In March 2022, Terra Praxis published the report “Repowering the Global Coal Fleet By 2050.” This was followed in June 2022 by the launch of the Beautiful Nuclear Campaign which called for REPOWER as one of top 5 priorities for clean energy transition. On November 7-17, 2022 at COP27 in in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt, Terra Praxis launched REPOWER -- a global Repowering Coal initiative to enable every coal plant owner in the world to assess their coal plant for conversion to clean energy, alongside global climate leaders and partner Microsoft.
The Terra Praxis ‘Repowering Coal’ system is a fast, low-cost repeatable strategy to repower hundreds of existing coal plants that would otherwise continue to burn coal, and whose closure is likely to encounter fierce political resistance and cause economic harm to communities. This initiative is designed for radical cost reduction to enable production of reliable, competitive, clean energy, rapidly repowering the 2TW global coal fleet and cutting carbon emissions by 40%.
Widespread impacts from climate change are already here. Our actions in this decade are critical. There is a widening gap between decarbonization policy targets and the real world of clean energy deployment. It is highly probable that the world will fail to achieve Net Zero emissions by 2050 and experience catastrophic climate change in this century unless new solutions are pursued at speed and scale. Repowering existing coal plant infrastructure is the largest single carbon abatement opportunity on the planet and could greatly accelerate the clean energy transition.
This Climate Solution Profile describes a REPOWER initiative and system that will enable the rapid repurposing of coal plant fleets with non-emitting advanced heat sources -- leveraging existing sites, infrastructure, transmission lines, industry knowledge, workforces, capital, and supply chains to accelerate the global transition clean energy.