Are We Headed for an Energy Revolution?

Figuring out how to meet the world’s energy needs over the next few decades will be an enormous challenge. Figuring out how to do that while also giving up fossil fuels will be … even harder. Our new video explores the challenge of achieving “net zero” by 2050.?

[SCRIPT]

It doesn’t happen that often.

But every once in a while, a single generation witnesses a technological breakthrough that will change the world forever.

The printing press.

The beginning of human flight.

And, for our generation, an inevitable, full-scale revolution in clean energy…

…that’s running a little behind schedule…

…ok, way behind schedule.

[OPENING SEQUENCE]

“The beginning of the end of the fossil fuel era.” That’s how the United Nations referred to the outcome of a 2023 climate change summit held in … the United Arab Emirates.

Which is sort of like having the prohibition conference in Vegas.

Nevertheless, delegates from throughout the world left the gathering having pledged that the world would transition away from fossil fuels and get the world to net zero carbon emissions by the year 2050.

Now, the rationale for this is clear enough. Leaders from around the globe are worried that, without a shift over to carbon-free energy sources like wind, solar, hydro, and nuclear the world will face significant problems as a result of climate change.

But, regardless of why they’re doing this, the more important question is whether they can do it.

Because here’s the thing about energy revolutions: they don’t happen. At least not in the way that the U.N. is imagining.

To understand why, it’s worth looking at the history of the world’s energy consumption — which looks like this:

Go back a couple of centuries and the world basically ran on “traditional biomass” — which is a fancy way of saying … wood. We burned a lot of wood. And also … dung.

Then, in the mid 19th century, coal came into the picture in a big way. By the 20th century we’re using tons of oil. And natural gas is a big factor too, especially as we cross into the 21st century and fracking makes it both more abundant and more affordable.

As the years went by, we added low-carbon sources of energy as well, like nuclear, hydro, wind, and solar — though, overall, they’re still a pretty small part of the picture.

Now, there are two important things to note about this chart.

First, the history of the world’s energy consumption can be defined in three words: more, more, more. Which … kind of makes sense. After all, pretty much everything that defines modern life involves a lot of energy.

Between 1950 and 2022, for example, the population of the U.S. a little more than doubled. But in that same time period, our electricity use got 14 times larger.

And second, because of that “more, more, more” trend, the only things we’ve ever had that look like energy “revolutions” have been about adding new sources into the mix, not getting rid of existing ones as net zero goals propose.

Now, to be clear, that doesn’t mean that nothing ever changes. In wealthier nations, the rise of cheaper natural gas had led to less coal usage, especially in the U.S. And poorer countries usually abandon traditional biomass as they get wealthier, because no advanced nation powers itself by burning wood.

We use it for much more sophisticated purposes … like doing psychedelics in the Nevada desert.

But using a little less coal or wood are relatively modest changes — and, importantly, are driven by cold, hard economic facts. By contrast, what the net zero goals entail is:

...in just about 25 years. Based on little more than the fact that politicians just want it to happen.

To understand just how tall a task this is it’s worth looking at what it would require to make it a reality.

It’s estimated that meeting net zero goals would require deploying 2,000 new wind turbines … every day … for the next 25 years.

To give you some context for that, the U.S. builds about 3,000 new wind turbines … a year.

Alternately, you could open one new nuclear plant every day for the next 25 years.

For the record, that’s over 9,000 of them.

And, also for the record, as of 2023 the number that were actually being built across the entire the world was … 59.

And, here in the U.S. anyway, it generally takes over a decade to build them.

And those are some of the reasons why what politicians promise about net zero and what the experts in their own governments say … don’t exactly match up.

The government’s U.S. Energy Information Administration, or EIA, projects that by the year 2050, far from seeing a revolution in energy, America will be a little less reliant on coal, a little more so on renewables and … the rest of the picture looks pretty much the same as today.

And in fact, this is true for the entire world. The EIA ran seven different scenarios for what the world’s energy consumption could look like in 2050. And while all of them showed a significant increase in renewables … they also all showed a world that continued to get most of its energy from things like coal, oil, and natural gas. Not exactly “the beginning of the end of the fossil fuel era.”

The reason for all of this: We simply can’t take enormous quantities of energy offline in a world where it’s predicted that we’re going to need almost 35 percent more of it by the year 2050. For one thing, there are a lot of poor countries around the world who are going to need dramatically more energy to bring themselves up to even a fraction of our standards of living. And for another, the technologies of the future require vast amounts of power.

By the year 2030, it’s estimated that computer usage around the world will take up as much as five times more of the world’s electricity production as it did even in 2020.

The digital cloud we all use to store data already uses twice as much electricity as the entire nation of Japan.

And with new, energy-hungry technologies like AI on the way, things are only going to move further in that direction.

Which means the real future of energy is probably: everything. Nuclear, natural gas, wind and solar, oil, hydro power, coal. We’re going to need all of it.

Probably not much wood though. Except for these guys:

[END SCRIPT]

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Kite & Key Media?is a research and evidence-driven organization. Our videos take as their sources cutting-edge research in universities, think tanks, books, and journalistic outlets. We rely on these sources because we believe that conversations about important issues should be rooted in an understanding of the underlying facts. Follow?our LinkedIn page for more updates.