Leading the surge in demand for energy are developing countries that are not members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).
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Carbon Brief reviews a few of the conservative assumptions that lie behind the outlook’s findings. This would be more than half of the increase in total power generation capacity to 2040 and more than estimated by the IEA past year.
“We support the IEA’s emphasis on using coal in the most efficient way possible through the use of advanced control technologies and carbon capture and storage”.
“By producing bulk of cheap electricity from coal, China has always been benefiting power consumers, particularly industrial and commercial category, through sufficiently meeting burgeoning power demand at much lower tariff”, Qayyum said.
Energy efficiency regulations also now cover more than a quarter of global energy consumption.
MICHAEL EDWARDS: What about the environmental implications of their use of coal, though? Only a “dramatic slowdown” in GDP growth or an “unprecedented pace” of economic restructuring could trigger sustained coal reductions, it says.
They noticed China’s coal boom but have missed the bust. And that is through much more modern, cleaner power stations.
It would have been even rosier though if the IEA had done a decent job of assessing the headwinds that are forcing the coal industry to a standstill.
If there is a global agreement in 2015, the results will be dire for the fossil fuel industry: because the value of all of those stranded assets, bankrupted coal companies, abandoned oil and gas leases, closed pipelines will mount into the billions.
India will be the engine of global energy demand growth…India is moving to the centre stage of the world of energy.
The group said Asian countries, such as India and China, could play a big role in determining how successfully the world combats climate change.
India has a truly urgent need to provide modern energy access to its population, but the massive increases expected in coal and oil consumption will lead to deteriorating air quality and rising emissions.
MICHAEL EDWARDS: Future demand for coal will largely come from one of the world’s fastest growing economies – India.
It’s a significant change for the IEA, which until now had been cautious in predicting the demise of coal.
The global energy agency has forecast that India will soon become the number one importer of coal, setting up Queensland as a premium supplier of its lower emission coal. The agency highlights one particular country to underscore this trend – though there are many other candidates – India, home to 1.3 billion people, 240 million of whom lack electricity, a lot of them living in rural areas. Under an “Indian Vision” scenario where the government’s goals are met, electricity demand in 2040 would be lower.
Uncertainty is a common theme running across the IEA forecast to 2040.
There are “clear signs” a global energy transition is under way, with renewables now the second largest source of electricity, the worldwide Energy Agency (IEA) has said. “It is no longer a niche”.
Beneath this positive outlook for renewables, however, there are again conservative assumptions.
The latest EWG study has proven that the IEA has been continuously publishing misleading projections on solar PV and wind energy in the past 10 years.
[That] seems very conservative. In 2014 coal consumption fell for the first time this century. In its most optimistic “450 Scenario”, the IEA assumes no (0 %) annual market growth for both technologies.
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It’s worth being cautious before taking this argument too far, not least because Swanson’s Law applies to the cost of solar panels rather than a fully-functioning, installed solar system. The price of solar panels fell by 75% from 2009 to 2014 and the costs of producing energy from the sun continues to fall.
