Some interesting charts on the "Cleantech Revolution”
An interesting slide deck on electrification, decarbonisation and where the world might be headed.
This will be a brief one. I thought I’d leave you with some interesting charts and thoughts to ponder over the weekend.
Kingsmill Bond, Sam Butler-Sloss, and Daan Walter from the RMI published an immersive slide deck this week on the status – and potential future – of the energy transition.
It’s packed with charts, reflections, and incredibly interesting tidbits to think through. I highly recommend you spend some time looking over it. It has an optimistic take on how the cleantech revolution will take off. Even if you disagree with some of the future outlooks, the historical trends and data are worth your time.
I thought I’d go through just a few of the highlights I picked out.
Most of the world’s energy is wasted, and there is lots of room for efficiency gains
Around two-thirds of primary energy from fossil fuels is wasted. Just look at the chart below: a tiny fraction of the energy at the top of the chain goes towards “energy services”, which is the energy that actually enhances our lives.
Decarbonisation and electrification offer the opportunity to eliminate many of these losses. We could supply the same energy services (or more) with a fraction of the primary energy we use today.
I’ve written before about the fact that final energy use – particularly in rich countries – could go down in the next few decades, despite us getting more value from it.
Electrification drives efficiency
One of the key drivers of efficiency improvements is electrification.
Electric vehicles need 3 to 4 times less energy than petrol ones. Electric heat pumps are around 3 times as efficient as a gas boiler.
China is electrifying quickly
One trend I hadn’t appreciated is how quickly China is electrifying.
The chart below shows the share of final energy coming from electricity in China and a range of countries in the OECD. Over the last decade, there has been little change in countries like the UK or US, meanwhile China is going for it.
I’m sure there are many explanations for this. A key factor is the relative price of electricity to gas. In the US and Europe, electricity is more expensive, which reduces the incentives to electrify. In China, gas is more expensive.
Time to electrify transport
A key success metric is how much of our energy comes from electricity. This needs to go up over time because we know how to decarbonise the power sector.
Only around 20% of the world’s final energy today comes from electricity. Buildings and industry are making progress. But transport, unsurprisingly, is way behind. Most of the cars and trucks on the road today have a combustion engine.
Transport has been the key laggard sector: look at emissions reductions in the UK or the US and you’ll see that it has come almost entirely from the power sector. Transport emissions have not budged.
This is the next big chunk to tackle, and electrification is the key.
The energy transition narrative is shifting
This slide from the deck is more reflective (subjective) than the others but seems like a good one to end on.
It tries to lay out how some of the narratives have changed over the last decade and what they might look like in 2030.
There is often a feeling that the world has made no progress in the last 10 years, but I think that’s wrong. Some of these narrative reframes show this.
In 2015, renewables were expensive. Not anymore.
Headlines claimed that 10% to 20% of solar and wind on the grid would break it. Many countries have easily passed these thresholds, and their grids are still standing.
Electric vehicles were a pipe dream. Now, most manufacturers are going electric to dominate the future market.
I’m already looking forward to returning to this in 2030 to see how accurate the last column is. In the meantime, I’ll be doing what I can to make it happen.
Explore the full deck from Kingsmill Bond, Sam Butler-Sloss, and Daan Walter here:
Some personal news.
This week, the Royal Statistical Society awarded me an honorary fellowship. This was unexpected but a great honour that I don’t take lightly. Thank you very much to the RSS for the recognition.
The honorary fellowship is framed as a “lifetime award” which means I should now retire at the ripe old age of 30.
Congrats Hannah!! So well deserved and thank you for using data, presented and interpreted so clearly to inspire and motivate the rest of us to do what we can to make difference in our own lifetimes. You are just getting started! Please don’t retire!!
Congrats for a well earned membership in the Royal Statistical Society!
Encouraging slides for sure, especially the rise of electrification in China.
Unfortunate but typical for the RMI is the dismissal of nuclear power, even calling for abandoning investment in it on slide 80. They also completely missed the massive vibe shift across the world of the last 3 years, which positions nuclear well for contributing a lot of green energy growth in the 2030s and beyond.