If Energy Was IT, This Was Your Screen - Part I

So far, the Make Energy Cool series discussed mainly cultural and psychological aspects of energy. This has allowed me to use big words like “Inspiration” and “Change”, without going into details, which is the area where most ideas get stuck. So I want to challenge myself by going deeper and talking about innovation in energy. Don’t worry, I won’t discuss how energy generation can be technically improved, I’ll leave that to people with better engineering skills. In fact, what I would really like to discuss is the lack of innovation in energy. At this point you could say that there are a lot of exciting new technologies, loads of brilliant minds and large investments in renewable and clean energy, so obviously I don’t know what I am talking about.

Because this is a complex issue, and requires a lot of words, references and figures for a single post, it will be covered in three different posts. Let's start. 

Back to The Future - 1985

In order to make my point about the lack of innovation in energy, it needs to be proved empirically, so I'll choose a random point in time (real random, no manipulation here) to see how we’ve progressed in the energy sector from that point. I chose the end of 1985, which is 30 year ago (and also the year of my favorite Back To The Future). In order to do this, I’ve organized (but did not manipulate) the fantastic, free and thorough database provided by the Shift Project. This is a great database for anyone who wants to understand what have been the trends, and what are the projections of the world energy production. I found their work to be pretty reliable and thorough. I’ve placed key figures for 1985 and 2014 (sadly, the last year of confirmed data) in the table below. 

Data Source: the Shift Project

There's a need for a little bit of historical context here. While the year 1985 has been randomly chosen, it was actually the end of one of the most important eras of energy innovation in history. In the wake of the 1970s Oil Embargo, governments around the world had no choice but to pursue alternatives to Crude Oil.

The result has been the first wave, and the most important up to date, of energy resources diversification. Some of the best renewable energy innovation breakthroughs have occurred during this decade. But these were marginal in comparison to the race for nuclear energy. As can be seen in this table, in the decade between 1975 and 1985, global production of nuclear jumped from 400 TWh p.a. to 1,450 TWh p.a. (375% increase). In the following decade, the global output has increased to only 2,200 TWh (146% increase, less than half of the previous rate). Nuclear energy growth has kept its slower pace since, and it is now actually in decline, as no new facilities are being commissioned.  

30 Years of Indecision

Between 1985 to 2014, the growth rate of renewables has been 1,745%, which looks really impressive. Until you look at two other figures - the first is the renewables’ share out of the global output, which is 6%, even after 30 years. On a business-as-usual scenario, this means that to be on par with fossils, e.g. 50% of global output, renewables would have to wait another 250 years, so don’t hold your fossil-fuels-polluted breath.

The second figure, and probably the most discouraging, is the share of fossil-fuels from the global energy output, which has actually increased in the last 30 years from 59% to 66%, literally increasing its share at the slightly higher rate than renewables (and thus offsetting most of their progress). If we imagine that somehow renewables were compensating for the decline in Nuclear, then fossils have increase their share at the expense of Hydro.

If this was the music business, The Renewables would've now become a respected indie act; The Fossil Fuels' band would play the Superbowl halftime show every year, for thirty years. 

So despite everything that you hear, and how much our governments and energy giants talk and spend on renewables, the global scorecard on this is pretty lame. If this was a private enterprise, designed to stop global addiction to fossil-fuels, after 10 years it would probably shut down for spending too much money and making too little progress.   

Now let’s compare this to other industries. If energy was IT, you probably won't be able to read this article on your most recent piece of a computing machine, which would look like this - 

Source: Wikipedia

The good news is that because we’ve doubled the output, you could now have two of those, or just one, with the breathtaking processing power of 256 bytes. You would also have two of those in your driveway.

Source: Curbside Classics

I can go on and on about this, but you get the point. Energy technology has literally stood still in the past 30 years.

The biggest innovation in the energy sector of the last half century, nuclear energy, has been mostly stagnant, and finally rolled back. The hope of renewables has been diminished to a few meager per cents of total output. Our current energy mix looks suspiciously similar to the energy mix we've had 30 years ago.  

So what went wrong?