The future of energy is renewable  

The Ecologist has an article on the future of energy, including an interesting graph of EROEI - The future of energy is renewable.

Yet despite this – and the fact that renewable technologies are becoming increasingly efficient and price-competitive by the day – the Government remains resolutely unimpressed and is set to drive investment towards uncertain technologies, such as CCS and nuclear fusion, and towards heat-inefficient centralisation.

To coin what is fast becoming an anodyne phrase, this is business as usual. The business as usual that Sir Nicholas Stern warned would end in climate catastrophe. As the recognised world leader on climate change, the Government’s insistence that continued and sustained economic growth is inviolable is terrifying and baffling, and simply incompatible with what is known.

It’s not just fossil fuels that are running out. Most major raw materials integral to modern manufacture are following a similar trajectory, on slightly varying timelines, as was detailed in May in an investigation published in New Scientist. In 50–100 years, it concluded, the era of cheap consumer goods will be over. Indeed, the OECD has convened a task force to look at resource depletion.

Growth cannot address the converging crises. Unless we take this single concept on board we will not be able to move forward with any sense of purpose. The business as usual approach simply mortgages the future, as we can see by looking at the EROEI of competing energy supplies and their respective carbon footprints. These are the critical considerations when assessing a viable long-term strategy to deliver energy security and mitigate against climate change. By seeing how much energy is generated by a given technology in its lifetime and then dividing this figure by all the energy used to construct, install, maintain and decommission, it is possible to calculate where best to spend our remaining supplies of fossil energy.

We can also immediately see which sources of energy build in security of supply and resilience to climate change, and which ones leave us exposed to random blackouts and climate catastrophe, spiralling costs, terrorism and far-reaching foreign policy demands.

The EROEI exposes government policy as falling into the latter category. Essentially, it is proposing that we burn our fossil fuels simply to meet current consumer demand, with no end game in sight.

Not only does this contradict the stated aim of tackling climate change, it compounds the evident belief that a techno-fix will emerge, which in turn undermines the drive to get consumers to be more energy-efficient. Historically, whenever there has been a technological advance in electricity generation or delivery, usage has gone up. The only times it has fallen is during a recession.

The R-word, perhaps more than anything, explains the current reluctance to go down the renewable route. It will make us uncompetitive if we act unilaterally, the Government says, wheeling out its mantra that we are only responsible for two per cent of global emissions. However, if the City of London’s offshore investments – from which the UK directly profits – are taken into account, as they were in the recent Christian Aid, report Coming Clean, the UK is actually responsible for 15 per cent of global emissions.

Today, admittedly, fossil fuels remain cheaper than most renewable sources, but in a decade that won’t be the case, as the costs per unit of renewable energy are fixed – the sun always shines, the wind always blows, the tide always turns and once the technology is installed, it requires maintenance alone. Conversely, the costs of fossil fuel and uranium over the next 30 years will be inherently volatile as supplies run out. To stand the faintest hope of controlling our destiny and preserving the lifestyle choices we enjoy today we have to end our reliance on fossil fuels. Contrary to popular myth, it is the pursuit of some kind of hybrid fossil fuel future that will return us to the cave, not the pursuit of a renewable energy future.

Undoubtedly, the switch to renewable energy will slow growth but the impact will be negligible compared to what we can expect if we crash into recession as a result of inflationary pressures arising from fuel scarcity, or suffer climate shocks of which the floods in Tewkesbury were just a foretaste. The impact of these converging crises is already emerging in the form of higher fuel prices, higher food prices and higher insurance premiums.