LONDON, UK, June 6, 2007.
Renewable energies have “enormous practical problems” that make them unlikely to contribute significantly to the challenge of climate change, a major report will conclude this month.
The World Energy Council will release a study, ‘Energy & Climate Change,’ on June 21 at a media event in London. The study draws on the experience and resources of energy professionals around the world to see what measures work to promote sustainable development.
“The world needs urgently to develop a coherent and practical approach to reducing greenhouse gas emissions,” it will explain. The evidence for global warming is unequivocal and early action to combat climate change makes economic sense, but “existing efforts are clearly insufficient” and most countries with targets under the Kyoto Protocol are not on track to meeting them and many countries do not have Kyoto targets.
“As a result, GHG emissions are still rising and are forecast to go on doing so for decades to come,” it continues. “The problem is not a lack of policies to deal with climate change” yet those policies “are not proving adequate to the scale of the problem.”
“If policies are to be effective, they have to be aimed at the right targets - those parts of the energy sector which are significant in terms of their emissions and offer cost-effective reduction opportunities,” it explains. “Sustainability will not be achieved if lower emissions are achieved only at the cost of social development, especially for the two billion people who still lack access to modern energy and all the services it provides.”
“Renewables certainly help but there are still enormous practical problems of cost, availability etc, which can prove particularly difficult for developing countries,” it notes. “Renewables can make a useful (and growing) contribution to emissions reduction but in practice, apart from those countries with substantial hydro (or geothermal) resources, it is unlikely that they will deliver a significant overall decarbonisation of electricity quickly enough to meet the climate challenge.”
“The environmental and other impacts of some renewables, like biomass, are complex and need to be assessed carefully,” it adds.
Thousands of policies have been introduced to meet Kyoto targets, and the choice of policy is sometimes different between developed and developing countries. Both groups favour energy efficiency and renewables, but economic instruments are more common in developed countries and direct interventions are more common in the developing world.
All policies have advantages and drawbacks in terms of sustainable development, and failure to recognise these complexities has led to policies which are proving unsustainable and ineffective, it cautions. “Regrettably, despite (or because of) the complications, few governments have attempted to assess the effectiveness of their policies in a comprehensive way against all the criteria of sustainable development” and the WEC study undertakes such an assessment.
“There is no automatic link between economic growth and energy use, or between energy use and emissions,” it concludes. “This means that emissions in principle might be eventually decoupled from economic growth, or at least the carbon intensity of energy use greatly reduced. To achieve the WEC goal of accessibility to energy services for all people in all regions and a minimum level (such as 1,000 kW of electricity for everyone) will take significantly more energy than the world now uses, but this projected increase does not have to result in unabated growth of carbon emissions.”
In its policy messages for governments, the WEC says “end-use energy efficiency is undoubtedly worth pursuing” but “it is not clear how much impact existing programs are having.” It would be unrealistic to expect energy efficiency to provide the substantial and rapid emissions reduction needed, at least until governments can ensure that their programs are properly targeted and assessed, it adds.
“Subsidies for fossil fuels should be closely scrutinized; often subsidy removal will be an effective first step in combating climate change in a sustainable manner,” it states. “Nonetheless, subsidies are introduced for a reason, and simply advocating their removal does not of itself resolve the underlying problem. For many developing countries, this is still a difficult issue.”
One key area identified by the analysis as underexploited is technology, and the scope for emissions reduction using both existing technologies and currently under development is immense, it adds. Existing mechanisms for transferring those technologies from the developed to the developing world are inadequate and, as a result, “there is huge but underdeveloped potential for technology to emissions reductions, provided more attention is focused on the development and deployment appropriate technologies.”
“No single energy source can meet the needs of the world and its emissions goals at the same time,” the document concludes. “Thus it is important to keep all energy options open.”
