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The Gigaton Throwdown Initiative was launched to educate and inspire investors, entrepreneurs, business leaders, and policy makers to “think big” and understand what it would take to scale up clean energy massively over the next 10 years. A unique group from the business community — investors, entrepreneurs, and executives — teamed up with leading academics for the throwdown. The team investigated what it would take to reach gigaton scale for 9 technologies currently attractive to investors.

To attain gigaton scale, a single technology must reduce annual emissions of carbon dioxide and equivalent greenhouse gases (CO₂e) by at least 1 billion metric tons — a gigaton — by 2020. For an electricity generation technology, this is equivalent to an installed capacity of 205 gigawatts (GW) of carbon-free energy (at 100% capacity) in 2020. The 9 technologies we analyzed are examples of the potential to scale up clean energy technology:

We found that 7 of the 9 technologies analyzed in the report have the potential today to scale up rapidly and massively by 2020, and an eighth, geothermal, could scale up after additional research and development and deployment of enhanced geothermal systems (EGS). The technology that in our assessment cannot achieve gigaton scale by 2020 is plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs). The Gigaton Throwdown target would require 300 million PHEVs on the road in 2020, which is equivalent to the total number of vehicles to be added to the fleet between now and then. Such a complete transformation within a decade would be infeasible.

Scaled up, the 8 feasible pathways could collectively offset more than 8 billion tons (gigatons) of CO₂e annually in 2020 and supply the equivalent of 55 quads (billion British thermal units [BTUs])of power annually, more than achieving current climate stabilization targets as well as meeting up to 50% of new energy demand worldwide. This exceeds by a factor of 5 current projections, which show clean energy technologies meeting less than 10% of new global energy demand in 2020. Under the Gigaton Throwdown scenario, clean energy technologies would add an estimated 4.5 million direct jobs to the economy and many more indirect jobs.

Of the 8 technologies, only one, wind power, is currently growing fast enough to achieve gigaton scale. By 2020, wind is projected to have an installed based of more than 852 gigawatts, avoiding more than 1.5 gigatons of CO₂e emissions annually. The other 7 technologies are not scaling up fast enough in our assessment

The rate of scale-up can be significantly influenced by policy action today. Just as policy-makers laid the foundation for the high-tech revolution with telecommunications reforms in the 1990s, action is again required to accelerate clean energy technology and spur innovation and investment to achieve what we now know is possible in a trillion-dollar sector that is already providing millions of jobs.