Up to $130trn of investment and enough wind turbines and solar panels to cover India just to produce green hydrogen – those are among the staggering statistics cited in a new study of what’s needed by 2050 to keep global temperature increases below 2°C.

A massive ramp-up of renewables to levels beyond anything foreseen to date – 16TW of PV and 11TW of onshore wind alone – is also cited under a new ‘Climate Scenario’ from clean energy research group BloombergNEF in a bid to put figures on a mid-century energy system that results in the best-case outcome for limiting global heating, and is led by a shift to green power and hydrogen.

The scenario needs the world to tilt decisively to electrification, with power accounting for 45% of global final energy demand, up from 20% now. Hydrogen, which is negligible today, would account for another 25%, with the rest made up of bioenergy and residual oil, gas and coal where no alternatives are available.

The vast amount of electricity needed for direct supply and to produce green hydrogen would create a 100,000TWh clean power economy, BloombergNEF reckons.

The green hydrogen alone would need an extra 36,000TWh of power – 38% more than the world’s current total output – and producing it at lowest cost would require an extra 14TW of wind and solar, needing 3.5 million km2 of land, or an area the size of India.

Alternatively, the world could look to meet its hydrogen needs through a dedicated 9.5TW offshore wind fleet or 4.4TW of nuclear.

Reaching the Climate Scenario would not be cheap. BloombergNEF says between $78trn and $130trn of new investments will be needed to meet the cost not just of adding at least a terawatt of wind and solar every two years – the entire global wind and PV fleets are currently both around 600GW – but the demands of a massively improved power system and building a hydrogen economy infrastructure from scratch.

The demands of the Climate Scenario contrast with BloombergNEF’s latest core Energy Transition Scenario, which despite seeing 2.5-years of emissions rises wiped out by Covid and predicting they may never return to 2019 levels, and “even more bullish” prospects for renewables, still sees the world heading for a 3.3 degrees temperature rise by 2100.

Jon Moore, BNEF CEO said: “The next ten years will be crucial for the energy transition. There are three key things that we will need to see: accelerated deployment of wind and PV; faster consumer uptake in electric vehicles, small-scale renewables, and low-carbon heating technology, such as heat pumps; and scaled-up development and deployment of zero-carbon fuels.”