Photo: Peabody Energy
As a follow-up to yesterday’s story about the price of battery storage plummeting thus painting a positive outlook for renewables, we still have some substantial supply and demand challenges to overcome before we can utilize renewables more broadly on a global scale. This week, the International Energy Agency released data showing that energy demand around the world grew by 2.3% over the past year, marking the most rapid increase in a decade. While nations used a wide assortment of energy sources to meet that demand, fossil fuels were used to meet 70% of overall demand. As the Guardian reported, “gas consumption in the US shot up by 10%, or the equivalent of the UK’s entire gas consumption in a year. Fracking has been a key driver, and oil production in the US also grew, while the dismantling of government incentives intended to reduce reliance on fossil fuels has continued.”
The Guardian further explained that:
- While demand for solar and wind power also increased, it was by much less overall compared to oil and gas
- Heating and cooling accounted for a fifth of the increase in global energy demand – the cooling needed for many areas to cope with global warming is an increasing factor in the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, as temperatures in some regions rose to record levels as the result of climate change.
March 28, 2019 » coal, IEA, natural gas, renewables
