David Fridley

The end of cheap coal.

New forecasts suggest that coal reserves will run out faster than many believe. Energy policies relying on cheap coal have no future, say Richard Heinberg and David Fridley.

Renewable Electricity: Falling Costs, Variability, and Scaling Challenges

THE UNIVERSAL AVAILABILITY and use of electricity has come to define modern life, at least for the vast majority of people in the industrialized world. Electricity is accessible in nearly every home and commercial building. We rely on power from wall sockets 24 hours a day, 365 days a year for a myriad of uses that range from toasting a bagel to powering an MRI machine. Electricity is remarkably versatile, and we have built a massive infrastructure to generate, distribute, and consume it.

Other Uses of Fossil Fuels: The Substitution Challenge Continues

THIS CHAPTER EXPLORES three broad categories of energy use. The first considers ways in which energy becomes embodied in infrastructure and manufactured products (primarily through the use of high levels of heat). The second has to do with the creation of lower-temperature heat for heating buildings and domestic hot water. The third has to do with the use of fossil fuels as feedstocks for chemicals and plastics. As we will see, the second of these three (heat for buildings) is probably the easiest to address with efficiency measures and renewable energy, while the first (high-temperature heat for industrial processes) poses possibly the highest substitution hurdle of all for 100 percent renewable energy systems.

What Government Can Do

THIS BOOK’S SURVEYS of renewable energy price trends, opportunities for renewable energy deployment, and challenges to that deployment, lead us to conclude that market mechanisms by themselves will be insufficient to drive the renewable energy transition at the speed required to outrun climate change and fossil fuel depletion. Government policy will be required to direct sufficient capital toward building renewable energy capacity, to manage the build-out of energy storage and necessary grid upgrades, to manage the evolution of industries (transportation, agriculture, manufacturing, mining) that currently rely on nonelectricity uses of fossil fuels, and to provide efficiency incentives and mandates to ease the burden of a likely decline in overall energy availability during the transition.

Energy Supply: How Much Will We Have? How Much Will We Need?

THERE IS SIMPLY NO WAY to accurately forecast exactly how much total energy is likely to be available in our 100 percent renewable future. There are too many variables at play—some technical, others economic or political. A few of the factors impacting future energy supply are favorable—including falling prices, technical improvements, and a generally favorable public attitude toward solar and wind. However, other factors that we have just surveyed pose challenges, including source intermittency, the need for storage and grid redesign, and the difficulties of electrifying heavy transport and many industrial processes. On balance, we believe the preponderance of factors support the assumption that energy quantities will be lower, perhaps significantly lower, than business-as-usual global energy demand projections from official agencies such as the International Energy Agency (which expects demand to rise 1.5 percent a year through 2035, nearly doubling over 2009 levels by 2050).

A Quick Look at Our Current Energy System

THE STATISTICS ARE READILY AVAILABLE: our world presently uses about 520 quadrillion British thermal units each year, or 153 billion megawatt-hours—the equivalent of 100 billion barrels of oil. These numbers are readily interpreted by the experts. But what do they mean in terms the nonspecialist can understand?

What We Learned

THE AUTHORS BEGAN THIS BOOK project with some general understanding of the likely energy transition constraints and opportunities; nevertheless, researching and writing Our Renewable Future has been a journey of discovery. Along the way, we identified not only technical issues requiring more attention, but also important implications for advocacy and policy. What follows is a very short summary, tailored mostly to the United States, of what we’ve learned.

Energy and Justice

THE ABILITY TO HARNESS ENERGY creates wealth and confers social power. With the advent of fossil fuels came a rush of wealth and power such as the world had never before seen. Naturally, humanitarians saw this as an opportunity to spread wealth and power around so as to lift all of humanity above drudgery, eliminate hunger, and even put an end to war. And to a large degree that opportunity has been seized: overall, child mortality rates are down, life expectancy is up, infectious diseases are on the decline, hunger has been reduced (even as population has dramatically grown), and mortality from violence has declined since the end of World War II.1 Yet globally, the wealthy industrial nations have disproportionately benefited from the fossil fuel revolution while poorer nations have largely borne the costs. A similar disparity also exists within nations, both rich and poor ones. Further, the injustice of energy wealth versus energy poverty is increasingly magnified by climate impacts, which fall disproportionately upon energy-poor societies—both because of geographical happenstance and because they do not have the same level of resources to devote toward adaptation.

What We the People Can Do

SOUND NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL CLIMATE policies are crucial: without them, it will be impossible to organize a transition away from fossil fuels and toward renewable energy that is orderly enough to maintain industrial civilization, while speedy enough to avert catastrophic ecosystem collapse. However, world leaders have been working on hammering out effective climate policies for nearly a quarter of a century, and during that time greenhouse gas emissions have continued to increase. And the impacts of climate change are becoming ever more incontrovertible and perilous. Clearly, individuals, households, communities, and nongovernmental organizations cannot merely stand by and hope that political leaders somehow find the wherewithal at the last moment (if it is not already too late) to halt our descent into climate chaos. We must put all possible pressure on those leaders to take politically difficult decisions to severely limit carbon emissions.

Transportation: The Substitution Challenge

LIQUID PETROLEUM is the world’s dominant energy source. Oil is energy-dense, portable, and easily moved by pipeline and tanker—characteristics that have made it very well suited as a transportation fuel. Further, during the twentieth century it was amazingly cheap. During the 1980s, for example, a barrel of oil, which contains 1700 kWh of energy (the equivalent of over 10 years of hard human labor), cost a mere