The World Economic Forum with Terra Praxis and Key Stakeholders Announce Priorities to Help Meet Global Clean Energy Demand
Geneva, Switzerland, November 7, 2024 – The World Economic Forum, in collaboration with Accenture, Terra Praxis, and other stakeholders across the clean energy ecosystem, has released a framework to accelerate the deployment of advanced nuclear and SMRs to help meet rising global demand for clean energy. Launched today, the publication A Collaborative Framework for Accelerating Advanced Nuclear and Small Modular Reactor Deployment serves as a tool to align stakeholders on actions within nine priority areas.
The World Economic Forum engages the foremost political, business, cultural, and other leaders of society to shape global, regional, and industry agendas. The collaboration between the Forum and Terra Praxis has consisted of a year-long series of engagements throughout 2024 to forge collaboration around core actions that can increase investment in scalable advanced nuclear and also ensure these investments deliver broader social, economic, and environmental value.
“The Framework represents a significant acknowledgement by the Forum of the rising global demand for reliable, clean, and competitive energy services including heat and power,” said Kirsty Gogan, Founding Director & Co-CEO, Terra Praxis. “It is a demonstration of the Forum’s vital leadership in advancing clean energy technologies, including small modular reactors (SMRs), that can complement renewables to service growth needed to support an equitable and clean energy transition.”
The Framework is a recognition of the challenges confronting large industrial energy users as they are faced with meeting commitments to decarbonize hundreds of gigawatts of business-critical energy services. Recent headlines highlight a strong demand signal for advanced nuclear -- major tech giants Microsoft, Amazon, and Google have all publicly made commitments to procuring nuclear energy for their U.S. operations. Since COP 28, more than 120 nuclear energy and technology companies, along with 25 countries, have committed to tripling global nuclear energy capacity by 2050. Most recently, 14 major financial institutions announced their support of this target during discussions at New York Climate Week 2024. With the Forum’s Clean Power, Grids and Electrification team, Terra Praxis, Accenture, and collaborators have produced a Framework that is intended to be adaptable to these different stakeholders, use cases, and geographies.
Critically, the Framework makes the case that these large energy users, governments, and investors need energy services that fit within the fast and predictable asset deployment process that industrial energy users use today. SMRs are compact, reliable, versatile, require minimal land, and have potential for standardized mass-manufacture production that can achieve the scale of deployment required to meet many clean power, heat and clean fuel production use cases for heavy industry, data centers, and transport. SMRs can be sited within the existing footprint of existing coal plants, or co-located with refineries, steel, chemical, or aluminum plants – to directly and competitively – replace fossil fuels by supplying heat, power, steam, or hydrogen to enable continued operation of existing assets, including transmission, without emissions.
Major energy users need reactors that are mass manufactured and licensed at the factory, that can be rapidly deployed to existing facilities as completed products. They need commercially viable licensing pathways that fit within the fast and predictable asset deployment process they currently use. The needed speed and scale of deployments will require radically new approaches to designing, licensing, and delivery of clean energy solutions.
“Meeting these requirements in order to viably achieve Net Zero is precisely what Terra Praxis’s REPOWER Initiative promotes,” said Eric Ingersoll, Founding Director and Co-CEO, Terra Praxis. “We are making tremendous strides with collaborators like the Forum and members of our global REPOWER Consortium.”
The Framework aims to unlock investment and leverage the key stakeholders that are already coming together, like the REPOWER Consortium, to respond to these opportunities, improve risk-sharing across project stakeholders, and implement innovative strategies for fast, low-cost, repeatable deployment at scale.
By choosing to apply the same strategic intent that successfully scaled renewables, and with the clear-eyed, prioritized focus on collaborative actions outlined in the Framework, we can transform health and socio-economic prospects for communities around the world, protect nature, and enable a timely transition of the growing global economy to clean energy.
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About Terra Praxis
Terra Praxis is a global nonprofit organization committed to universal access to affordable, reliable, and clean energy that empowers people and protects nature. Powered by philanthropy, we innovate and accelerate scalable, equitable solutions to decarbonize the largest sources of global emissions (the difficult-to-decarbonize sectors of coal-for-power, industrial heat, aviation, and heavy transport).
Collaboration:
Learn more about our collaboration with the World Economic Forum.
Blog:
Read our blog with the World Economic Forum.
Contact:
Sarah Ingersoll, Director of Strategic Communications, Terra Praxis: Sarah.Ingersoll@TerraPraxis.org