New Malthusians are wrong: a rich world needs less energy than once feared
An untruth has led us to believe net zero is near impossible
A cardinal fallacy reigns over the debate on green energy and global decarbonisation. It taps into deep Malthusian instincts and creates near universal confusion.
It causes well-educated people to accept the claim that stabilising greenhouse emissions by mid-century will prove to be a near impossible task. It contaminates economic models and explains why the UK Treasury and other bodies – though not the Energy Institute – cling to exorbitant estimates of what it will cost.
There are, of course, many obstinate fallacies in this controversy. The most common is to conflate “flow” and “stock”, much exploited by those engaged in predatory delay. The constant extraction and shipment of coal, oil, and gas, day after day, to feed the existing energy order is not the same as the one-off demand of mined minerals for a lithium battery that will be recycled.
A close rival is to conflate “investment” and “cost”. Investment delivers a return, and clean-tech pays for itself with a high multiplier.
These are known fallacies. The larger silent fallacy that subverts all else is the notion of “primary energy demand”, promoted by the International Energy Agency (IEA) during the oil shock of the 1970s. It shaped a generation of academics and energy analysts, and still informs IEA reports.
In a nutshell, it assumes that we have to replace all the energy extracted from hydrocarbons. It seems an obvious truism, except that we do not need to do any such thing. Two-thirds of fossil energy is currently wasted, mostly in thermal heat lost to the air.
Cutting-edge research suggests that we will require just 40pc to 45pc of today’s total energy supply to replace the old system, and to lift the global South, and to satisfy the voracious demand of data centres, all at the same time. So rejoice.
“The entire decarbonisation challenge is far smaller than is made out by its critics. Primary energy demand, irrespective of how it’s defined, is simply not a matter of any importance,” said Michael Liebreich, global technology guru and founder of Bloomberg New Energy Finance.
If you light your study with a 10-watt LED bulb powered off wind or hydro, you consume 95pc less energy for the same light as a 75-watt incandescent bulb powered by a coal plant working at 37pc thermal efficiency. Real life usually falls between these two theoretical extremes, but you get the picture.
The LED bulb will last 15 or 20 times longer. It will not lose 80pc of its energy in heat. It will not set the lampshade on fire. Bingo.
Mr Liebreich offers a grand summary of the bullish case in Five Superheroes of the Transition, part of his “Cleaning-up” series of energy podcasts. The obstacles are serious, but they loom larger in our minds than they really are.
As we electrify everything that can usefully be electrified, the need for primary energy will fall mechanically. We lose roughly 15pc of the power generated by renewables, factoring in losses from conversion, transmission lines, the grid, etc – a loss rate that keeps thinning with technology.
If you switch from a VW Golf to an electric VW ID3 charged at night off British wind, or charged during the day off Australian solar, you cut primary energy use by 75pc at a stroke.
I hate to mention heat pumps, a peculiar bone of contention in the idiosyncratic British culture war, but when it comes to primary energy, the energy science is unanswerable.
Like them or not, they have a performance coefficient near four. They cut demand for primary energy by almost 80pc, adjusting for the relative variables of upstream losses and furnace efficiency of gas boilers versus grid loss for electrification.
The beauty of ground source heat pumps for office buildings, blocks of flats, or light industry is that the ground itself acts as a giant battery in non-tropical climates. It does half the work of heating in winter and of cooling in summer.
Some 15pc of the world’s primary energy demand is to extract and refine oil and gas, so that will partly disappear. Fossils account for 40pc of the world’s blue water shipping. That, too, will be slimmed down to residual needs for chemicals or long-haul aviation (perhaps).
“It will be sold for salvage,” said Mr Liebreich. Oil and gas pipelines will be recycled for scrap, lowering iron ore demand.
Will we run out of lithium? An enduring myth has taken hold that just 5pc of lithium batteries are recycled. It tracks back to a report by Friends of the Earth from the early 2010s, which divided newly manufactured EV batteries by the number of old ones collected. It has been repeated uncritically by the press ever since, and even by Nature Energy as recently as April 2019.
Obviously, there were almost no end-of-life EV batteries to collect a decade ago. The definitive report for the Swedish Energy Agency by Hans Eric Melin estimates that the true recycling rate today is 90pc and heading for 99pc. Minerals in batteries are too valuable to waste.
When you combine recycling rates at such levels with gains in battery technology – solid state batteries with three times the energy density may be hitting the market by 2030, or soon after – you reach perfect circularity. You have all the lithium you will ever need, and the same logic applies to copper. As for cobalt and nickel, the new LFP batteries conquering China need neither.
Do we really need to keep 30,000 dairy cows locked up in single hangars in China, never seeing pasture or daylight, feeding on Brazilian soy to produce milk when we can make bio-identical milk, with no antibiotics or steroids, in precision fermentation vats using a fraction of the lifecycle energy, 96pc less water, and emitting no methane? No, we do not. Nor will once cellular agricultural costs fall below griddle parity.
Without straying too far into exotica, the latest semiconductors using graphene or silicon carbide cut electricity use of certain processes by orders of magnitude. Breakthroughs in gallium nitride promise to replicate the LED lighting revolution, this time in power electronics, cutting losses from solar inverters by 40pc, and cutting energy use for EV charging by 70pc.
Superconductors are coming of age. Scientists at MIT have developed a nanoscopic diode that aims to slash the energy needed to cool data centres, currently projected to gobble up 20pc of the world’s power by the end of this decade if nothing is done. Something is being done.
We can talk ourselves into paralysis, but once we grasp that the twin concepts of primary energy demand and exponential mineral demand are both false, the obstacles fall away. We will not need nearly as much of either as we once thought.
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