Resources for Sustainability: Exploring the New REN21 Renewables Global Futures Report

Exploring the opportunities and challenges of different renewable energy scenarios and pathways to 100% coverage helps identify and solve problems in reaching ambitious goals.

Ambitious sustainability goals—such as the much-touted path to creating energy supplies powered 100% through renewable sources—rely primarily on resourceful growth, informed adaptation, and various forms of energy and efficiency systems. Sustainable economies have to be built and maintained with a functioning energy infrastructure, and the performance of different systems across the world helps inform potential as well as pros and cons of prevailing models and future innovations.

Team Gemini primarily focuses on implementing its decentralized, closed-loop project models that use industry-relevant technologies to create and maintain sustainable communities; waste is eliminated and processed into usable resources, and precious supplies of otherwise limited inputs are conserved, recycled, or otherwise improved. With the right combination of options and infrastructure, this setup can create a 100% sustainable energy and resource-creation system.

REN21 has long been a proponent of renewable energy growth, and their newly release Global Futures Report helps highlight future pathways and challenges towards implementing ambitious sustainability goals. While not dealing closely with subjects of water treatment and waste management, which are topics that are still essential to sustainability, the report nonetheless covers a wide range of sustainability topics that still relate to Team Gemini’s work.

In this Resources for Sustainability article, we outline the categories of the report and provide links to additional media and contents.

REN21 has released its latest report on the feasibility and challenges of achieving a 100% renewable energy future. Renewables Global Futures Report: Great debates towards 100% Renewable Energy, analyses the views of 114 renowned energy experts from every region of the world, interviewed over the course of 2016. The results are clustered as “12 Great Debates”:

01. 100% Renewables: A logical consequence of the Paris Agreement?
02. Global Energy Demand Development: Efficiency on a global level?
03. Renewable Power Generation: The winner takes all?
04. The Future of Heating: Thermal or electrical applications?
05. Renewables for Transport: Electrification versus biofuels?
06. Interconnection of Sectors: System thinking required
07. Storage: Supporter or competitor of the power grid?
08. Technology versus Costs: Which should come first?
09. Scaling-up Investments and Work Force: 100% renewables for socio-economic change
10. Utilities of the Future: What will they look like?
11. Mega Cites: Mega possibilities
12. Energy Access Enabled Through Renewables: How to speed up connections?

To download the full report, infographics and press release head to the Renewables Global Futures Report page.

Partnered with resources like the Go 100% Renewable Campaign, and you get even more nuanced feedback about working solutions on this topic:

Global 100% RE is the first global initiative that advocates 100% renewable energy. This unique campaign builds on projects that are already taking place on national, regional and local levels and steers the global discourse on renewable energy towards 100% RE as the new normal.

Feel free to explore more topics on our Resources page, or contact us if you’d like to recommend others.

For a full listing of Team Gemini sustainability tools and resources, please visit our resources page at http://teamgemini.us/resources/.