Schalk Cloete is creating his own Global Energy Forecast to 2050. He wants to see how his own independent analysis will match up with the next IEA World Energy Outlook, due in November. And so do we. Rich with data, his major predictions include a global policy shift from technology-forcing to technology-neutrality shortly before 2030, driven by growing worldwide acceptance of the severity of climate change. The exhaustion of the 1.5°C and, later, the 2°C carbon budget will accelerate other policy changes too, including CO2 pricing schemes above $50/ton and rising. That’s the top-down. Bottom-up lifestyle changes will also start to show up in the numbers, assisting the transition. His first article scopes out his project. The next four, published here in 2-3 week intervals, will cover wind and solar; fossil fuels; nuclear, biomass and CCS; battery electric vehicles. After the IEA WEO 2019 is released he will compare his with theirs. On his journey, Cloete welcomes comments and feedback from our readers.
Introduction
Having now spent a good seven years intently watching global energy developments, I thought it was about time to put my understanding to the test. And there is no better arena for such a test than long-term energy forecasting.
The only thing I’m certain about with this forecast is that I’ll be wrong. The interesting part will be seeing the magnitude and direction of my error over the years and trying to figure out which of my assumptions should carry most of the blame.
Large institutes doing this sort of thing usually emphasise that their projections are not forecasts, but scenario analyses. Well, this one is a forecast. In this first post, I will outline the narrative I think the global energy system will follow together with some headline numbers from the forecast. The following four articles will then dive a little deeper into the development of different technologies up to 2050.
So, here we go…
The narrative
The global conversation about climate change will dominate the energy landscape in coming decades. In my view, there will be a marked global policy shift from technology-forcing to technology-neutrality shortly before 2030.
A combination of two events may well end up triggering this tipping point: the official exhaustion of the 1.5 °C carbon budget and the next serious El Nino event (as shown below, a big one comes around every decade or so). With the momentum building behind climate change awareness, a late 2020’s media storm triggered by the demise of the 1.5 °C target and several consecutive new all-time highs in global temperatures may just translate talk into action.
At this point, policies like renewable energy mandates will be replaced by dedicated climate change policies, such as CO2 pricing schemes imposing an emissions cost above $50/ton with a clear upwards trajectory. Developed nations will be forced into the lead by mounting pressure from increasingly powerful developing economies feeling the effects of the vast historical emissions of the rich world.
This global policy shift will not really affect the rapid growth trajectory of wind and solar, which will also benefit from technology-neutral policies. What it will do is to also bring nuclear, biomass, CCS, efficiency and lifestyle change to the party. As a result, I see global CO2 emissions starting a permanent and gradually accelerating decline around 2030.
Carbon capture
In the figure below, the solid lines are the projections and the dashed lines the projections without CCS. Clearly, CCS plays an important role in reducing emissions from all fossil fuels as well as biomass, starting in earnest after technology-neutral climate policies are successfully implemented.
Despite successfully decoupling economic growth from emissions growth, the world will still burn through the 2 °C carbon budget in the 2040s. However, I believe that technological progress will have inspired greater confidence that this damage can be mitigated in the second half of the century.
Lifestyle changes
Intelligent lifestyle design will also play an important role. People will value their health more highly, significantly decreasing excessive food demand and very costly medical services for treating lifestyle diseases. Cars will increasingly go out of fashion, displaced by telecommuting and small electric vehicles. New city zones and neighbourhoods will increasingly be designed for people instead of cars.
Overall, I see a world on the right track in 2050. There will be a huge amount of work left to be done, but we will have the tools and the motivation required to do it. Developments in the second half of the century will depend greatly on the latest insights from climate science at that time. Given the large uncertainty in current climate models, forecasting past 2050 is not useful.
Overall energy trends
Electricity grows strongly in my forecast, more than doubling by 2050. Clean energy will be responsible for all this growth, led by wind and solar power. I see solar surpassing wind around 2030 as cost declines continue and centres of global economic growth gradually shift to sunnier countries. Nuclear also starts growing noticeably beyond 2030 after technology-neutral policies are implemented.
Together, wind and solar grow massively to supply more than a third of global electricity by 2050. However, in line with the standard S-curve for technology deployment, wind growth starts decelerating around 2030 and solar around 2040. During this time, the capacity installed over the past decade will reach retirement age, various integration challenges will increasingly constrain future expansion rates, and sites with good resource quality and public acceptance will be harder to find.
Primary energy growth will be much more modest, increasing less than 30% to 2050. Steady electrification, efficiency gains and lifestyle changes will all contribute to reduced primary energy consumption. Oil demand will be hit particularly hard by the intelligent lifestyle design trends outlined earlier.
Gas will do well thanks to its lower emissions, clean combustion and versatility. Coal will prove difficult to remove from the global energy system as industrial demand in growing regions with limited gas reserves remains robust. Overall, I see fossil fuels still supplying 59% of global primary energy by mid-century.
Despite growing by a factor of 10, wind and solar supply only 13% of global primary energy by 2050. Note that their electricity output is converted to primary energy by dividing by the average efficiency of the global thermal power fleet and multiplying by the estimated wind and solar value factor. Since thermal efficiency will increase and value will decrease over time, this conversion multiple decreases over time, muting the contribution of wind and solar to primary energy.
Coming up…
The four articles that follow this one will delve a little deeper into various energy sources. Each article will feature comparisons to the three different scenarios in the IEA World Energy Outlook 2018. In addition, there will be some interesting insights derived from a simple power system model that optimises investment and hourly dispatch of 13 different technologies.
We’ll start with the rising stars; wind and solar, looking at my forecasts for capacity additions, capacity factors and the resulting generation. There will also be some insights about how these variable generators interact with other generators and how they benefit from battery storage and electrolysis.
Next, we’ll move on to fossil fuels and why they are so difficult to displace from the energy system, despite increasing climate ambition. Their roles as firm capacity in an evolving electricity system and their continued dominance in other economic sectors will be analysed in more detail.
The less popular climate change solutions of nuclear, biomass and CCS will be discussed next. Here, the focus will be on understanding why they are important, where they complement wind & solar and where they clash.
We’ll end with a look at battery electric vehicles, exploring what might happen in this rapidly growing segment. The focus will be on how much they can contribute to climate change mitigation, particularly with my projections of the declining popularity of cars in cities around the world.
It will certainly be interesting to observe how actual data compares to this forecast over coming years. Where do you think I’ll be proven wrong?
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Schalk Cloete is a Research Scientist at Sintef.
Kristian Petrick says
Dear Schalk, you state in the beginning: “The only thing I’m certain about with this forecast is that I’ll be wrong.” I really hope that you will indeed be wrong because if we have these high levels of coal, oil and gas use in 2050, the world won’t be a liveable place anymore according to what we have learned from the IPCC. I’m also surprised to see an increase in nuclear energy given the un-competitiveness of this technology even under consideration of carbon prices. I think it would be more useful to work on scenarios that keep us within the 1.5 degree limit than giving the impression that everything stays basically the same, renewables just covering the additional demand but replacing almost none of the fossil/nuclear energy used today. We should not assume that we can neutralize all these carbon emissions through CCS or some other kind of not-yet-invented technology.
Schalk says
Hi Kristian, I’m also concerned about climate change, but saying that the world will not be livable anymore under this forecast is a bit extreme. This is not the IPCC message.
The problem with scenarios that stay below 1.5 deg C is that they are highly unlikely in a world that still requires such a huge amount of economic development. Reaching a 1.5 deg C scenario mainly through renewables will require about an order of magnitude increase in the rate of wind and solar deployment as outlined in an earlier article: https://energypost.eu/if-renewables-growth-still-wont-stop-climate-change-do-we-need-tech-neutral-incentives/. And this is not going to happen any time soon.
Roger Arnold says
Hi Schalk. So, the only thing you’re certain about with this forecast is that it will be wrong; well, the only thing *I’m* certain about is that it is an honest effort by someone who is well informed and has no axe to grind. I’m very much looking forward to the remaining articles in the series. Like you, I will be looking to see how the actual data compares with your predictions over the coming years.
The reason that predictions about anything as complex as a global energy use are always wrong is that the deck is stacked with wildcards. Which ones will show up to disrupt the picture can’t be predicted, but it’s virtually certain that some will.
Following is a short list of some of the wildcards that could turn up. First, two biggies that could blow any predictions out of the water:
* World War III. Well duh! Not much to say about this one. If it comes, all bets are off. Accuracy of energy forecasts will be the last thing we’ll have to worry about. I only mention it because wars do have a nasty tendency to erupt from competition for scarce resources — or resources perceived as being scarce. In a world of rising nationalism and what strikes me as a “circling the wagons” mentality, the prospects are scary.
* Global depression. A lot of folks worry about this one. Fear of the disruption that climate change will bring complicates matters. It may be a factor in the “circling the wagons” mentality that I mentioned. “We have nothing to fear but fear itself”, but in hard times, that’s a lot.
And more specifically on the energy technology front:
* Practical fusion energy. I personally think this unlikely, but include it on the list because a lot of credible people disagree. There is suddenly (it seems) a lot of money going into various startups who are pursuing diverse approaches. It’s no longer an academic game of slow incremental advances in plasma physics and tokamak reactors. The new approaches are completely different. If any do succeed, it would become game changing. But probably not before 2050, at the earliest.
* China’s DHR-400 deep pool reactor program. China has launched a program to build and deploy hundreds–or potentially thousands–of deep pool nuclear reactors. These are small and simple unpressurized reactors that are not intended for power generation. They’re intended to replace coal for district heating. They’re a well-proven class of reactor, used in research at various universities. According to Brian Wang, writing on his Next Big Future web site (www.nextbigfuture.com), projections are that once the program gets rolling, one of these reactors will need only to years, start to finish, to build and commission. Cost is projected to be around one cent (US) per kWh thermal.
The projections may or may not pan out. If they do, it will quickly prove game over for coal in urban and industrial heating. Wang doesn’t mention it, but it could also slash electrical demand for air conditioning in the developing world. Low grade heat at 100 C is nicely suited for driving liquid desiccant air conditioning. If it can be supplied at only one cent per kilowatt thermal, this could end up being how the developing world survives global warming. Oh, and it’s also a good way to extract fresh water from the air in arid countries.
* Solar thermal power. Before solar PV panels became affordable, green energy enthusiasts focused on solar thermal for space heating and hot water. But it never caught on. Rooftop solar thermal panels were a hassle to install and maintain. The were prone to frozen water pipes in winter and leaky plumbing connections at any time. But the humble solar thermal panel could soon see a renaissance.
If it happens, what will drive it will be the advent of cheap silica aerogels. A group at MIT has just announced their development of a passive panel that can collect solar thermal energy at 200 C, even in subfreezing temperatures (http://news.mit.edu/2019/aerogel-passive-heat-sunlight-0702). It’s an aerogel panel that is transparent to visible and near-infrared solar energy, but opaque at thermal infrared wavelengths. It’s highly insulating, so very little heat on the collector side of the panel leaks through to the cold outside. It’s a super greenhouse panel. It sounds like the same technology that was recently proposed as a means of “local terraforming” of selected areas on the surface of Mars. Areas under the panels would warm up enough to melt ice in Martian soil. (Sorry, don’t have a handy reference for that.)
The panels should collect about four times as much solar energy per square meter as PV panels. It’s only thermal energy, not electrical, but if thermal energy is the goal, the panels would be very efficient. Arrays of these collectors could be distributed competition for China’s deep pool district heating nuclear reactors.
Schalk says
Hi Roger, thanks for the insightful comment. It would be interesting to do an article about these wildcards after this series is done. Maybe we could write it together?
Four more that I would add are super-cheap solar PV, truly clean and flexible coal, a VR renaissance, and vastly improved life efficiency.
People have been wrong about the impressive PV cost reductions for too long to keep ignoring the possibility of super-cheap solar. If the current 30% learning rate can continue indefinitely, it could double or triple solar’s contribution relative to this forecast, allowing it to actually reduce fossil fuel use.
Truly clean and flexible coal is a political no-no at the moment, but it is a real technical and economic possibility. We are currently doing techno-economic assessments of clean coal plants that can achieve higher than 50% efficiency with full flexibility to produce either electricity or clean hydrogen. Such plants will work very well next to variable renewables in developing countries with huge energy demand and limited gas reserves. It may sound sacrilegious, but coal is for all practical purposes a sustainable resource because there is such a huge amount of it and such a large amount of CO2 storage capacity.
If VR can become so advanced that the virtual experience of many daily events get very close or even better than the real thing, the potential energy savings are truly enormous. Spillover effects to the way our cities are constructed can also bring large additional benefits. The possibilities of a clean and car-free city where people do most of their travelling virtually and all the rest in a beautiful outside environment using their own energy or a small electric vehicle look very attractive.
Lastly, my personal favorite. I’m pretty sure that, with the aid of deep learning, the world will one day figure out a way to pool all global experiences into a great global mind that people can access to extract truly optimal lifestyle choices for their particular situation. Currently, the “life efficiency” or the amount of happiness and longevity per unit of material consumption of the average rich-world citizen is pretty woeful. This can easily be improved by a factor of three with intelligent lifestyle choices and tailoring of habitual thought processes, creating huge savings in energy and other material resources.
We have some interesting decades ahead of us 🙂
Roger Arnold says
I’d love to do a collaboration about wild cards. That would be fun.
I’m curious about one thing you said. About coal. You said that for all practical purposes it’s a sustainable resource because there’s such a huge amount of it and such a large amount of CO2 storage capacity. As it happens, I agree. However, it runs so counter to the dominant narrative that I haven’t wanted to go there. Too much flak if I tried. But I’m wondering if there’s a new CO2 storage technology you know of that makes it easier to defend such heresy? That would be a wild card in its own right.