Global Apollo Programme

A group of researchers and scientists has announced it wants to launch an "Apollo Programme" for renewable energy.

The so-called Global Apollo Programme, launched this week at the Royal Society in London, aims to engage investors, governments, scientists and the public to come together for a £15 billion-per-year global drive to lower the cost of green electricity.


Though the full report is lengthy, the group defines the challenge succinctly: "To avoid irreparable damage, governments of the world have agreed to limit the world's rise in temperature to 2 degrees C," they write. "This means an absolute limit on the total accumulated CO2 that can be produced. On present trends that limit will be breached by 2035. So we must urgently reduce our annual output of CO2."

To do this it wants to see carbon-free energy become cheaper than coal, gas and oil within a decade, with the help of countries devoting 0.02 percent of their GDP to the programme. Specific aims include finding new, cheaper ways to store large amounts of power generated with solar panels for use overnight, and when the Sun is hidden by clouds.

The group points to the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors as a model, which they say has reduced the cost of semiconductors every year for three decades. While the programme has not been public until now, they say it has been "privately discussed with governments" over the last year, and "widely welcomed". It will be discussed at the G7 meeting in June, with the aim to sign up the world's major countries by the end of 2015. Most challengingly of all, perhaps, they aim to end the $550 billion global subsidy for fossil fuels. "There will be a Commission of countries which decide to join. This will appoint a Roadmap Committee which identifies the bottlenecks to cost reduction year on year and co-ordinates international research to unblock the bottlenecks," the group said. "Areas to be tackled include electricity storage and transmission, and the generation of wind and solar power."

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The Global Apollo Programme's initial group includes Sir David King, the former chief scientific officer, Astronomer Royal Lord Martin Rees, the LSE's Lord Nicholas Stern and the executive chairman of L1 Energy Lord John Browne. Lord Richard Layard, director of the wellbeing programme at LSE's Centre for Economic Performance, Lord Gus O'Donnell, chairman at Frontier Economics, and Lord Adair Turner, senior research fellow at the Institute of New Economic Thinking, founded the group. "The challenge is as big as putting a man on the Moon," Layard told New Scientist. "It took £15 billion a year over ten years to get a man on the Moon, and we're suggesting that's the absolute minimum needed globally per year to crack this problem."

While the idea has been largely welcomed as a concept by the scientific community, some have pointed out that it is hardly the first time that the Apollo name has been dropped to try and galvanise support for both green energy and other causes -- mostly without success.

The obvious point, perhaps, is that in Apollo Programme-scale missions of any kind, the key factor is not the branding, but the detail -- a point the Global Apollo Group do recognise. "We are talking about a crisis more serious than most major wars," the report says. "This is the biggest scientific challenge of the 21st century. Let us show we have the collective intelligence to understand and overcome the danger that faces us."