A report by Mark Mills called the The “Energy Transition” Delusion came out in August with some killer statistics. Despite the rampant glorious uptake of sparkling renewables, wind and solar provide less than 5% of the total global energy demand while the hated hydrocarbons still provide 84%. And that energy demand is growing relentlessly and with no end in sight.
Global economies are facing a potential energy shock—the third such shock of the past half century. Energy costs and security have returned to center stage, as has the realization that the world remains deeply dependent on reliable supplies of petroleum, natural gas, and coal.
It’s a hi-tech energy blackhole
As James Freeman at the Wall Street Journal, noted, some of the most game-changing statistics in the report are about mobile phones. Our need for gadgets, phones and the internet means we need more energy than ever:
Historically, the energy costs of manufacturing a product roughly tracked the weight of the thing produced. A refrigerator weighs about 200 times more than a hair dryer and takes nearly 100 times more energy to fabricate. But it takes nearly as much energy to make one smartphone as it does one refrigerator, even though the latter weighs 1,000 times more. The world produces nearly 10 times more smartphones a year than refrigerators. Thus, the global fabrication of smartphones now uses 15% as much energy as does the entire automotive industry, even though a car weighs 10,000 times more than a smartphone. The global Cloud, society’s newest and biggest infrastructure, uses twice as much electricity as the entire nation of Japan.
Most of the world doesn’t own a car (yet)
Advocates of a carbon-free world underestimate not only how much energy the world already uses, but how much more energy the world will yet demand. There are more people, more wealth, and more kinds of technologies and services than existed when President John F. Kennedy faced the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, and 60 years later, global energy consumption has risen more than 300%. In the future, there will be yet more innovations and more people, many of whom will be more prosperous and want what others already have, from better medical care to cars and vacations. In America, there are nearly as many vehicles as people, while in most of the world, fewer than 1 in 20 people have a car. More than 80% of the world population has yet to take a single flight.[25] Drug manufacturing is far more energy-intensive than fabricating cars or aircraft, and hospitals use 250% more energy per square foot than commercial buildings.
No matter the will to get pink-batts in the roof, the global numbers are colossal, and only at the start of the exponential curve.
As I graphed in June — the world is using more fossil fuels than ever
The energy transition has no chance of keeping up with the growing global energy demand, let alone pushing out fossil fuels:
https://ourworldindata.org/energy-mix
h/t to Rafe Champion, Paul Miskelly, Jim Simpson, Neville, Dave B.
REFERENCES
Manhattan Institute, Mark Mills
The Energy Transition Delusion [PDF]
Photo: Mbrickn Qualcomm QSC6055 BNSM523 on LG VN251S
