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Massive R&D investment needed to reduce cost of renewable energy
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MANY people today believe that renewable energy will let us get off fossil fuels soon. Unfortunately, the facts say otherwise.
According to International Energy Agency data, 13.12 percent of the world’s energy came from renewables in 1971, the first year the IEA reported global statistics.
In 2011, renewables’ share was actually lower, at 12.99 percent. Yet a new survey shows that Americans believe that the share of renewables in 2035 will be 30.2 percent. In reality, it will likely be 14.5 percent.
Solar and wind energy account for a trivial proportion of current renewables — about one-third of one percentage point.
The vast majority comes from biomass, or wood and plant material — humanity’s oldest energy source. While biomass is renewable, it is often neither good nor sustainable.
Burning wood in pre-industrial Western Europe caused massive deforestation, as is occurring in much of the developing world today.
The indoor air pollution that biomass produces kills more than three million people annually. Likewise, modern energy crops increase deforestation, displace agriculture, and push up food prices.
The reality is that humanity has spent recent centuries getting away from renewables. In 1800, the world obtained 94 percent of its energy from renewable sources. That figure has been declining ever since.
The switch to fossil fuels has had tremendous environmental benefits. Kerosene saved the whales (which had been hunted almost to extinction to provide supposedly “renewable” whale oil for lighting). Coal saved Europe’s forests. With electrification, indoor air pollution, which is much more dangerous than outdoor air pollution, disappeared in most of the developed world.
Of course, fossil fuels brought their own environmental problems. And, while technological innovations like scrubbers on smokestacks and catalytic converters on cars have reduced local air pollution substantially, the problem of CO2 emissions remains.
Return to renewables
Indeed, it is the main reason for the world’s clamor for a return to renewables. To be sure, wind and solar have increased dramatically.
Since 1990, wind-generated power has grown 26 percent per year and solar a phenomenal 48 percent. But the growth has been from almost nothing to slightly more than almost nothing. In 1990, wind produced 0.0038 percent of the world’s energy; it is now producing 0.29 percent. Solar-electric power has gone from essentially zero to 0.04 percent.
Yes, Denmark gets a record 34 percent of its electricity from wind. But electricity accounts for only 18 percent of its final energy use.
Europe now gets 1 percent of its energy from wind — less than before industrialization, when cozy windmills contributed about 2 percent (and ships’ sails provided another 1 percent). The UK set its record for wind power in 1804, when its share reached 2.5 percent — almost three times its level today.
Moreover, solar and wind will still contribute very little in the coming decades.
In the IEA’s optimistic scenario, which assumes that the world’s governments will fulfill all of their green promises, wind will provide 1.34 percent of global energy by 2035, while solar will provide 0.42 percent. Global renewables will most likely increase by roughly 1.5 percentage points, to 14.5 percent by 2035. Under unrealistically optimistic assumptions, the share could increase five percentage points, to 17.9 percent.
So we are nowhere near switching back to renewables anytime soon. In the US, renewables accounted for 9.3 percent of energy production in 1949. President Barack Obama’s administration expects that number, almost a century later, to increase slightly, to 10.8 percent by 2040.
In China, renewables’ share in energy production dropped from 40 percent in 1971 to 11 percent today; in 2035, it will likely be just 9 percent.
Current green energy policies are failing for a simple reason: renewables 2are far too expensive. Sometimes people claim that renewables are actually cheaper. But if renewables were cheaper, they wouldn’t need subsidies.
Former US Vice President Al Gore’s climate adviser, Jim Hansen, put it bluntly: “Suggesting that renewables will let us phase rapidly off fossil fuels in the United States, China, India, or the world as a whole is almost the equivalent of believing in the Easter Bunny and [the] Tooth Fairy.”
The solution is to innovate the price of renewables downward.
We need a dramatic increase in funding for research and development to make the next generations of wind, solar, and biomass energy cheaper and more effective.
China has 68 percent of the world’s solar water heaters on rooftops, because it is a smart and cheap technology. It needs no subsidies, and it produces 50 times more energy than all of China’s solar panels.
When green renewables are cheaper than fossil fuels, they will take over the world. Instead of believing in the Tooth Fairy, we should start investing in green R&D.
Bjorn Lomborg, an adjunct professor at the Copenhagen Business School, founded and directs the Copenhagen Consensus Center. Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2013.www.project-syndicate.org. Shanghai Daily condensed the article.
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