YouSaid · the spoken record

Mark Lewis

lines on the record: 22
first: 2016-08-12
most recent: 2016-08-12
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“If you look at low carbon technologies, they are not happening in isolation. And a lot of the other trends that we're talking about in Goldman Sachs research, like for example drones, the blockchain, autonomous vehicles, they interact with these technologies. Drones are, for example, being used to survey wind turbines. The blockchain may be in the future, not today, but maybe in the future might be used to trade energy in a decentralized net. And the future electric vehicles may very well be autonomous vehicles at the same time. So it is very difficult to say today how the interactions between these different trends will work out. But what we could see is that these different trends reinforce each other.”
2016-08-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Emission Control: The Expanding Low Carbon Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely, in the end this is a commercial decision. Companies have to make the economics work for them and we see a big push in investment in renewables in India. We will have to see how this transition works out. But what makes India interesting from our perspective that this could be the first economy that sees large-scale industrialization based on low carbon technologies. So a big part of India doesn't have a grid today. The ownership of cars is still very low.”
2016-08-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Emission Control: The Expanding Low Carbon Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think what you see in India is a government that is pursuing all of the above strategy, so they're investing very heavily in solar. They're also investing heavily in fossil fuels. But the economics will play a key factor here. So we're now in a situation where wind and solar are among the cheapest forms of adding new electricity generation capacity in some places. Over the next five to ten years, we'll probably go to a situation where there are cheapest sources in most places. And that includes places like”
2016-08-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Emission Control: The Expanding Low Carbon Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of interesting regulatory support. So, for example, in Beijing, there's limits on license plates, the availability of license plates. Of the 150,000 license plates that they give out per year, they now are reserving 60,000 for what they call new energy vehicles. And that is a power.”
2016-08-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Emission Control: The Expanding Low Carbon Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, China is among the many countries that are very seriously thinking about how to change the way that they use energy and consume energy. China is today the biggest market for low-carbon technologies. It's the biggest market for wind and solar. It's also among the biggest markets for LEDs. And it's also, and this is something that a lot of people don't know, the biggest market for electric vehicles. Almost half of electric vehicles last year, fully electric vehicles were sold in China. What we see happening now in China is that actually the energy landscape is changing. Coal is losing market share in electricity generation, and we believe that coal demand and also coal production in China for the first time in decades might decline. So it is certainly one of the markets where the future for these technologies is created, where there's a lot of interesting business models and where we also see a lot of...”
2016-08-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Emission Control: The Expanding Low Carbon Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we think, but we also need the regulatory support. We have that with the emission limits, but we also see governments thinking about new ways of incentivizing this transition. And ultimately what we need is consumer acceptance. The jury is still out on that, but the likelihood that we get to a disruptive change trajectory in the autos industry with electric vehicles has certainly increased over the last year.”
2016-08-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Emission Control: The Expanding Low Carbon Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If we look at electric vehicles, we're now in a situation where the auto industry needs to look to alternative drivetrain technologies. And if we go back to years, it was still a big question mark what does alternative drive trains might look like. So we were debating fuel cell vehicles, various forms of hybrids, electric vehicles. The jury is in many ways still out, but the rapid advances in battery technology make it more likely that an electric vehicle might be the winner there. Now, if you think about how that transition works, we expect that to be similar to the LED case or to the case in power generation. So you need the continued rapid cost reductions and performance improvements.”
2016-08-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Emission Control: The Expanding Low Carbon Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Drop rapidly. Post 2020, there's much bigger question marks because we don't know what the potential is to further optimize the existing chemistries. And if we are forced perhaps post-2020 to switch to other chemistries, it's very difficult to say what the cost will be or which chemistries those will be.”
2016-08-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Emission Control: The Expanding Low Carbon Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, we're now in a situation where over the last five years we've had rapid improvements in battery technology. Until twenty twenty those will continue. Why is that? We have quite good visibility on that because we're taking chemistries that we understand very well and we're basically scaling them. And so if you look at something like the giga factory that's been built in Nevada or a similar type of battery plants that are being built in China, what these do is take technologies that we know and produce them at scale and we know what that does to costs. Easy to model.”
2016-08-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Emission Control: The Expanding Low Carbon Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In order to get into the next phase of this transition, which is the autos industry, you will need a battery that is good enough and cheap enough for a mainstream car. If you get that battery, that will also revolutionize the economics of wind and solar. So the big question mark in the industry today is how fast will battery technology improve? How cheap will it become? and what will be the chemistries that ultimately allow that battery to work.”
2016-08-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Emission Control: The Expanding Low Carbon Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“that all cases in Europe where brand new gas fired power stations are basically mothballed already. And the reason for that is that solar and wind power that is on the grid in countries like Germany makes it very difficult for gas-fired power stations to compete. Their business model is based around the idea that they basically switch on during peak demand and with a lot of wind and solar on the grid, the economics for some of these gas power plants don't work out anymore.”
2016-08-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Emission Control: The Expanding Low Carbon Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. The transition in the power generation sector has been going on for a much longer time, but will probably still need several decades to complete because we're talking several billions of investments for a bigger power plant. We think about lifespans of 20 to 40 years rather than 12 to 18 months.”
2016-08-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Emission Control: The Expanding Low Carbon Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I find the lighting sector a fascinating case, so if you think about LEDs, they had 1% market share in 2010. 1% ago. Exactly. And we're now in a situation in the US where more than half of lighting sales are already LEDs. And we think globally we might go towards 6 and 10, 7 and 10 by 2020. That is probably one of the fastest technology shifts in human history. How did we get there? Part of it was regulation. So you had bans on incandescent light bulbs in the US, in Europe, in”
2016-08-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Emission Control: The Expanding Low Carbon Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, probably the most advanced pillar, and you mentioned this, is lighting, it's projected by 2020, six and ten light bulbs will be LEDs. What learnings can we take away from how the lighting industry evolved over the last couple of years?”
2016-08-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Emission Control: The Expanding Low Carbon Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think we're now at a point where wind and solar, for example, are adding 100 gigawatts of power generation capacity per year to electricity supply. That is much more than we could have imagined just two, three years ago. And I think the analogy to shale is interesting. When the shale revolution was gaining pace, very few people saw that coming. 2011, exactly. People were dismissing this as a flash in a pan. The economics were thought to be marginal. And two, three years later, though oil priced half, we could see similar types of developments from these technologies.”
2016-08-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Emission Control: The Expanding Low Carbon Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, in our research, we have tried to understand the impact of these technologies on global emission pathways. And our key takeaway from this is that the impact on emissions might be bigger and come earlier than a lot of people anticipate. So we think that these four technologies will help global carbon emissions peak perhaps already as early as 2020 rather than towards 2030 as it is in mainstream projections. So to give you an example, we think that these four technologies, so LEDs onshore wind, solar PV, and hybrid and electric vehicles, are ready today saving over one gigaton of emissions per year. And we see that increasing to five gigatons by 2025 just to put that into context, if we're thinking about energy-related global emissions, that's over 33 gigatons. So we're actually talking about”
2016-08-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Emission Control: The Expanding Low Carbon Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, absolutely. I think you're right there. So if you think back maybe 10 years when these technologies were starting to take off, we were very excited about, say, solar companies. Solar has exceeded all expectations as a technology, but if you look at solar companies from an investor standpoint, they have often struggled to create sustainable returns. And I think we had a very interesting example of that this year, the two biggest corporate bankruptcies in the US year to date are a coal company and a solar company and they both went bust 10 days apart. And we see similar dynamics happening in the lighting industry. And it's interesting to think about how the transition to hybrid and electric vehicles is eroding the competitive advantages of the incumbents as their expertise in the fossil fuel engine is no longer as valuable as before.”
2016-08-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Emission Control: The Expanding Low Carbon Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We think the best way to think about these technologies is quote unquote good old-fashioned tech disruption. So what is happening is that these new technologies are eroding the competitive advantages of the incumbents, the barriers to entry are coming down, and we see a number of new entrants pushing into these markets, and that leads to a fragmentation of those markets and increasing competitive pressures and margin compression. So that makes it very difficult for the incumbents, but it's also a very difficult environment for many of these new entrants.”
2016-08-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Emission Control: The Expanding Low Carbon Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's a short list of usual suspects. First and foremost, that's LEDs, solar PV, onshore wind, not the offshore stuff, and increasingly hybrid and electric vehicles. And what we see here is markets that are now, in terms of revenue today already in the hundreds of billions of US dollars, and that are growing relatively quickly.”
2016-08-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Emission Control: The Expanding Low Carbon Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Some of these technologies are grown relatively fast, but if you think about something like fuel cell vehicles, the market leader expects for the first vehicle that is now available 30,000 in sales by 2020. So in an 80 million car market, that is too small to matter.”
2016-08-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Emission Control: The Expanding Low Carbon Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so if you talk about low carbon technologies, there's a very long list out there. But we think actually only very few of them matter because they combine scale and rapid growth. So if you think about technologies like nuclear or biofuels, these are big markets today, but they're actually growing relatively slowly. So nuclear as technology has lost market share in global electricity generation since the 1990s. And then there's a whole range of other technologies like, for example, fuel cell vehicles, carbon capture and storage, concentrated solar power that are simply too small to matter on a five to ten year scale.”
2016-08-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Emission Control: The Expanding Low Carbon Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely, we didn't have low carbon sources for power generation other than hydro and nuclear at the time. We were far away from alternative sources in lighting. We didn't have the prospects even of alternative vehicle technology. We think we're now at an inflection point. And the reason for that is that we think that low carbon technologies are now taking off the training wheels. So the select technologies out there, not all of them, but some of them, that are now rapidly gaining scale and taking market share in things like lighting, power generation, autos. And we think that is changing the way that power is generated, the way it's stored, the way it's consumed, and that taken together, that's what we describe as the low carbon economy.”
2016-08-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Emission Control: The Expanding Low Carbon Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT