Clean Energy May be Growing, But It’s Not Replacing Dirty Energy

Lots of people have high hopes for an energy transition, but they’re looking through the wrong end of the telescope.

Yes, solar farms are spreading out over deserts and farm fields, and wind turbines are popping up all over the land and even in a few locations offshore. But global consumption of fossil fuels grew 1.5 percent last year, according to the Statistical Review of World Energy. Clean energy is growing, but so is demand, and to meet it, dirty energy is growing too. We’re going to have to do things differently if we hope to trim the output of climate-changing emissions.

Even the fossil mix is getting worse; oil was up even faster than total fossil consumption, and demand passed 100 million barrels a day for the first time. Coal also hit a new record, and carbon emissions from energy consumption are up by 50 percent since the turn of the century. The fossil share of primary energy slipped by 0.4 percent, to 81.5 percent, but the climate doesn’t care about percentages; it cares about volumes.

The Statistical Review of World Energy might be more familiar by its older name, the BP Statistical Review. The recent history of BP illustrates the waxing and waning of the idea of green energy. It used to be “British Petroleum” but rebranded itself as “Beyond Petroleum” in 2001, and then reverted back to “BP” in 2006. It published the report, a survey of all forms of energy production and consumption, for 70 years, and the Statistical Review has always served as a useful guide to all things oil.

But BP dropped the report in 2023. A spokesman for the company told Reuters that BP wanted to give the report team more time to concentrate on a shift to renewables and low-carbon energy. Now the report is funded by BP, KPMG, and Kearney. It’s still using the same methodology, and some of the analysts who produce it have left BP to continue on the data series.

The race to transition to zero emissions by mid-century was going to have to be a sprint. Now it appears that the starting gun has fired and the runners are milling around in confusion.

“I would argue that the transition hasn’t even crossed the start line,” said one of those analysts, Nick Wayth, now the chief executive of the Energy Institute. He spoke at a briefing on the report at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, DC.

The perception here in the United States is that renewable energy is booming. The United States has ample capital, a strong industrial base and a grid to plug into, plus government incentives. But in 2022, solar and wind together produced about 13.66 percent of the kilowatt-hours in the U.S.; in 2023, the last year for which full statistics are available, they produced about 14.1 percent of U.S. electricity generation. These numbers are strong but will leave us a long way from zero at mid-century. And while U.S. greenhouse gas emissions may have declined by 1.9 percent last year, global emissions increased by about 1.1 percent.

Why are emissions increasing? Because the world is hungry for two things: energy and all the manufactured goods that consume energy (cars and trucks, refrigerators, water pumps, cell phones, etc.).

One country is at the center of both categories: China. It was responsible for 85 percent of the growth in energy demand in 2023 over 2022, according to the survey. Some of that responsibility stems from the reporting system, as manufactured goods made in China are counted on China’s climate tab, not on the account of the country where the goods were sold or distributed, such as Walmart, Costco, or Amazon fulfillment centers.

And China has been making herculean efforts to produce clean energy. Of the approximately 60 nuclear reactors under construction worldwide, 26 of them are in China, compared to seven in India. Both countries have plans for lots more. China has twice as much wind and solar capacity under construction as the rest of the world combined.

But both are short of electricity and are adding whatever they can. China started work on 70 gigawatts of new coal plants in 2023, by one count. The rest of the world broke ground on less than four gigawatts of new coal generation.

India, now the seventh-largest emitter of greenhouse gases, at just over 7 percent of the global total, will add nearly 14 gigawatts of coal-fired capacity this year. It plans roughly four times that amount over the next eight years. But it’s hard to argue that India, now the world’s most populous country, isn’t doing its share to slow global warming. India has 7 nuclear reactors currently under construction, with plans for more, and has an emissions per capita rate of roughly half the global average.

India and China both have electricity shortages. After a blackout in July 2012 that left 9 percent of the world’s population in the dark, India has been adding capacity fast, especially coal. India used more coal last year than Europe and North America combined. But China is the big consumer, accounting for 56 percent of the world’s total coal use.

And coal, in some ways, is wonderful stuff.

Wind and solar farms may get their fuel for free, but above a modest level of market penetration, they must be accompanied by storage, which is expensive. And in places that have phased out coal and natural gas, storage requirements rise sharply.

Energy from coal doesn’t have much of a storage cost. The fuel is cheap to stockpile. While it is bulky and requires a lot of rail capacity (which has turned into a constraint on burning more in China) and the emissions create horrible smog, there is no technical challenge to burning it. Coal is widely available and generally not subject to embargoes or attacks on shipping. Europe may be past the peak of fossil use, and the United States may not be far behind. But demand for coal isn’t growing in those places —despite some alarm about data centers and artificial intelligence. (And despite those concerns, electricity consumption in the United States fell last year).

The growth rate per year for primary energy consumption (that is, counting all the energy from coal, gas, oil, uranium, falling water, wing, solar, and biomass that goes into power plants, oil refineries, cement kilns and everything else) in the United States was just 0.1 percent per year for 2013-2023. For South and Central America, it was 0.6 percent and for Europe it was minus 1 percent.

In Africa, with a large share of the estimated 750 million people who lack electricity for lighting, refrigeration, heating or air conditioning, energy consumption grew by just 1.9 percent. The Asia/Pacific region, which uses about 47.1 percent of the world’s primary energy, grew by 2.9 percent. And unlike Africa, that is 2.9 percent growth on an enormous base.

Around the world, and especially in the Asia/Pacific region, we are likely to continue seeing new coal plants. And the other bête noir of climate warriors, the oil and gas industry, is doing fairly well, with enormous profits and stock price growth in 2021 and 2022, some losses last year, and a mediocre year so far in 2024. Electric cars are nibbling away at the gasoline market, only to the extent of about 1 million barrels per day. (Some of that gasoline was replaced by solar, wind, and nuclear, and some by goal or natural gas.)

Outside North America and Europe, dirty energy turns out to be not nearly as bad as insufficient energy. “It is better to have access to coal than no access at all,” Anna Mikulska, a research staff member for the Institute for Defense Analyses, said at the briefing.

When will this problem turn around?

This is mostly a supply-side problem. People may live more comfortably in the future with less energy than we have now (although not if cooling requirements continue to rise, as the globe warms.) The trick is to produce more energy but with fewer emissions.

That will happen when something better comes along. When electric utilities or national energy authorities can order zero-carbon nuclear plants with the same schedule and price reliability as gas turbines or coal boilers, and when factories can turn them out like the Liberty Ships of World War II, produced by the thousands in an urgent, coordinated national effort, in multiple locations, from a single design or handful of designs.

That future is possible but by no means assured. The advanced reactor models now moving toward commercialization are designed to be more easily manufactured, in a wider variety of factories. The Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) could be erected in a process that resembles installation, not building. If it happens, the U.S. role will not be to solve the world’s emissions problems by reducing emissions domestically: it will be to invent, demonstrate, and export—export —export.