ABSTRACT
Decarbonising the energy supply into textile manufacturing is the single most powerful action that can be taken to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Unfortunately this is also true for every other industry and demand for renewable energy will outstrip supply for many decades in the key countries that manufacture textiles.
It is important for the fashion industry to focus on switching away from the energy sources with the highest global warming potentials per kWHr, in particular the use of coal and oil for electricity and direct heating. This action alone can have a large impact on the industry’s GHG emissions and may necessitate large-scale relocation of the industry. An enabler of this is electrification, which allows the sourcing of renewable electricity where sources of renewable fuel are either absent or technically not possible.
Despite the obvious potential of focussing on the energy supply only, the switch to renewables is not a panacea. The use of solar and wind is still limited by the availability of grid-scale energy storage and the energy intensity of many manufacturing processes used in textile manufacturing will preclude the use of electricity. In this chapter it is concluded that decarbonisation of the energy supply in combination with the reduction in energy demand will most likely be the only way to deliver the rapid decarbonisation required to align with the Paris Agreement.
