An executive’s guide to the global energy system
An interesting podcast. Government regulation drove the renewables to start with, but now it is the cheapest form of enegy.
In my opinion, without the government regulations giving renewables a chance, they might still be more expensive today, and that would be a great loss.
In my opinion, without the government regulations giving renewables a chance, they might still be more expensive today, and that would be a great loss.
Global energy demand is headed toward a plateau over the next ten to 20 years, as the world focuses on electrification, energy efficiency, and more service-driven economic growth.
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«Global energy demand is headed toward a plateau over the next ten to 20 years, as the world focuses on electrification, energy efficiency, and more service-driven economic growth.»
An interesting statistic is that electricity consumption per head in many "first-world" countries it hit a plateau or collapsed in 2003-2005, well before the GFC, but but in countries where the economy is expand, indeed it accelerated. Both inflection points happened 1-3 years after China's entry in the WTO, look at this very telling graph:
https://www.google.co.uk/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&met_y=eg_use_elec_kh_pc&idim=country:DEU:ITA:GBR:FRA:ESP:GRC:CHN:JPN:KOR:MYS:THA:BRA:MEX:URY:TUR:IRL:SGP:IND:ISR:USA
It is notable that among "first-world" countries the richer the country the smaller the fall, and for the UK a commenter on another blog showed that the fall is the larger the poorer the region of the UK (and I checked another similar country and that's also what happened):
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/d95944777bd2fcb316e937ca45e2207bbe35b040eb9d3910a1a6589df00a3b2a.png
A sustained large fall of electricity consumption per head did not happen before in "first-world" countries, and that's over 100 years, and pretty much it never ever happened that electricity consumption per head fell while the GDP index rose (which to me means that the GDP index for several countries is highly optimistic). For countries like the UK electricity consumption per head is now 40% below trend... My best current guess is that electricity saving has no role in this (and there is Jevons Effect, that has applied to electricity too over the past 100 years), it is simply that many people and businesses cannot afford the electricity bills and are cutting down on use of electricity as much as they can. That would explain why the poorer regions are cutting down more than the richer regions.
Sometimes I think that "first-world" governments are intentionally keeping their political economies in a semi-recessionary state, not just to increase unemployment and pushd down wages, but also to minimize imports and consumption, especially of energy and commodities, to prevent runaway energy and commodity price inflation as in the 1970s.
My guess is that in the 1970s Japan's ever increasing demand for energy and commodities caused massive inflation, as supply is very rigid in the short term, and today "first-world" governments are suppressing demand from the bulk of their population to accommodate China's ever increasing demand for energy and commodities without another round of massive price increases. This graph is also telling:
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/chinas-staggering-demand-commodities/
It says in the podcast how we are continuing to inprove on fuel efficieny.
They said how burning fossil fuel was very inefficient, but didn't say how else to obtain its energy. But one day we might be able to get the energy without burning it.
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