Author of Finding Lights in a Dark Age, Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future and A Small Farm Future
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Posted on June 21, 2024 | 40 Comments
The Energy Institute published its annual Statistical Review of World Energy yesterday, releasing the energy figures for 2023. So I thought I’d bring you a brief newsflash with a few headline items from it.
I’m still having internet connectivity problems (one reason why my comments have become sparser here of late), but I wasn’t going to let that stop me getting at the data. So while England were eking out an underwhelming draw with Denmark in the Euros, I cycled to the edge of town, set up a mobile hotspot and downloaded the energy data onto my laptop. I am a normal person, right?
Here are a few tidbits from my hastily constructed preliminary analysis spreadsheet.
Last year:
I’m interested to hear what others make of these figures. My first blush response is that (1) the purported transition out of fossil fuels to low carbon forms of energy has, alas, been delayed for at least another year, (2) the level of change now required before climate change starts to mess with our plans is, to say the least, daunting, and (3) low-carbon renewable electricity generation (and consumption) is mostly the preserve of rich, powerful countries and is not widespread globally. (Note: the figures above refer mostly to primary and not final energy. Despite what renewable transition optimists might say, I believe the primary energy figures are to the point).
Meanwhile, I’ve nearly finished reading Brett Christophers recent book The Price Is Wrong: Why Capitalism Won’t Save the Planet (Verso, 2024) – just shy of 400 pages devoted almost entirely to the economics of renewable electricity generation, transmission and consumption. Suffice to say I’ve learned some things I didn’t know before – including the great importance of understanding the difference between those three things. The book defies easy summary, but it demonstrates (in some detail) that the concepts of cost, price, efficiency, profit and risk are not the same, even though most of us muddle them up a lot of the time. Such muddling is at issue in quite a few of the topics I’ve been involved in debating of late.
In the case of renewable energy, given that renewable electricity generation facilities are so cheap, why isn’t the global energy system switching rapidly to renewables? Because, Christophers shows, the economics of energy (like the economics of everything else in the modern world) isn’t driven by price, but by profit. We, or at least some of us, have built a world based around the difference between the price we get, or at least some of us get, for selling and the price we get for buying – and, for various reasons that I hope to discuss in more detail in another post, this tends to make renewables an unattractive option for people who have the money to finance big energy projects. We urgently need to start building a world which, more like the natural world, is based on cost instead of profit. But, as the saying goes, we are where we are.
This makes the transition to a fossil fuel free world doubly daunting. Not only do we need to swipe out a South & Central American sized slice of fossil energy use each and every year for the next twenty-six years, but in order to do so we need to completely rewrite the basic assumptions of the global economy.
Anyway, as I said I hope to write some more about this shortly. But for now I will end on that cheery note and wish you happy World Localization Day.
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In a perfectly competitive, perfect information economy the natural rate of profit is zero. So the switch to cost should be easy
In a market with “perfect competition” capitalism can’t work, which is why it always will look for new markets….
Perhaps the cynicism is just too strong with me this week, but I am utterly unsurprised; crapitalism gonna crap.
Your mobile hotspot shenanigans are very, very normal: human beings are highly motivated by communication and information, which is part of why I think some kind of cobbled-together internet is likely to persist for as long as it is physically possible. I don’t know for sure, but I suspect that more people at the food bank use our electricity to charge their phones and our WiFi to check their emails than used our winter fuel exchange — where people who didn’t need their winter fuel payments could donate them, so we could top up utility meters. Certainly more people have asked me if they can charge their phone or use the WiFi than have asked me to do the meter top-up. Admittedly most of them probably aren’t downloading reports from the Energy Institute, but not many of them have written books either, and I’m inclined to lump rather than split in this instance.
But supper tonight will be potatoes baked in the fire at the allotment, accompanied by peas in their pods, the first of the greenhouse tomatoes and followed by fresh strawberries. I’d like a less-industrial solution for the spuds than wrapping them in foil but that will have to wait for another evening. There are more gherkins to harvest and pickle, the peppers are starting to ripen, so are the blueberries, and I’m about to make my third sowing of some squash varieties, having had poor germination on a few this year, but the ones that worked the first time are starting to take off now. At home I have cherries waiting to be eaten.
I’m not happy about the increasing signals that you may be right, Chris, but despite knowing that everything I am doing could be wiped away very quickly in the kind of rapid change that may strike as things unravel, I am finding it hard to be unhappy about my choice to start where I am.
Well. How could we have possibly seen this coming?
Bill Rees does yeoman’s work dismantling the hot air around renewables—and it is bleak. The ranks of collapsniks are growing…
One of the most interesting and important approaches to renewable energy I have seen is at Living Energy Farm, where they use a Daylight Drive DC microgrid. I think this is very important stuff. Low Tech Magazine did a writeup, and also mentioned them in a solar article.
Low-tech Lab – Living Energy Farm: A community free of fossil fuels ?
That “living energy farm” link reminded me of the Centre for Alternative Technology in Wales – or rather, what CAT was like in it’s origins in the 70’s, according to reports.
So yeah, the time to do all this was at least forty years ago …
http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2024/06/america_s_federal_lands_were_set_to_be_listed_on_the_stock_exchange_before_the_proposed_rule_was_yanked.html
Another attempt at greenwashing , how about this for a way your capitalist friends to make money !
Electricity is very nice but really a minor player where carbon energy is concerned , transport is the big energy hog , the USA uses 9 million barrels a day of gasoline , I suppose someone could turn that into KWh and tell us how many windmills needed , there is another energy hog on the way , AI , I watched a video from the WEF , the engineer in the room stated that to feed AI the USA would have to double the entire US grid capacity by 2030 , we all know that can’t happen
9 million gallons of gasoline converts to about 301 million kWh.
9 million gallons of diesel fuel converts to about 366 million kWh.
The national media just noticed that Texas is having trouble supplying all the electricity that AI data centers want there. Must be a real problem…
Yep ,TX has no spare capacity in summer and is relying too much on solar with no battery back up , plus the wind drops out in summer , the EPA will not allow new large gas fired stations so TX is relying on modified jet engines to fill the hole .
100% of TX water is pumped so outages can last more than three hours , oil refineries are likely to blow up without electricity and need plenty of warning to start their diesel generators .
ERCOT has warned of rolling blackouts after the sun goes down .
Around here there is a thriving industry fixing 100 year old wind powered pumps and fitting new solar powered systems so yes TX is in the poop .
Hi Greg,
you can’t do a 1:1 comparison between oil and EV’s because the 2nd law of thermodynamics means oil throws out about 80% of the energy when we burn it, and also just the shipping costs of oil from where we mine and refine it to where we burn it is also incredibly wasteful. 40% of global shipping will dry up when we Electrify Everything to run directly on renewables. And – as I’ve shared before – that also means we’ll do 95% of the work we do today MORE efficiently with renewables than we do with fossil fuels. In fact, we’ll run the modern world on 40% of the THERAL energy in fossil fuels.
You see – when we stop burning stuff like cavemen and Electrify Everything – we can ship solar panels around the planet instead of fossil fuels, install them in an off-grid EV charging station roof – and what do you know? They can stay there 25 years instead of being topped up every week. Oh – and an EV USES 80% of the energy as forward motion – but an oil car only uses 20% of the oil energy going forward.
So again – 1:1 comparisons between solar and the BTU’s in fossil fuels is downright wrong. Instead – every unit of firmed renewables is worth 2 Units of fossil fuels.
Indeed – some who wonder how we are going to mine ores on renewable energy NEED to read this article!
I love this next mining truck that carries its ore downhill – on regenerative breaking the whole way – and so NEVER needs to be charged. In fact – with this route – it has SURPLUS power to feed back into the grid!
https://www.emobility-engineering.com/electric-truck-mines-own-energy/
It’s not perpetual motion – the ‘recharge’ happens when the big digger dumps the ore in the truck. That ore has weight = energy as the vehicle is slowed on the way down the big hill via the regen breaking. Amazing hey? But oh how oh how will we run the world without oil? I’m afraid that’s Big Oil talking. Don’t fall for it.
Regards,
Eclipse
Eclipse, I just want to ask you re the logic of the last para in your comment here – you believe the fact that it’s possible to convert potential energy into electrical energy by moving minerals downhill at a mine constitutes evidence that we can run the world without oil, and that arguments to the contrary amount to advancing the self-interest of the oil industry? That’s what you’ve suggested in that paragraph, yes?
Hi Chris,
20 years ago I was told on forums like this quite emphatically that there were empirical rules of chemistry that forbade anything as heavy as a car running on anything as weak as batteries for any distance. Let alone trucks. Then Alice Friedman realised EV’s were coming – and so just scaled up the problem. She wrote “When the trucks stop running.” Now peak oil was a matter for Semi’s. Then the Tesla Semi launched, and Australia has the Janus battery swap for big Tesla’s.
Then I became aware there was a doomer argument that mining was the real peak oil bottleneck and crunch point. But as I keep pointing out – this mostly electric 240 tonne mining truck drives up hill at TWICE the speed of the diesel truck next to it – while charging on overhead catenary. https://youtu.be/6TxMeHRq1mk?t=213
For me the fact that there is a electric mining truck that never needs to charge is just the icing on the cake given that 20 year history. There’s even a giant “Infinity train” that does the same trick! “It could save 82 million litres of diesel a year.”
https://reneweconomy.com.au/fortescue-says-regenerative-infinity-train-may-be-on-tracks-in-two-years/
Now – I’m not accusing anyone here in particular intending to help Big Oil in any way. You all obviously care about climate change and the environment a great deal.
I’m talking about unintentional consequences. I’m talking about young people being sold a message of Climate Doom from a variety of sources, and coming here to read yet more attacks on renewable energy.
Ever since Climatologist Simon Clark explained that Big Oil are now sponsoring Climate Doomers and their attacks on renewable energy, I’ve been extra aware of just how strong the pyschological link between hope and action really is. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3XSG2Dw2mL8
You might counter that there IS hope if we get our families to move out and start a small farm future together. But as we have seen, populations are moving into cities, not out of them. There are also massive geographic issues in finding enough nearby land for the citizens of many countries.
Typo! “Janus battery swap for big Tesla’s.” should have been Janus battery swap for big TRUCKS. As in BIG TRUCKS! Aussie 100 tonners. https://www.januselectric.com.au/
Just questions – What to bet that no other media site picks up that Energy Institute report ? If they do, will it be reported along the lines of ‘Robust increases in energy use indicates a strong economy’ ?
It reminds me of the scene at the end of the original The Italian Job, we’re teetering on the edge and we need people to move away from the gold and stop moving altogether!
‘Edge back , as far as you can go , to counter balance me….’
Thanks for the comments, and for assuring me that I’m normal, Kathryn. Unless…
A good (intentional?) reminder from Ken (& Gunnar) that the most sophisticated self-understanding of how capitalist economics works … doesn’t understand how capitalist economics works. Though in the case of renewables it probably also needs to be said that it’s often not as low-cost as it seems.
Thanks also for the other informative comments. Yes, alas the 2023 figures suggest the bus is teetering that bit more… But unfortunately we can’t rely on running down the fuel tank.
Be interesting to know what % of total energy use is electric and how much of that electricity is generated using renewables.
If the renewables % share of electricity generation is on the rise.
On hydrogen…….. 2 years ago, the heating trade magazines were all trumpeting hydrogen as the way forward.
The two trial schemes to incorporate hydrogen into domestic settings (Redcar and Fife I think) have both now been scrapped.
Seems like hype couldn’t compete with reality.
My recollection is that electricity is about 20% of global energy use. Sorry I don’t have a source for this, it’s just the number that lives in my head.
The other 80% is shipping/transport, heating, and industry (things like smelting steel) but I’m not really on top of what the proportions are. I’m also not sure where “driving your giant tractor up and down the field all day” fits.
There is a Hummer parked on the street not too far from where I live, along several of my regular bicycle commutes. It is the most incongruous thing I’ve seen for a while. Who lives in a terraced house in East London and can afford one of those?
Some of the fossil fuel use is more urgent to replace than the rest. We don’t need to worry too much about retrofitting terraced houses in East London for ground source heat pumps if the local population density is going to be substantially lower; retrofitting for biomass is a lot easier in homes that still have chimneys and used to have fire places, and there isn’t enough biomass for everyone to do that now but there is clearly a density at which it would be plausible. We don’t need to replace the Hummer, either.
But if tractors stop being viable we are in Big Trouble until we figure out how to feed ourselves, and we do need some means of getting goods and people from one place to another. In my more whimsical moments I am personally rooting for airships. They’re a lot slower than jet engines but that could take the edge off the jetlag, and they don’t have to be made from hideously flammable
gases like hydrogen.
I view most technological solutions to energy production and distribution as less likely to happen than airships.
@, Kathryn
Ive always been a fan of airships (and Led Zeppelin).
I drew up plans to make a radio controlled one out of balsa and dope when I was a kid. Was going to fill with party ballons. The plan never got off the ground 🙂
(Pun intended)
I think a big drawback, which has hampered large scale projects, is the product of Helium. It’s quite rare and a faff to isolate from other compounds.
It’s almost as if we’re living in a world with physical limits or something…
John, it’s slightly tricky to compute electricity as a proportion of global energy use from the EI data because it involves comparing primary with secondary energy, but the dataset reports global primary energy consumption for 2023 as 619.6 EJ and electricity generation as 107.7 EJ – electricty generation therefore constituting 17% of total primary energy consumption, if that makes sense. So I think Kathryn is about right.
In terms of the fuel types responsible for electricity generation globally in 2023, they break down proportionately as follows:
Coal 35%
Gas 23%
Hydro 14%
Wind 9%
Nuclear 9%
Solar 7%
Oil 2%
Would be interesting to know how those percentages compare to, say, 10 years ago.
How much of a dent renewables are making in fossil fuel usage for electricity generation.
The thing that is often missed, is that renewables require fossil fuels in their manufacturing/installation etc.
Renewables aren’t really detached from fossil fuels.
It’s questionable if renewables can be manufactured/installed/decommissioned/recycled using just renewable energy.
Your wish is my command, John:
Proportionate global electricity generation by fuel type, 2013:
Coal 42%
Gas 22%
Hydro 16%
Nuclear 11%
Oil 5%
Wind 3%
Solar 1%
Other 1%
Bear in mind of course that these are relative figures.
Total global electricity generation, 2013 – 23,469.4 TWh
Total global electricity generation, 2023 – 29,924.8 TWh
Meanwhile food for 8 billion people at 2000 kcal/day (which is, admittedly, probably on the low side) works out at something like 66990000000000 kJ, which I think is roughly 0.06699 EJ/day, rounded up to 0.07/day that’s 25.55 EJ/year, unless I’ve messed up the conversions somewhere. It’s easy to see why “hey, how exactly are we going to produce food in this technoutopian future?” gets shoved aside in energy conversations when it looks like such a small proportion of our energy consumption. But if we’re using a 10:1 ratio of energy input to output in agriculture, then the 255.5 EJ we use to grow our food is a serious problem, already more than twice as much as our total electricity generation. Combined with existing distribution problems (where we produce enough food, but people still go hungry), it seems like that could bite pretty hard if we’re facing energy limitation and increased production problems from climate catastrophe.
Or maybe as renewable electric doesn’t keep up with demand, we’ll prioritise research into integrating renewable electric into agricultural work with a decent EROEI over other uses, we’ll prioritise energy for growing food for the majority over energy for a small number of rich people to fly around the world several times per year, we’ll prioritise those mitigations that make energy descent more livable over those that look good to shareholders…
…but I’m not betting on it.
(Current growing project: expanding my range of perennial tuber crops to eat during years when the spud harvest is poor. I have some hopniss tubers to plant out, to add to the Jerusalem artichokes and oca which I quite enjoy and which require very, very little work on my part.)
No till saves in diesel use per acre ( about 4 gallons per acre less )and is better for the soil than conventional tillage. But weeds adapt and gain resistance to roundup . Plastic mulch saves on cultivation and human labor but micro plastics are a health issue we don’t acknowledge yet. Also plastic and fertigation are a ways to evade composting so end up hard on long term soil health.
Reducing that 10 to 1 fossil fuel to food calorie conversion needs way more experimentation and documentation . We don’t have research papers on what does or doesn’t work. The diesel trucks carrying all that produce around can be electrified but at a very high cost. What we haul, what it weighs, and how far it needs to go , are more fossil fuel to food calorie questions.
There are agricultural practices that could get higher food calories returned than human labor calories exerted but we haven’t explored this option in any quantifiable way. Collecting acorns or pine nuts , free range chickens , gardening with stone tools.
We , as usual, are trying to support farming techniques that use ungodly amounts of fossil energy with some replacement energy like solar/ electrics . Just like trying to convert our home and auto transport to electric but way more difficult and power hungry. Anybody who actually tries replacing diesel with electrics will quickly understand their limitations. In reality it would be easier to replace steel hand tools with stone tools than to replace diesel with electrics.
But as long as the big tractors keep working anyone who chooses to step back from the energy trap will soon learn that making money while competing agains’t a huge horsepower differential just doesn’t work. Food is artificially cheap, human labor is devalued , soil health suffers . And if you accept some lower income level ,with your low energy food system and garden ,academia and the public at large will write you off as irrelevant.
Electrics does offer some help in small gardens/ very small farms but it won’t replace the current system. IMO nothing will.
Regarding claims such as a 10:1 ratio of energy input to output in agriculture, I will repeat (below) an earlier comment I made. In summary, such claims are misleading. It depends on the crop, and whether food processing, distribution, and cooking energy inputs are included.
For agricultural production, the average is more like a 2:1 ratio (at the farm gate) if the high energy and low calorie crops are included, such as greenhouse tomatoes and lettuce. Some crops provide more energy as food calories than the energy it took to produce them. For example, the total energy (not just fossil fuels) to produce soybeans are repaid more than tenfold as food calories at the farm gate.
My earlier comment:
~~~~~~~~~~
Kathryn wrote, “I have seen rough claims of 8 to 10 joules of fossil energy being used to produce every joule of food energy we harvest… What has my bullshit detector missed?”
Here’s some data to help debunk sweeping claims like that one. First of all, a number of crops actually require less than 1 calorie of energy costs to produce 1 calorie of food energy. Soybeans require far less energy costs than the food energy content of the soybeans. There’s less than 0.1 calorie of energy costs for each food calorie of soybeans at the farm gate, or conversely around 12 calories of food calories contained in soybeans for every calorie of energy costs to produce the crop.
In ‘Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future’, Chris wrote this about the energy cost of soybeans, with a focus on protein:
“By comparison, I estimate the energy inputs for large-scale soybean agriculture in the US, including the human labour that’s involved, as around 1,090 kWh/ha on the basis of relevant studies.8 Applying that to the national average yield suggests a figure of about 1.0 kWh/kg protein – about 65 times less than the minimum ballpark figure for manufactured protein.”
That’s 1.0 kWh of energy costs for each kg of soybean protein at the farm gate, which translates to around 1/12 of a calorie for the energy costs to produce 1 calorie of soybeans (considering the calories from the carbohydrate and fat content of soybeans, in addition to the protein content), based on data from USDA studies. Thus, the energy costs to produce soybeans are repaid more than tenfold as food calories at the farm gate.
Moving on to other crops besides soybeans, USDA data for all crops combined shows this breakdown for the ‘US Food System Energy Use in 2002’:
CALORIES OF ENERGY INPUTS TO PRODUCE 1 CALORIE OF FOOD
Agriculture (Agricultural production): 1.6 Calories
Processing (Food processing and packaging): 2.7 Calories
Distribution (Wholesale, retail, freight, and food services): 4.3 Calories
Consumption (Personal food-related travel, household energy use): 3.4 Calories
TOTAL = 12 Calories of energy inputs to produce 1 Calorie of food
Thus, according to the USDA Economic Research Service, only 1.6 calories (out of those 12 total calories) were the averaged energy inputs for agricultural production of 1 calorie of food.
So, the USDA numbers show that if you’re only counting production costs (without including transport away from the farm, meal preparation, etc.), then agricultural crops in the US (in total, including low-calorie crops like lettuces, and high-energy-input crops like greenhouse tomatoes) require only 1.6 calories of energy costs on average, for each calorie of farmed food produced, after accounting for waste. (This average would be lower than 1.6 calories if low-calorie crops like lettuces were excluded.)
The average of 1.6 calories is for 2002 data, and the linked article says the average has increased since then.
(See the chart ‘US Food System Energy Use in 2002’ to find these numbers at the page linked below.)
https://learn.uvm.edu/foodsystemsblog/2013/07/18/counting-calories-the-energy-cost-of-food/
The high energy cost of food distribution (which is much higher than the total energy cost of producing the crops, according to that USDA data) thus gives an efficiency advantage to the Small Farm Future scenario.
Thanks, Steve.
I suppose the difficulty is that if we’re only counting the energy to the the crop to the farm gate, well… I can’t eat soybeans raw and there are zero soybean farms within walking distance of my home.
But if we include transport, off-farm processing, and cooking, we risk double-counting in our energy use. (If nothing else, I’m far more likely to put the oven on when it’s cold out, because it does heat up the kitchen considerably. Does that energy count as cooking or heating?)
Soybeans, which provide more than a tenfold return of energy (in calories of food at the farm gate), contrast greatly with George Monbiot’s bacterial protein powder, which requires more than a tenfold of calories of energy inputs per calorie of food value (at the factory gate), according to my calculations based on the numbers in Saying NO…
The energy efficiency of soybeans is thus more than 100 times greater than bacterial protein powder, on a per calorie basis, at the farm or factory gate. That’s the power of free sunshine, when cutting out the photovoltaic middlemen and factory processes required to manufacture bacterial protein powder.
Some other crops also provide more calories than the total energy inputs used to produce them (including the embodied energy of machinery, labor, fertilizers, pesticides, minerals, etc.)
The total energy used to produce wheat, potatoes, and maize (corn), for example, is effectively returned with a multiplier, resulting in a higher number of food calories, at the farm gate. In other words, the food calorie content is higher than the total embodied energy.
This study found that one calorie of energy inputs results in around 3 calories of potatoes or wheat, or around 4 calories of maize (corn).
Pimentel D. Energy Inputs in Food Crop Production in Developing and Developed Nations. Energies. 2009; 2(1):1-24. https://doi.org/10.3390/en20100001
Chris used an arguably better study for the soybean numbers in Saying NO… since this study reportedly had some inaccuracies and oversights (such as counting the energy that would be required for liming the fields every year for soybeans, when the lime is typically applied every 5 to 10 years), IIRC.
just a note on units –
1 EJ = 277 TWh.
25.5 EJ = 7063.5 TWh
Hydrogen is just an explosion waiting to happen , flash point ( the temperature that it catches fire ) 60 degrees Fahrenheit , it burns with a clear flame ( we used soap spray to find leaks or you got burned ) it eats plastic / rubber so all metal pipes .
Then you have got to make the stuff !
https://slaynews.com/news/bill-gates-launches-maggot-milk-feed-general-public/
Just the stuff to pour on your corn flakes , NOT !
He reminds me of Davros from DrWho .
A review of Christophers’ book mentioned above just out here: https://www.resilience.org/stories/2024-06-24/capitalism-wont-save-the-planet/
This article seems to be a written form of the energy graphic Chris posted in “Solar panels on a pinhead”.
Some people energy analysts get “stuck in a moment – and they can’t get out of it.” Analysing last year’s energy results is one thing. But appreciating where renewables are coming from, how fast they are being built now, and what the trends are for the future is another thing entirely.
GLOBAL DEMAND
We live in a developing world that cries out for more and more energy. It’s not like everyone on earth is blessed with the same developed nations so that any serious Gigawatts of renewables should be displacing gigawatts of coal or gas. Not at all! We live in a worth that is still demanding vast amounts of NEW energy, let alone displacing the old energy.
So how’s that going? It was not so long ago that renewables were only say 5% of all new energy. But last year renewables were the MAJORITY, around 80%! Yes – sadly – 50 GW of new coal capacity was built. Much of this is in China – and much of it will only run at say 30% capacity factor because it’s to backup intermittent renewables.
But over 7 TIMES that amount of solar was built – about 350 GW! Solar and wind with batteries are now the cheapest power ever. Short of a catastrophic nuclear war – the trend is now unstoppable.
WAR IN UKRAINE
This also temporarily bumped up coal demand in some countries – which should soon be weaned off again.
THE RETIRING
Many older coal plants are due to retire – soon! For example, my home State of NSW has Australia’s largest coal plant, and it is due to be closed in just a few years.
THE SNEAKY EXPONENTIAL GROWTH OF RENEWABLES
Remember exponential growth is sneaky. For the longest time nothing appears to be happening. EG: When is the Petri dish half full? You are told 2 things – if you drop bacteria in the Petri dish, these bacteria will double every minute. You are also told the dish will be full in an hour. When is the dish half full? At 59 minutes! That means it’s been on an invisible exponential doubling curve for something like 54 minutes before you even notice it. Then near the end there’s a smudge on the side. It’s only /16h of the jar, not threatening to fill the jar yet, right? Wrong! Then it’s 1/8th the jar, 1/4, 1/2 the half the jar at 59 minutes and at 60 minutes it’s full.
Renewables have been invisible for the last 30 years – and now are just appearing on everyone’s radar. Renewables are at about 56 minutes. In just a handful of doublings they’ll have taken over.
Professor Andrew Blakers (recipient of the Queen Elizabeth Prize for engineering – like a Nobel Prize for engineering) says:-
“80% of new generation in 2023 was wind and solar, with solar installations reaching more than 350 GW Cumulative global solar installed capacity passed 1.4 TW, and cumulative production reached 1.7 TW, which is more than tenfold larger than ten years ago, and it is doubling every 3 years. If this growth rate continues, there will be more solar installed in 2031 than all other electricity generation technologies put together.”
https://re100.eng.anu.edu.au/2024/04/24/fastest-energy-change-article/
In other words – don’t just analyse minute 55 and declare it’s just a small smudge – nothing to see here. Look at the trends, and look ahead!
THE GREAT HALVING
Weirdly, the growth of wind and solar is only half of the energy story. The other half is how transport and industry are going to run on renewables. It’s called “Electrify Everything” – mainly because renewables do not produce abundant fluids or gases to burn. Instead, we’re moving to electric vehicles for transport and electric industrial heating. (That’s in the form of heat pumps, electric arc furnaces, industrial microwaves and even plasma torches.) This replaces the inefficient and polluting practice of burning stuff like cavemen. Burning stuff loses a majority of the energy as waste heat and noise and light.
If anyone wonders how we’re going to Electrify Everything – try this 10 minute introduction by Deutsche Welle news. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EVJkq4iu7bk
Data Scientist Hannah Ritchie summarises the paper that shows we only need 40% of the total thermal value of fossil fuels: https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/electrification-energy-efficiency
THE YEARS AHEAD?
The IEA has predicted that there EV’s are selling so fast that there will be an oil GLUT of about 4 mbd by 2028. Google “IEA Growth in global oil demand is set to slow significantly by 2028” They also predict peak fossil fuel emissions around 2030-ish. Google “IEA: electric cars, clean energy policies to drive peak fossil fuel demand by 2030”
We are Electrifying transport so fast with EV’s that there will be an oil GLUT of about 4 mbd by 2028. https://www.iea.org/news/growth-in-global-oil-demand-is-set-to-slow-significantly-by-2028
The IEA says the TOTAL Energy Transition – including Electrifying Everything – is happening so fast we’ll see peak emissions around 2030ish. https://www.iea.org/news/growth-in-global-oil-demand-is-set-to-slow-significantly-by-2028
HOW CAN WE HELP?
Fight any new fossil fuels. Campaign to support the growth of some essential powerlines across appropriate places in your country. HVDC powerlines are essential to connect renewables up to super-grids to keep the prices low. And get involved in some form of conservation for your favourite local national park or wild space, or saving your favourite critter. Think global, act local.
And have fun. There is hope.
You could make these points more briefly by saying ‘look at the secular trends I want to emphasize, and don’t look at the ones I want to ignore’. Exponential growth in renewable capacity has not been accompanied by any degrowth in fossil consumption. Coal consumption increased by 10% in India and 5% in China last year, the highest proportionate increase in the former since the 1980s and in the latter since 2011. It’s worth pondering the implications of those growth rates in those particular countries too. Anyway, more on this soon.
“Exponential growth in renewable capacity has not been accompanied by any degrowth in fossil consumption. ”
Not in absolute terms. Not yet anyway.
But it has offset what would have been VASTLY MORE!
EG: Sydney has had millions of more residents in the last few decades but power demand has remained flat and we have not built new coal plants. Why? Rooftop solar and some coastal wind. Renewables prevented a few new coal and gas plants coming online.
Globally – 50 GW new coal.
350 GW new solar.
117 GW new wind.
See the trend?
“Coal consumption increased by 10% in India and 5% in China last year”
I’m not across Indian statistics – but I’m pretty sure (from somewhere in the many podcasts I listen to) that you can cut the Chinese 5% by a 30% capacity factor – as I explained above.
“It’s worth pondering the implications of those growth rates in those particular countries too. Anyway, more on this soon.”
Yes – but you see – trends are my argument – not yours.
Extrapolate this!
“India saw the highest year-on-year growth in renewable energy additions of 9.83% in 2022. The installed solar energy capacity has increased by 30 times in the last 9 years and stands at 84.27 GW as of May 2024”
https://www.investindia.gov.in/sector/renewable-energy
Nope, trends are very much my argument.
Meanwhile, Global Energy Monitor states that 115 GW of new fossil fuel generating capacity was installed globally in 2023, mostly in China but also in India, Bangladesh, Indonesia and Vietnam. Most new renewables were also installed in China. You’re not addressing the geopolitical story or the total energy story, which aren’t fundamentally about decarbonisation.
Fossil fuel consumption in India increased from 32.2 EJ in 2022 to 34.8 EJ in 2023, while renewables consumption increased from 2.1 EJ to 2.4 EJ. Extrapolating…
This article does its best to turn bad news into good, but scarcely succeeds:
https://www.carbonbrief.org/china-responsible-for-95-of-new-coal-power-construction-in-2023-report-says/
“Globally, a total of 69.5GW of coal power came online in 2023, while 21.1GW was retired, GEM finds. This led to the highest net increase in global operating coal capacity since 2016, with a 48.4GW jump …. The world’s operating coal power capacity is up 11% since 2015, when governments agreed to keep the global average temperature to well below 2C above pre-industrial levels and aim to limit warming to 1.5C under the Paris Agreement. Outside of China, there are still 113GW of coal power projects under construction. While this is only slightly up from the previous year’s level of 110GW, it still highlights that the coal sector is not in line with the International Energy Agency’s (IEA) 1.5C scenario GEM says. Across all IEA scenarios that meet international climate goals there is a rapid decline in global coal emissions. Globally, pre-construction capacity rose 6% in 2023 …. Only 15% (317GW) of currently operating coal power capacity has a commitment to retire in line with Paris Agreement goals”.
Contrary to your previous remarks, I’m all in favour of trying to make the best of things, but it needs to be grounded in some semblance of reality. You’re effectively saying that if we ignore trends in fossil fuel consumption, then the trends in renewable consumption are looking pretty good. Okay, agreed.
I’ll say more in a forthcoming post, but enough for now.
Hi Chris,
Isn’t there a difference between new coal plants being opened, new coal plants breaking ground and getting construction started – and new coal being proposed.
Proposed is all hypothetical until they break ground. What I’m saying is a lot of that could be cancelled because of the unanticipated speed of wind and solar accumulating. Remember – just solar alone could be beating the Paris goals by 2 or 3 times by 2030.
Note that your Carbon Brief link also said:
“While global coal power capacity – both overall and outside China – grew in 2023, GEM says this is likely to be a “blip” that will be offset by accelerating coal retirements in the next few years in the US and Europe.
Other key findings of the report include that construction of coal-fired power plants globally – excluding China – declined for the second year in a row. However, coal power plant retirements were also at the lowest level since 2011.”
There are also lots of PROPOSED coal plants that may never happen because of the shockwave the solar and wind explosion is going to cause to the fossil fuel sector. I’ll say it again – solar alone could be deploying 2 or 3 TIMES the Paris goals by 2030.
Let that sink in for a minute.
The title, “Global energy transition deferred, again”, seems appropriate. A study published last month found that the current efforts worldwide are generally insufficient for meeting energy transition objectives.
“This study offers a comprehensive review of worldwide energy transitions to carbon neutrality… the study uncovers a general trend: the current business-as-usual scenarios are insufficient to meet carbon neutrality objectives, underscoring an urgent call for accelerated global energy transition efforts.”
Measuring energy transition away from fossil fuels: A new index
Y Qi, J Lu, T Liu
Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, 2024 • Elsevier
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1364032124002697
[behind a paywall except for the abstract]
I kindof want to make a bar chart race of exogenous energy consumption since, say, 1200, comparing coal, oil, natural gas, biomass, biodiesel, hydro, nuclear, solar, and wind… but I do not have the kind of time needed for the amalgamation of the necessary figures.