Abstract
For millennia, humans relied almost entirely on renewable energy (RE), largely biomass, for their energy needs. Over the past century, fossil fuels (FFs) have not only largely replaced RE, but have enabled a many-fold rise in total energy use. This FF dominance changed the way we think about and accounted for energy use. If (as at present) the world essentially continues to ignore climate change, eventual resource depletion will force conversion to RE and, perhaps, nuclear energy will once again have to provide most of the world’s energy use. However, the change is more likely to come about because of the urgent need for climate change mitigation. At present, primary RE electricity accounting is done by calculating the FF energy that would be needed to produce it. But as FFs disappear, this approach makes less sense. Instead, a new approach to energy accounting will be needed, one that allows for the intermittent nature of the two most abundant RE sources, wind and solar power. Surplus intermittent RE might be converted to H2, further complicating energy accounting. An additional complication will be the treatment of energy reductions, especially from passive solar energy, likely to be more important in the coming decades. This paper is a review of the evidence to try to determine the best approach to future energy accounting.
Highlights
According to Vaclav Smil [1], global primary energy use in the year 1800 was only 20.35 EJ, of which most was fuel wood and the rest coal
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the International Energy Agency (IEA) place heavy reliance on carbon capture and storage (CCS) for fossil fuels and negative emissions technologies (NETs) including CCS with bioenergy (BECCS) [13,14], while others have argued that solar radiation management (SRM) is increasingly an important option for climate change mitigation [15]
They argued that ‘geoengineering schemes aimed at reducing global warming impacts without reducing CO2 concentration would not fully mitigate changes in extremes whose likelihoods have increased by the direct effect of increasing CO2 concentrations.’
Summary
1. Global primary energy energy type, This dominant role for FF must change in the coming decades. Before oil and gas were developed as additional thermal fuels, coal production statistics were given it is conceivable that breeder and even fusion reactors could be important later on. Before oil and gas were developed as additional thermal fuels, coal production statistics were given in tonnes. In a world energy system produced mainly from FFs, it made sense to base energy accounting on the total thermal content of the various fuels ( NG power stations have greater efficiency than coal power stations). In the coming RE age, energy could be mainly produced from wind and solar photovoltaic (PV) energy, which are both intermittent producers of primary electricity.
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