Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
As demand for fossil fuel plummets, education, job creation and other support is critical to save millions of oil industry employees and their communities from collapse.
If you have found yourself occasionally challenged to follow some of the more technical conversations we have here, or even if you just want to brush up on the fundamentals, this mini-series is for you! We hope these episodes will give you a bit more familiarity with the terms and concepts of energy, and help to fill in some of the knowledge that you were never offered in school.
Most of the world’s 20 leading economies, including Brazil, Mexico and Argentina, are choosing to support fossil fuels over clean energy as part of their coronavirus economic recovery packages, although China is outspending on renewables by a ratio of 4 to 1, according to data collected by Energy Policy Tracker.
If fossil fuels are rapidly eliminated during the transition to non-fossil energy, the pool of energy available to society will shrink. How much it shrinks will depend on how fast the new energy capacity and a new electric grid can be developed.
In this lagniappe episode, we ask: what are some unanswered questions about the energy transition from five years ago, but that seem answered today? And what are the new questions that have emerged over the past five years which remain unanswered today?
It is worth noting that globally, some 11 million people are already employed in the low carbon and renewables sector, but the numbers of people and resources currently focused on fossil fuel industries and their dependent products and services remain vast.
The renewable energy industry, which until recently was projected to enjoy rapid growth, has run into stiff headwinds as a result of three era-defining events: the COVID-19 pandemic, the resulting global financial contraction and a collapse in oil prices. These are interrelated, mutually reinforcing events.
Pandemics change business-as-usual overnight. Governments mobilise huge resources to tackle the problem and compensate for its impacts. At the same time, people depend on the civil and public domains for advice, protection, health services and the whole infrastructure of response.
Between 1970 and 2018, the UK population rose from 56m to 66m, but both total energy use and carbon emissions fell in this same period. This was because coal – the most carbon-intensive of the fossil fuels – was nearly eliminated, cleaner natural gas consumption rose slightly and then fell, and oil consumption stayed the same, as the growing area of transport remained oil-dependent.
After commencing only in 2015, the Lake Turkana Wind Power Project (LTWP) in Kenya has rapidly become the largest such initiative in Africa, and Kenya’s single largest investment in the country’s history. It began generating electricity in 2018 and was fully inaugurated in 2019. For that reason, its lessons are being scrutinised for the technology’s wider regional potential.
That we must one day rely solely on renewable energy is true by definition. The fossil and nuclear fuels are depleting resources and their use entails ecological harm on an immense scale. Therefore, this use will eventually become infeasible, unacceptable, and uneconomic. But how we get from here to there is radically uncertain.
Low-carbon electricity output from wind, solar, nuclear, hydro and biomass rose by just 1 terawatt hour (TWh, less than 1%) in 2019. It represents the smallest annual increase in a decade, where annual growth averaged 9TWh. This growth will need to double in the 2020s to meet UK climate targets while replacing old nuclear plants as they retire.
