Elsevier

Energy Policy

Volume 123, December 2018, Pages 367-372
Energy Policy

Renewable and low carbon technologies policy

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.enpol.2018.07.039Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Lower carbon challenges and need for realism.

  • Transition periods, sustainable and sensitive development.

  • Issues of energy returns on investment and power densities.

  • Costs and willingness to bear them.

Abstract

Over the past twenty years there has emerged widening interest in shifting to a lower carbon world. This has primarily been motivated by fears of human-induced climatic change, growing risks to sustainable development, concerns about the continuing availability and affordability of useful energy, and opportunities for investment gains.

Promotion of renewable forms of energy, and related technologies, has been considered the way forward, for understandable reasons. But some major challenges have been overlooked, sidestepped, and/or sometimes denied on spurious grounds - examples can be noted in biomass, biofuel, wind, solar, and estuarine barrage or tidal lagoon schemes, for example.

Technologies are proposed and discussed which may, and hopefully will, assist in meeting the various challenges, but such proposals and discussions often exhibit excessive optimism about likely transition times and scale of contribution.

Already massive subsidies provided or supported by many industrialised country governments to foster renewable forms of energy have had major impacts on electricity prices, fuel poverty, and cut-offs of domestic supplies. Further down the line, the relatively low power densities of renewable forms of energy, their relatively poor energy returns on energy invested (EROI), and a tendency to overstate emissions reductions (by not including emissions 'embedded' in imports), will bring increased realisation that there may not be “a fantastic evolution just ahead of our time”, as has been claimed.

Introduction

Over the past two decades there have been regular pronouncements and publications on how the world can achieve an energy transition to 100% reliance on 'modern' renewable forms of energy by 2100, and in a few cases by 2050. But wherever one stands on the need to shift to a low carbon world, and the urgency of responding to what is widely considered to be 'global warming' caused by human activities, the question arises: how quickly could such a massive transition be achieved? This paper urges much greater caution and questioning about the realism of such optimistic projections, and some of the official targets (international, regional - as in the case of the EU, and national - as in the case of the UK).

The paper therefore begins by setting out the main challenges facing increased exploitation of biomass and biofuels. This is followed by sections on wind and solar power. A further section discusses other renewable energy technologies and constraints on a major expansion of their use – which includes hydro schemes, estuarine barrages, tidal “lagoons”, tidal stream, wave power – and the need for greatly increased storage and long-distance transmission capacities. Implications for energy policies are then discussed, including likely energy transition periods and the costs likely to be borne by households. Finally, the paper's Conclusions and Policy Implications are provided. The underlying theme of the paper is that there is excessive optimism about the speed with which a massive change to a low carbon economy will be achieved; a widespread failure to recognise some fundamental problems associated with operating renewable energy schemes for overall human needs; and a persistent unwillingness to face up to the costs which so many, often quite poor, people are apparently expected to bear.

Section snippets

Challenges confronting biomass and biofuels

Modern biomass can, of course, trace its origins back hundreds of thousands of years. Since 1985 the generation of electricity from biomass has greatly expanded in the USA, and since the year 2000 in Germany. Brazil's exploitation of biomass is of longer standing, but has also increased markedly since 2000, while China has increased its biomass use for electricity generation greatly since 2008 (after nearly a decade of massively expanding coal use).

The most evident concerns have arisen over the

Challenges confronting wind energy

The biggest challenge for those reliant on electricity generated by wind power is its intermittency. This is an issue which is usually localised, being dependent on mean wind speeds, and is likely to have a much greater impact on larger-scale developments rather than 'mini-turbines'. Propelled by concerns about human-induced climatic change, and subsidies offered to developers in consequence, the capacity offered of major wind energy developments around the world has greatly expanded since

Challenges confronting solar energy

Solar photovoltaics (solar PV) expanded their global capacity from a little over 5 GW in 2005 to just over 300 GW in 2016 (REN 21, 2017, pages 66–67). Annual capacity increases in recent years have been close to 25%, and between 2008 and 2016 there was a rapid decline in costs. Since early 2016 there has been some moderation in rate of expansion and cost declines, but the overall picture provided by the industry is one of unqualified optimism despite a few business failures (SunEdison's

Challenges confronting other renewable energy technologies

Other renewable energy technologies are not without their challenges. Those of hydropower, not least the displacement of people and disruption of traditional occupations and lifestyles, can be observed over more than a century. For example, the damming of the Porjus River in northern Sweden from 1906 obstructed traditional reindeer herding routes and disrupted the lives of many Sami people. Despite this experience, over the border in Norway the damming of the Alta in 1987 had similar

Resulting energy policies

The share of renewable energy in total global primary energy supplied has risen only modestly so far this century, from about 7% to 10% in 2014, according to the International Energy Agency in its 2016 World Energy Outlook (International Energy Agency, 2016) and cited in REN 21 (2017). The contribution in 2014 from wind, solar, and geothermal was 1.4%; from hydropower 2.4%; and from biofuels and waste 10.3% - some 90% of which was use of traditional fuels in developing countries by people

Conclusions and policy implications

This paper's analysis suggests that progress towards a low carbon global economy will be slower and more costly than its many advocates suggest or claim. The reality is likely to be closer to the assessment of specialists such as Smil (2010). Care needs to be taken if strong countervailing forces emerge on the grounds that the efforts to force the pace of change are too costly for those living in ageing industrial societies, both for the elderly and for the younger generations on whom much of

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    This article is part of a Virtual Special Issue entitled 'Energy and Environment: Transition Models and New Policy Challenges in the Post Paris Agreement'.

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