The growing energy production in 2025-2030 will be led by wind and solar power generation, according to Sergio de la Vega, CEO of Citizens Resources, considered it.

By Patricia Ortega

February 12, 2022

The growing energy production in 2025-2030 will be led by wind and solar power generation, according to Sergio de la Vega, CEO of Citizens Resources. “Solar and wind power generation combined with batteries will exceed the economics of a modern combined cycle natural gas plant, and even combined cycle natural gas generating plants are expected to become obsolete.”

During the talk “Energy transition and sustainable mobility” held at the Hermanos Rodríguez Autodrome at the Formula E, the CEO said that there is a series of studies that show that in 2015- 2020, the cost of energy generation based on of coal, fuel oil and open-cycle natural gas is higher than that of most renewable technologies, and insisted that “generating plants based on these fossil fuels are becoming obsolete.”

Even the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimated an average efficiency of 32% in the global use of fossil fuels. This calculation is based on measuring process and transport losses and then adjusting for mechanical efficiency.

Sergio de la Vega said that although the social support of energy transition is decarbonization, “the focus is on electrification both in electric vehicles, electric heating and air conditioning, electric stoves, synthetic gas and chemical inputs using electricity, electric industrial processes and grid balance based on demand.”

Electromobility

The CEO believes that there is a need to take into account that the transition of the automotive industry towards electromobility poses multiple challenges, which require long time cycles and a collaborative effort in several fields, which goes beyond borders, but which will soon be driven in the long run by market forces and social demand.

He explained that the energy transition will lead to two opposing economic phenomena. “While on the renewable energy side there will be a deflationary virtuous circle, as both photovoltaic and wind power generation panels and other renewable energies tend to become cheaper, increase their efficiency and be more environmentally sustainable, on the fossil fuels side, the process will be reversed, that is, inflationary, as hydrocarbons will be increasingly scarce, access will be increasingly difficult, and their use will be increasingly restricted and punished.”

The CEO of Citizens Resources, a firm that owns the subsidiary brand Link EV Electric Vehicles, mentioned that “although at first the transition to electromobility must contemplate financial, urban, technological and regulatory measures, among many other aspects, to reach the goals to lower emissions, in the long term we are seeing an alignment of incentives that will make market forces themselves the ones driving the transition, as we can already see in the rechanneling of large flows of investment capital that are coming out of the fossil energy industry and into renewable energies.”

Regarding electromobility, he explained that investments in electric motor transport should be thought of in terms of total capital cost; that is, the entire life cycle of the vehicle and the charging network must be analyzed, contemplating that although today the short-term purchase price is a little higher than its internal combustion equivalents, by incorporating the operating costs in the long term, electric vehicles are already more convenient in economic terms, especially in cargo or passenger vehicles of intensive use and last mile, as they require less maintenance than internal combustion vehicles and their technology is advancing rapidly.

Sergio de la Vega said we must understand the concept of energy efficiency itself. For instance, today less than 30% of the energy in fossil fuels is turned into electricity. This gives us an idea of the efforts in terms of electricity generation that humankind will have available to be able to replace the use of fossil fuels in automotives, in a planet where the International Energy Agency has estimated that the energy demand will increase by 30% towards 2040, equal to adding another China and India together to the global demand.

“Electromobility is already going beyond borders, and proof of that is this week’s visit of John Kerry to Mexico in order to attend the conformation of the Mexico-US task force for the electrification of transportation, an initiative that had begun at the North America Leaders’ Summit, held in November 2021.”

Link to the story: Los avances tecnológicos abaratarán la movilidad sustentable: Citizens Resources | El Economista