Renewables only Archives - Nucleation Capital

The world’s carbon intensity of energy, namely the amount of CO₂ spewed into the air for each unit of energy consumed, has not budged much since Kyoto was held, 20 years ago. Even among the highly industrialized nations in the OECD, the carbon intensity of energy has declined by a paltry 4% since then, according to the International Energy Agency. This statistic, alone, puts a big question mark over the 100% renewable strategies deployed around the world to replace fossil energy. In a nutshell: Perhaps 100% renewables are not the answer.

Eduardo Porter isn't taking his eye off the ball, the way many reporters are, in gushing over the growth of wind and solar around the world. Instead, he takes a hard look at the carbon-intensity of energy, which we think is the key metric to assess for our progress in addressing climate change, along with the parts per million of CO2 that are interfering with our atmosphere.

Although the world emerged from Kyoto, Japan, with what was billed as the first-ever deal to limit emissions of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping greenhouse gases, we have not made a lot of progress reducing the carbon-intensity of energy since then. All but one of the world’s nations — the United States, thanks to then President Bush — committed to making concrete commitments to reduce their reliance on fossil fuels. But now, twenty years later, emissions have kept rising, along with the carbon-intensity of energy, despite the fact that the price of wind turbines and solar panels has plummeted.

"Over the past 10 years, governments and private investors have collectively spent $2 trillion on infrastructure to draw electricity from the wind and the sun, according to estimates by Bloomberg New Energy Finance. Environmental Progress, a nonprofit that advocates nuclear power as an essential tool in the battle against climate change, says that exceeds the total cost of all nuclear plants built to date or under construction, adjusted for inflation.

Capacity from renewable sources has grown by leaps and bounds, outpacing growth from all other sources — including coal, natural gas and nuclear power — in recent years. Solar and wind capacity installed in 2015 was more than 10 times what the International Energy Agency had forecast a decade before."

By The New York Times | Source: Environmental Progress with data from BP’s “Statistical Review of World Energy”

Read more of this analysis by Eduardo Porter at the New York Times: "Wind and Solar power Advance, but Carbon Refuses to Retreat."

Published by Nucleation Capital in 100% Renewables, Carbon emissions, Corporate purpose, Future of Energy, LINKS, Nuclear competitiveness, Zero emission energy

Democrats in the United States Senate and in the California Assembly have proposed legislation calling for a full transition to renewable energy. In doing so, they are relying on scholarly analysis by a prominent Stanford University professor, Mark Z. Jacobson, who published a paper in 2015 asserting that it would be feasible to power the American economy by midcentury almost entirely with energy from the wind, the sun and water, cheaper than fossil fuels. Then a group of 21 prominent scholars, including physicists and engineers, climate scientists and sociologists, dismantled the Jacobson paper and its conclusions bit by bit, in a long-awaited study published in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences — the same journal in which Professor Jacobson’s manifesto appeared.

Read more of this analysis by Eduardo Porter at the New York Times: "Fisticuffs Over the Route to a Clean-Energy Future."