How fast will the world move to cleaner energy? Two scenarios
The impending global energy transition is exciting – and it will have wide-ranging implications for the global climate, for business and for consumers. But at what speed is the transition moving – and more importantly, how fast will it go? Will our energy future be fundamentally different from the one we know today?
A new report from the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Energy explores these questions by looking at recent development and potential future scenarios.
There are two possible narratives: one of a gradual energy transition and one of rapid energy transition. And each narrative has its own advocates, and can be underpinned by facts.
Advocates of the rapid transition point to fast declines in costs and rapid growth in solar and wind energy, electric vehicles and digitalization of energy as well as decentralized energy solutions centred on customers as signs the transition is already happening quite fast – and will further accelerate, leading to transformative change in the next few decades. Advocates of gradual transition, on the other hand, point to the size of the global energy system and its traditional slowness in changing, as well as continuous growth in global demand and energy-related greenhouse gas emissions – trends that may continue as global populations and economies grow.
The gradual narrative says the energy world of tomorrow will look roughly the same as today. Gradual scenarios extrapolate current patterns of policy, industry, consumption and investment decisions implying the global energy system has strong inertia and the transition to true low-carbon systems will take many decades. The rapid narrative, meanwhile, says new energy technologies are quickly supplying all growth in energy demand, leading to peak fossil fuels demand in the 2020s. Rapid scenarios suggest current technologies and new policies will reshape markets, business models and patterns of consumption, challenging carbon-intensive investments and opening the way to a low-carbon global economy.
Συνέχεια ανάγνωσης εδώ: www.weforum.org
