Powering the World Without Warming It
Electrification is key to decarbonization. Sources of low-emissions electricity generation include wind, solar, nuclear, geothermal, hydropower, and tidal power. Delivering clean power at scale requires not just expanding generation, but integrating it with transmission, storage, and demand to ensure reliability and overcome the variability of renewables.
Using IPCC and GCAM data, Energy Innovation projected future “greenhouse gas emissions at stake” in 2050, assuming current policies remain in place. The resulting estimates overlap because different technologies may reduce the same emissions pool.
Electricity is the heartbeat of the modern world — the current that lights our homes, charges our devices, and powers global industry. The problem? More than 60% of it is still generated using fossil fuels, making power generation a global warming juggernaut. To decarbonize our world, we need to electrify everything possible — from cars to buildings to industry — and power it all with clean energy. The scale of this transition is enormous: meeting the demands of a growing, electrified world could require more than doubling global electricity generation by 2050 — the equivalent of adding roughly 580 New York Cities’ worth of power. But the opportunity for innovators is equally enormous: to pioneer and scale technologies that can deliver the abundant, affordable, zero-carbon electricity the world urgently needs.
The Path We're On
Our biggest emissions source — and our biggest climate unlock.
Electricity sits at the center of the climate challenge — and the climate solution. Power generation is currently the largest single source of global CO₂ emissions. It’s also the key to unlocking decarbonization, since electrification is the single most affordable, feasible solution to reduce emissions across many industries, including transportation and building operations. Meeting global climate goals means electrifying everything we can, even as populations grow and infrastructure expands. But doing so will push electricity demand sharply upward.
The good news: the transition to cleaner electricity is well underway. Low-carbon resources like nuclear and hydropower have long been fixtures of the global power system. And thanks to dramatic cost reductions, renewables have surged in prominence: today, the overwhelming majority of new generation capacity globally is wind and solar.
While they’re powerful drivers of decarbonization and the lowest-cost carbon-free resources we have, it’s important to recognize that wind and solar power have their limits. For one thing, they require substantial land area, which can create conflicts with other land uses and pose challenges for siting and public acceptance — particularly as deployment scales. More crucially, they’re intermittent and vary by region. Not everywhere has consistent wind or high quality solar; nowhere has either 24 hours a day. When the sun sets and the wind stills, the grid still needs power, which means renewables alone struggle to drive deep power sector decarbonization. Maximizing their potential is essential, but so is ensuring we support a diverse portfolio that delivers on affordable, reliable power.
That’s why decarbonized electricity can’t be built one technology at a time. It’s important to think about generation as part of a larger system — one that coordinates clean power with storage, transmission, and demand to deliver reliability at scale. Decarbonized electricity isn’t just about low-emissions generation; it depends on how that generation interacts with the system as a whole. Because wind and solar output varies by hour, season, and location, transmission helps manage that variability by moving power from where it’s produced to where it’s needed. Battery storage helps shift energy across the day, while flexible demand enables end users to respond to grid conditions in real time. Clean, dispatchable generation and longer-duration storage are needed to carry the system through extended periods of low renewable output.
Planned and operated together, these resources can complement — and in some cases substitute for — one another, lowering overall costs and reducing redundancy.
That’s why the next phase of the transition must focus on innovation and integration — on building a new generation of low-emissions power that can function within a diverse, reliable zero carbon electricity system.
A New Way Forward
Charting a path to abundant, affordable, clean power
Every watt of clean electricity we generate moves us closer to a climate-friendly future. But getting there means solving for speed, scale, and reliability all at once — expanding generation while transforming the systems that support it. Meeting rising demand with zero-carbon electricity will require a diverse mix of resources: renewables that are cheaper and easier to deploy, clean power sources that run around the clock, and flexible resources that can ramp up quickly to meet peaks.
The imperatives below reflect this mix. They focus on accelerating what’s already working — improving economics, strengthening reliability, and expanding clean power across all hours of the day. The moonshots look beyond today’s technologies, exploring breakthroughs that could redefine what’s possible for energy itself.
Innovation Imperatives
Drive down cost, reduce required land use, and ease deployment for mature intermittent renewable technologies
Solar and wind are already well-developed, but sustained innovation can accelerate adoption by improving economics and helping overcome non-monetary barriers to deployment. Solar efficiency improvements, for example, could reduce required material and land use while maintaining comparable power output. Other examples include innovation in materials, modular design, robotic deployment, and grid integration. By boosting efficiency and capacity factors, we can generate more clean electricity using less land and fewer resources.
Develop and deploy sources of low-emissions power generation capable of being ramped up and ramped down at short notice
Even with abundant renewables and firm clean power, grids will need flexible “peaker” plants that provide dispatchable power — resources that can be quickly turned on and off to meet demand spikes or fill gaps in intermittent supply. Traditionally powered by fossil fuels, these plants are now mostly natural gas–based. Clean alternatives, such as hydrogen turbines or carbon capture–equipped peakers, are urgently needed. While they may run only intermittently, clean peakers are critical for grid stability and reliability during extreme events or periods of high demand.
Develop and deploy always-on clean power production
Solar and wind are cheap and powerful drivers of decarbonization, but they remain intermittent by nature. When the sun isn’t shining or the wind isn’t blowing, grids still need dependable, carbon-free power. In addition to batteries and peakers, other, cleaner sources, such as next-generation geothermal and advanced nuclear, can help fill this gap — generating around-the-clock power and reducing the overall cost of grid decarbonization. However, high upfront costs and perceived technology risks must be addressed before these always-on alternatives can fully displace coal and natural gas.
Moonshots
Achieve scalable, cost-effective nuclear fusion for power generation
What if we could build a star here on Earth — harnessing the same process that powers the sun to deliver limitless clean energy? Fusion has long been considered the holy grail of clean power: nearly boundless, safe, and carbon-free. By fusing light atoms into heavier ones, it releases extraordinary amounts of energy. Scientists have already demonstrated fusion on Earth, but harnessing it for power generation will require major advances — sustaining the reaction at high power densities, controlling it precisely, and converting its energy into electricity with systems that can endure the extreme environment of a fusion reactor. Achieving commercial fusion would be more than an energy breakthrough; it could be a turning point for humanity, providing a permanent solution to our global power needs.
Achieve high-temperature (>300°C) baseload geothermal at >5 kilometer depth
Beneath our feet lies an enormous ocean of clean heat — a geothermal resource so vast it could power our world for millennia. This moonshot captures the quest to drill deeper than ever before, tapping into superhot rock more than five kilometers below Earth’s surface to unlock this energy almost anywhere on Earth. This will require a new generation of low-cost drilling and heat extraction technologies capable of withstanding the immense pressures and temperatures of Earth's deep crust. This breakthrough could provide a source of firm, carbon-free baseload power that’s always on, independent of the weather, and available to every nation, turning the ground under us into the ultimate clean power plant.
Dramatically improve solar cell efficiency to increase power output per area
While the sun provides more energy in an hour than humanity uses in a year, today’s solar cells capture only a small fraction of it. This moonshot seeks to break through the efficiency limits of conventional silicon by advancing integrated tandem perovskite cells and other next-generation architectures that convert far more sunlight into electricity. Success would enable cities to be powered from smaller land footprints, embed high-output generation directly into vehicles and buildings, and unlock clean energy in even the most space-constrained environments.
Implement low-temperature, impurity-resilient carbon fuel cells
What if we could transform solid carbon — from agricultural waste or forest clutter — into a clean, powerful fuel source? Today’s fuel cells typically run on hydrogen, but direct carbon fuel cells could generate electricity more efficiently by using solid carbon instead. These systems could use widely available clean carbon feedstocks to deliver clean, dispatchable power.
Convert kinetic energy of fission and fusion products directly into electrical energy
For over half a century, nuclear power has been trapped in a steam-age paradigm, using the immense power of the atom for the simple task of boiling water to turn a turbine. This moonshot aims to break that cycle by capturing the raw kinetic energy of nuclear reactions and converting it directly into electricity. This would require a leap in physics and materials science — but could ultimately unlock a future of hyper-efficient reactors.
Create movable baseload clean power sources that can be seasonally anchored where electricity is needed
Imagine if clean, reliable power plants weren’t fixed in place, but could be deployed wherever demand is greatest. This moonshot envisions mobile baseload generators — such as floating nuclear, offshore renewables, or other advanced systems — that can be anchored to coastal grids during peak summer heat or winter cold, then redeployed for disaster recovery or remote industrial needs. By bypassing the decades-long buildout of permanent infrastructure, mobile clean power could deliver flexible, carbon-free electricity and transform global energy resilience.
Deploy space-based photovoltaics with microwave or laser transmission to Earth
This moonshot envisions building power plants in space, capturing the raw, unfiltered power of the sun before it’s weakened by the atmosphere. The goal is to construct vast solar arrays in orbit and transmit clean energy to Earth 24/7. This would require radically reducing the cost to either launch these arrays or build them in space while simultaneously mastering the technology to beam that power back to Earth safely and efficiently. This breakthrough could unlock a fantastic source of clean, baseload power: the ability to deliver energy to any point on the planet, day or night, untethered from the constraints of land or weather.
Discover new clean electricity generation methods such as hydrological and chemical systems
The history of energy is a story of radical breakthroughs, from fire to steam to the atom. This moonshot asks: are there attractive power sources that we have not yet considered? This is a quest to discover entirely new ways to generate clean electricity by looking beyond today's technologies to the fundamental forces of nature. From exotic systems that harness the hydrologic cycle to unlocking novel stores of chemical energy (without the carbon) on the planet, innovators are exploring frontiers beyond the established categories. These “wild card” technologies may seem speculative, but they represent the long tail of innovation, where small bets made today could yield transformational breakthroughs in clean power tomorrow.
The most viable solutions will:
Can the solution achieve low enough costs — at climate-relevant scale — to provide final energy at a reasonable cost? Innovators should consider projected Levelized Cost of Energy (LCOE), competitiveness with incumbent fossil resources providing similar services, capital-intensity vs. operating-cost intensity, opportunities for sustained cost declines through learning or manufacturing, and whether the solution in question can scale to supply a meaningful share of total electricity demand.
Does the solution improve the overall functioning of the grid, not just add clean megawatts? Promising technologies should enhance reliability; reduce the cost of integrating renewables, lower system-wide costs, not just plant-level costs; and add diversity that reduces dependence on a single resource.
Does the solution integrate smoothly with existing transmission, storage, and demand-side resources — and can it reduce the need to build additional infrastructure? The most valuable generation technologies don’t just add capacity; they substitute for other investments, delay costly buildouts, and fit within coordinated, system-level planning approaches.
How well can the solution respond to changes in demand? Does it run around the clock? Ramp up or down rapidly? Complement variable renewables by filling gaps?
Can the solution succeed in a wide variety of regions, climates, and geologies? Does it rely on strong wine or sun? Rare geologic conditions? Extensive land or water access? The more geographically flexible a resource is, the more globally scalable it will be.
