Thread by @paraschopra

How is our world's energy ultimately consumed? And what does it tell us about the possibility of weaning of fossil-fuel based energy by 2030 to prevent climate crisis?

I go down the rabbit hole so you don't have to.

(A thread)

1/ First thing to notice is that the transport sector is the biggest end consumer of energy taking in 36% of all the world's energy, with passenger cars (that you and me drive) accounting for 21% of the world's total energy. That's huge.

Source: webstore.iea.org/key-world-ener…

2/ One-third of all energy going into transporting materials and people seems like an easy wins. Simply replace them with electric cars, no?

There are around ~5 million electric vehicles in the world. Do you know how many are petrol and diesel cars in the world? 1.2 billion!

3/ So the current share of electrical vehicles of ALL cars is 0.4%. This is an insanely small base, given how fast we need to reduce our carbon emissions.

4/ Let's assume an exponential growth and that magically all cars in next one or two decades will be electric (highly unlikely given that even in 2018, ~80 million petrol/diesel cars got sold worldwide).

Even after that assumption, we're left with fuel for aviation and shipping.

5/ Out of total 36% for transportation, the 15% is used for non-passenger cars. We have NO electric vehicle equivalent for planes and huge ships

They're can't run on renewables, so are exclusively dependent on fossil-fuels.

This category is not going to zero anytime soon.

6/ Apart from direct usage in internal combustion engines, the lion's chunk of oil is used of course in generating electricity.

70% of the world's energy is generating by burning fossil fuels.

7/ Let's talk about what could potentially replace fossil fuel powered electricity.

Take hydro-electric power, where the growth in recent years has almost exclusively come from China.

8/ Unfortunately, we can't scale hydro forever as we have limited hydro resources (that are diminishing).

It seems we've picked all the low hanging fruits. See this: dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/12/how-mu…

9/ Then come our current darlings: solar and wind energy. They account for <2% of all energy generated.

There's a significant push in getting this built up as quickly as possible. See how fast they're picking up. But also see how fossil-fuel based energy is also picking.

10/ Even if we SIGNIFICANTLY scale solar and hydro, we must know that these energy sources vary by time of the day and hence are not always guaranteed. So the limitation becomes energy storage.

We don't have enough energy storage tech to store even this 2% of energy.

11/ To accommodate for this variability from solar and wind, usually utility companies need to fire natural gas powered plants to give electricity when load becomes higher than generation.

That's why they love supporting solar (so they can keep selling gas).

12/ This leaves nuclear, which is fantastic except it takes a decade to build and nobody wants it on their backyard.

Notice there's virtually no growth in nuclear powered electricity.

13/ So, the situation is grim. IPCC recommends reducing emissions by 45% by 2030 and becoming net zero by 2050. Given our current energy consumption and production scenario, this looks improbable.

14/ All this of course assumes 100% political commitment, which (ahem) is a justifiable assumption. Isn't it?

Also, let's not forget that the world population is projected to be 9 billion by 2050.

15/ Not just that. Due to energy imbalance, the poor 2 billion of the world will justifiably aspire to the current western lifestyle and the associated energy consumption with it.

How'd we do this? I don't know.

16/ That's it.

I know that thread didn't lift your spirits, but I hope you found it interesting. As a reminder, the top 5 personal actions that you can take to reduce YOUR carbon emissions are.

@KevinClimate can you please comment if my analysis in this is correct?