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:
- Globally, we used more fossil energy and emitted more carbon dioxide from energy use than ever before in history (504.8 exajoules and 35.1 billion tonnes, since you asked)
- Global average per capita energy consumption was higher than ever before in history (77.0 gigajoules per capita)
- Global consumption of renewable energy increased by 5.4 exajoules from the previous year, from 45.2 exajoules in 2022 to 50.6 exajoules in 2023, while global consumption of fossil energy increased more than that over the same period – by 7.4 exajoules from 497.5EJ to 504.8 EJ
- As a proportion of all energy consumption, the share of fossil fuels decreased from 81.9% to 81.5%
- If South and Central America in its entirety was one country, it would be the fifth largest energy consuming country in the world, at 31.28 exajoules – albeit dwarfed by China (170.7 EJ) and the USA (94.3 EJ). If we are to cut out fossil fuel use entirely by 2050, we will need to cut roughly the entire amount of fossil fuels used in South and Central America last year from global energy use in each and every year between now and 2050
- Globally, the proportion of electricity generated from fossil fuels decreased from 60.8% to 60.0%
- Generation of renewable (non-hydro) electricity increased by 24% from the previous year, increasing its share of total electricity generation from 14.4 to 16%
- The main global countries/areas responsible for renewable (non-hydro) electricity generation were China (35.6% of global generation), Europe (18.0%) and the USA (14.7%), comprising nearly 70% of all worldwide renewable generation between them
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.
