By Paul Homewood
h/t Philip Bratby
AEP is away with the fairies again!
A cardinal fallacy reigns over the debate on green energy and global decarbonisation. It taps into deep Malthusian instincts and creates near universal confusion.
It causes well-educated people to accept the claim that stabilising greenhouse emissions by mid-century will prove to be a near impossible task. It contaminates economic models and explains why the UK Treasury and other bodies – though not the Energy Institute – cling to exorbitant estimates of what it will cost.
The larger silent fallacy that subverts all else is the notion of “primary energy demand”, promoted by the International Energy Agency (IEA) during the oil shock of the 1970s. It shaped a generation of academics and energy analysts, and still informs IEA reports.
In a nutshell, it assumes that we have to replace all the energy extracted from hydrocarbons. It seems an obvious truism, except that we do not need to do any such thing. Two-thirds of fossil energy is currently wasted, mostly in thermal heat lost to the air.
Cutting-edge research suggests that we will require just 40pc to 45pc of today’s total energy supply to replace the old system, and to lift the global South, and to satisfy the voracious demand of data centres, all at the same time. So rejoice.
“The entire decarbonisation challenge is far smaller than is made out by its critics. Primary energy demand, irrespective of how it’s defined, is simply not a matter of any importance,” said Michael Liebreich, global technology guru and founder of Bloomberg New Energy Finance.
If you light your study with a 10-watt LED bulb powered off wind or hydro, you consume 95pc less energy for the same light as a 75-watt incandescent bulb powered by a coal plant working at 37pc thermal efficiency. Real life usually falls between these two theoretical extremes, but you get the picture.
If you switch from a VW Golf to an electric VW ID3 charged at night off British wind, or charged during the day off Australian solar, you cut primary energy use by 75pc at a stroke.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2024/04/18/rich-world-needs-less-energy-net-zero/
Societies have been improving energy efficiency for decades, but still use more energy every year. Indeed arguably we have been doing this for thousands of years.
In fact it is part and parcel of a much wider transformation of improving industrial efficiency, which has allowed us all to consume so much more.
And does AEP really not understand that the likes of the IEA and CCC have not already factored these changes into their calculations? He must be extremely naive to believe the word of the head of Bloomberg New Energy Finance, whose sole purpose is to make money from renewables, something which depends on the useful idiots in the media continuing to promote its agenda.
While the West continues to reduce energy consumption, its efforts will continue to be swamped by the rest of the world.
But regardless of the exact amount of energy the world will need in thirty years time, nothing changes the fact that no modern economy can be run solely on intermittent wind and solar power, despite AEP’s assertions to the contrary.
AEP has clearly become totally unhinged where Net Zero is concerned, clutching at every straw which comes along.
It was not long ago that he was claiming we don’t need Net Zero Acts and targets, because renewables were so cheap and wonderful.