Dr. Roger Pielke Jr. tips us to this interesting yet inconvenient graph.
The graph below shows data from the BP Statistical Review of World Energy 2014, which was released yesterday. It shows the proportion of global energy consumption that comes from carbon-free sources. Guess what? It isn’t growing.
Pielke writes:
The proportion of carbon-free energy consumption is a far more important metric of progress with respect to the challenge of stabilizing carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere than looking at carbon dioxide emissions.
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What you should take from this however is that there remains no evidence of an increase in the proportion of carbon-free energy consumption even remotely consistent with the challenge of atmospheric stabilization of atmospheric carbon dioxide. Those who claim that the world has turned a corner, soon will, or that they know what steps will get us around that corner are dreamers or fools. We don’t know. The sooner we accept that, the sooner we can design policies more compatible with policy learning and muddling through.
Nick Stokes,
Energy consumption is about 580 quadrillion BTU’s. It grows about 4% per year. (Let’s let carbon free and renewables be synonyms for these purposes) If carbon free is currently 13% (from chart above) and renewables make up 15.7% of the 4% growth then renewables grow from 75.4 Quad BTU to 79 Quad BTU. While non-renewables grow from 504.6 to 524 quad BTU. That is then 13.1% for carbon free. Again, your facts are still consistent with no noticeable change in the graph above.
Sadly, increased natural gas consumption is mainly in the USA. Over the last 10 years, global gas consumption is up by 29% but coal is up by 47%.
The carbon intensity of global primary energy production has been pretty flat for the last decade or so at around 23 tonnes CO2 emitted per MWh of energy consumed. Again, this is a combination of two factors: a huge growth in coal consumption, increasing carbon emissions, almost exactly offset by the growth in renewable energy.
Does this include hydro?
Of it does and you take it out of the equation the graph may look extremely different.
(The extreme enviro-nazis hate hydro because it actually works – they don’t want us to have easy access to energy sources as they want us all living in caves)
Given China’s success in bringing coal plants on line, “treading water” is not too shabby for the “carbon-free” industry. Given the enormous unmet energy needs of the world and the resulting human misery, I suppose we should celebrate the global “all of the above” approach’s energy supply growth especially given sensible reductions in non-carbon subsidies.
Doh! After I typed my comment asking if hydro was included, I then saw Nigel Harris @5.28 already answering my question.
(My opinions regarding the enviro-nazis still stand)
Sorry, that should be 0.23 tonnes of course!
Nigel Harris has the better grasp on this one. Kudos.
@Walker808
When the cost of carbon-based fuels equals the cost of solar/wind then their proportion will increase. Long before that nuclear and hydro-electric will increase.
Also, why is it people still insists that methane (natural gas) will run out when it is present on planets where there likely has never been life in any great quantity if any at all (like some moons of Saturn). Methane may be a by-product of the nuclear fission/chemical heat reactions in the core and mantle of our planet. Its production may be slower than we might wish as economies grow. At the same time it may not be a “fossil fuel”.
Coal-based energy is increasing, nuclear-based energy stagnated after Three Mile Island meltdown – plants under construction were finished, but very few more were started.
Meanwhile renewables are growing very quickly – but they started from an almost zero point. Their impact will be seen much more in the coming years.
With coal reserves limited and due for exhaustion within 50 to 60 years, the world had better start building the wind turbines.
We are going to need them.
sooner or later all the oil, coal and gas will be used up
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cheap oil, coal and gas has been used up. however there doesn’t appear to be any shortage of the expensive variety. they keep finding more and more of that.
@Nick
“Renewables contributed 34.6% of the growth in global power generation in 2013, representing 15.7% of world energy growth.””
I would like to know if the generation of electricity using water power is counted in this ‘renewables’ or not. I understand that there are extremist elements in the green movement who refuse to count water power as ‘renewable’.
Hydro power in Africa could easily increase by 10-fold the current continental output. If it is included, so what? It was going to happen anyway. If not, the ‘carbon content’ of the ‘solutions’ is really high.
When flying from Beijing to Mongolia yesterday I saw from the air the infrastructure China is building in order to erect giant windmills that look large even from an aeroplane. There is a road of perhaps 0.5-1.0 km long per windmill to reach them. Not to mention the wires strung across the land. They have to be made and maintained. I can’t see that a massive metal, plastic and epoxy construction gets to be counted as ‘zero emissions’.
India and China are throwing off the bell curve………
coal reserves limited and due for exhaustion within 50 to 60 years
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if that was true there would be no worries about CO2. It would be self limiting. The big worry is that the third world will try and use coal to industrialize, the same way that the west did and that india and china are doing, because it is the only path that has been shown to work. the problem isn’t that we will run out of coal. rather the opposite, that we will not.
You can make any shape of graph you like by (re)defining what your parameters are. This graph of “non-CO2” energy consumption includes nuclear and hydro as well as renewables (solar and wind) so the levelling off is as much to do with slowing down nuclear and hydro as anything else. I wonder where biofuels are included in this?
Dr Pielke’s point is that there is no evidence of any major shift to reducing CO2 emissions in energy consumption and – as he is accepting of the link between CO2 and temperature – is pointing out the failure of mitigation policies to actually do anything.
The tax credits were not an inexhaustible resource after all. Besides, they started to crowd out the other vote-buying-operations-with-borrowed-money schemes.
One btu of growth in solar or wind is not the same as one btu of growth in fossil fuels. 1 BTU/hr = 0.29307107 W. Different substances have different btu’s per unit of that substance (even different wood species have quite different btu’s per cord). The cost of bringing that one unit online would then also be different. How would you calculate the cost of bringing one btu of fossil fuel online versus bringing one btu of solar or wind online?
Hydroelectric is obviously carrying the carbon free energy market but that source is reaching full capacity. Unfortunately the graph of capital expenditure on carbon-free energy does not have the same shape.
The Thoruim Age officially starts next year when China’s first Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor goes online.
There is no need for governments to waste taxpayer money on LFTR development, all that is required (unfortunately) are government rules/regs/standards to be established and to let the free market determine the pace at which this new technology is adopted over conventional/non subsidized energy sources.
Governments do an absolutely awful job at picking winners and losers and any government involvement in LFTRs will merely delay, rather than accelerate LFTR adoption.
It would appear that 1990’s were the highest percentage in recorded history!
Nearly all hydro and nuclear, no doubt. But why would we want to limit CO2? The earth is still in a CO2 famine. 400ppm is still too low. 1,000 would seem to be the minimum healthy level. An no, the earth will never run out of fossil fuels. They’ll just get more expensive than nuclear. Hopefully, the CO2 enrichment will stay around for a few centuries.
Does Dr. Roger Pielke Jr’s graph include nuclear power? If so, what would it look like if you excluded nuclear?
Hell folks!!! We have discovered a perfect match for the warming AND the pause!!! The cause? The growth and stalling out of renewables!! I can be all sciency about correlation being causation too. And in this case the correlation is far superior to CO2. So it must be it. Yeppers!
Wonder what contortions the AGW proponents will go through to deny this ‘pause’? 😉
Coal, oil and gas are also renewable. The same processes that produced these sources in the first place, are still at work producing more.
I recognize the logistics function here. The previous paradigm prevailed until the 1960’s. Then a new factor entered and grew, with the system eventually re-equilibrating about 1995. This very closely tracks the historical data for the on-line capacity of nuclear reactors: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Nuclear_Power_History.png