The message from last month’s Climate Week event in New York City was clear: the modernization of economies is driving a “grassroots” acceleration in electrification. As buildings, transportation systems, and industries invest in new technologies to lower costs and drive higher efficiencies, they are increasingly dependent on electricity, simply because no modern technology or innovation runs on anything else.
And as the economy modernizes, the energy transition is not only occurring but accelerating.
Many Climate Week participants seemed to agree with this. We’ve reached a global tipping point, where electrification — and in particular, solar energy-driven electrification — will continue to grow rapidly, and fossil fuel usage will plateau and engage in a slow decline.
Explore the latest energy transition research at the Sustainability Research Institute.
What types of data suggest such a trend? Consider the following points highlighted in the recently released Ember report “The Electrotech Revolution – The shape of things to come”:
- Fossil fuel reserves pale in comparison to solar power – As it becomes more challenging to extract and transport fossil fuels across the planet, the cost of fossil fuel energy continues to climb. Meanwhile, the costs of implementing solar systems continue to drop. Additionally, the energy available from the sun far exceeds the remaining potential of fossil fuel reserves. According to Ember, the sun supplies the Earth with as much energy every five days as all fossil fuel reserves (both tapped and untapped) combined for the rest of time. This massive reserve of power now enables a new energy era.
- The clean energy shift is moving faster than official reports suggest – Grassroots adoption of Photovoltaics (PV) solar systems worldwide is advancing so quickly that government statistics and measurement tools can’t keep pace. As a result, most published energy data worldwide underreport the growth in PV system implementation. For example, some observers estimate that up to 4 to 5 gigawatts of “balcony” solar systems could exist in Germany alone, a number which would be unaccounted for in published statistics.
- Fossil fuel dependencies are much higher than those of solar-generated power – Why has this “under the radar” solar power experienced so much growth? One reason (and huge advantage) is that solar systems by their very nature involve far fewer dependencies than fossil fuel-based systems. To take an example, a traditional vehicle relies on a weekly (if not daily) supply of gasoline. A conventional manufacturing facility requires a constant supply of natural gas to operate. However, when an energy consumer installs a solar panel, the device remains in place and produces electricity for the next 25-30 years without relying on anything else, except the sun. When the latter substitutes for the former, daily dependencies vanish.
- Across most of the world, fossil fuel energy consumption has already peaked – A striking insight from Ember: fossil fuel energy consumption would have already peaked across most industrial sectors (including cement and steel production). Even the transportation sector is on the cusp of achieving peak consumption of fossil fuels (due to electrification). This trend is materializing across most nation-states. The fact that electrification and modernization technologies are three times more efficient than burning fossil fuels is accelerating this trend.
- China and emerging economies are leading the way in energy transition – According to Ember and other analyses, such as the ones from the International Energy Agency (IEA), Europe and the United States lag behind in the deployment of electrification as a share of final energy and are surpassed by China and Asian emerging economies (like Vietnam). Nations worldwide can achieve an electrification rate of 75% in their energy systems. This represents an immense potential for further electrification growth (e.g., in the US or in Europe, electrification as a share of final energy is barely above 20%, and it has been stagnant for 15 years).
The energy future will not resemble the energy past
By 2050, our energy consumption profile will look quite different from today’s. Thirty years ago, who would have guessed that texting / instant messaging would supplant the writing of personal letters and person-to-person phone calls as the preferred method of communication?
Many marketplace observers and analysts often look at the development of new energy sources through a rearview mirror, which is usually not an accurate predictor of what lies ahead. Consider the evolution of solar energy, for instance. Prognosticators believed that centralized solar farms would represent the vast majority of the solar installed base. In fact, today, 40% of solar panels deployed consist of distributed systems. By 2035, we may have a billion people on the planet with solar on their roofs or balconies.
As fossil fuel traditionalists and green energy environmentalists wrestle back and forth over energy policies, grassroots deployment of modern building, transportation, and industrial energy systems serves as the hidden driver of an accelerated energy transition.
Discover more
To learn more about how modernization through the deployment of electrification technologies can help accelerate energy transition, access the Sustainability Research Institute (SRI) report library.
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