Building a World Without Carbon Requires Megaproject Thinking

One of the biggest mistakes we can make in the current moment is to assume climate change is only an environmental problem—one that we will address at some time in the future. Climate change is an everything problem. It affects our economy, national security, health, competitiveness, and communities right now, and how we respond to it sets the landscape on how the future unfolds. Clean industrial strategy for a problem this large requires the kind of thinking that goes into the construction of multibillion-dollar, multiyear megaprojects.

In the last few years, the US began to tie its response to climate change to overall economic strategy. Structurally, it worked. Through a mix of multiple major legislative efforts, infrastructure policy and funding helped the country build, technology manufacturing promotion funding helped the country innovate, and recovery funding helped the economy return to full employment, all while helping the market pull clean tech into the entire economy. 

Not only did this approach support America’s largest factory construction boom in decades, but over $1 trillion in private sector investments have been announced in semiconductors, clean energy, batteries, and clean manufacturing.¹ Utility-scale solar installations per month tripled, residential solar installed capacity doubled, and 12 Hoover Dams’ worth of grid batteries were added to the grid.² And the US was on track to nearly double its amount of carbon emissions reductions by 2030 compared to before these laws went into effect.³ These are huge wins for communities, and for climate. But it is not enough. Abundance under climate change requires quickly and equitably building enough clean and cheap energy for all, accessible and efficient mobility systems, housing that people can afford, and clean manufacturing infrastructure that advances US competitiveness. 

To get to net-zero carbon emissions by 2050, we need an accountable schedule, materials, visible progress, and a lot of in-the-field innovation. If this sounds like a construction project, it is. At the beginning of my career, I worked as an engineer on megaprojects—multibillion-dollar complicated infrastructure projects with lots of different stakeholders and multiyear timelines. Surprises and changes in megaproject plans can balloon costs and cause delays. But megaprojects are usually only in one city. Decarbonization, therefore, is the largest megaproject in history. It happens in every town, in every country in the world, and it lasts for decades. And if we fail, we’re all going to suffer. 

For a megaproject, we have to create a schedule—a plan with objectives and deadlines—for what and how fast we have to build. The year 2050 is 25 years away. There are only a couple of capital cycles (rounds of funding for major projects) in 25 years, and even fewer infrastructure cycles (replacements of long-lived infrastructure like power plants and housing). We do not have much room in the schedule for delay or error, yet we are operating like we do. The government has not articulated the contours of a schedule to get to zero emissions. A megaproject schedule outlines what is needed by when at dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of different points—for example, when the steel needs to arrive at the construction site. While the schedule for a decarbonization megaproject will not be that specific, we understand the near-term scale needed. We will need five times the amount of solar power and three times the capacity of energy storage in the next decade.⁴ We need to double regional transmission, and we need five times as much interregional transmission by 2035 to keep decarbonization in reach. After the last 15 years of basically flat electricity demand growth, we might need 30 to 50 percent, or more, electricity generation than we have now—and this is on top of new demands from AI and data centers.⁵ This expanded electricity system has to be clean, affordable, reliable, and equitable. 

Similarly, the schedule for electric vehicle charging stations, home construction, and building electrification and weatherization should have annual or even monthly completion goals. This helps firms and communities know where we are in the decarbonization project, where we’re going, and where we need to be. Right now, we’re building a clean energy economy without even knowing if we are on track to finish on time. We need an open information dashboard tracking progress on this megaproject with key indicators such as rates of electric vehicle charging station deployments, acres of forests replanted, or miles of transmission line constructed. The Bureau of Economic Analysis tracks GDP, the Bureau of Labor and Statistics tracks employment, but we need something closer to the Federal Reserve for tracking decarbonization—not just measuring progress, but using those measurements to analyze how well the economy is making progress toward decarbonization outcomes, identify risks to that progress, and make plans to course correct. Breaking down barriers to information could be one way for the government to encourage private sector innovation and competition.

The second component of what the decarbonization megaproject will take is materials. Physical materials including solar panels, heat pumps, electric vehicles, batteries, e-bikes, insulation, and more. Electric vehicles are a good example of the scale we need to build at: US EV sales were 1.7 million units last year, and by 2035 we need to be selling about 15 million per year.⁶ If we want to grow this opportunity domestically, the country needs to add the capacity to make and sell about a million more new EVs every year. And for larger trucks? Last year, a couple thousand zero-emissions trucks were sold, and we’ll need a couple hundred thousand or more per year by 2035.⁷ The industrial strategy of the early 2020s was a critical down payment on what is needed, but giving up that progress risks missing goals and ceding the future to global competitors, and forfeiting a generational opportunity to unlock place-based regional economic growth by building this equipment. 

But the scale needed requires a much larger tailored public investment to then leverage much larger flows of private capital to build these assets in the US. Often, megaprojects are plagued by cost overruns and schedule delays. Decarbonization efforts need to aggressively stay on schedule and focus on cost control by doing small repeatable projects that learn-by-doing through deployment, have streamlined permitting processes that are good for communities, and scale up to meet the speed of deployment required. 

While we are deploying, we need even more innovation. Sometimes in climate policy, “innovation” is a code word for delaying action. But without real innovation, we will not meet our climate targets. We have to ramp up early-stage R&D and prototyping for a portfolio of game-changing innovations to ensure we have the technologies to get us all the way to net-zero emissions. The US Department of Energy and the US public and private energy innovation ecosystem know how to do research, development, demonstration, and deployment, and these activities need to be scaled up to deliver rapid advancement. But multiple “valleys of death” in this process remain, which stop ideas and innovations from scaling into solutions and successful companies. 

There is a missing middle in clean energy in-the-field innovation. These are the small- to medium-sized projects that need federal support not for deployment alone but also for learning to build things better, faster, and cheaper. Carbon management, geothermal energy, small and micro-nuclear reactors—these are some of the projects that need to be fielded to learn what goes right, what doesn’t, and what will scale. By embedding researchers and AI-enabled sensing into these projects to relentlessly innovate and identify sources of project cost growth and delay, we can ensure the next set of these technologies are fielded faster and better. Continuous in-the-field innovation can help these nascent technologies scale in the market. We have to pull clean tech to the market with policy measures to accelerate deployment and adoption of technologies that are ready today. We also have to demonstrate early deployment of technologies that are not yet at commercial scale. But this missing middle—deliberate innovation experimentation to cut costs and scale technologies—will help us get to net-zero.

Finally, we face challenges of choices and “the right” decisions. How do we deal with uncertainty, good surprises, and bad surprises? How do we ensure new and emerging technologies such as AI work for everybody, are secure, and improve people’s lives? We need a new era of collaboration and R&D investment between the social sciences and STEM to drive innovation and to ensure people actually adopt and want to use new technologies. And we need to rapidly address community impacts that exist, that are predictable, and that unexpectedly arise, so these new technologies work for everyone. 

It’s time to start thinking about decarbonization as a megaproject that’s already in motion. We need continuous innovation and deployment to ensure we meet our climate commitments. And we need to be nimble and bold about making climate solutions cheaper, better, equitable, and scalable. By thinking about schedules, materials, and innovation, we greatly increase the likelihood of getting this megaproject done on time and on budget.