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Why bother with renewable power? Yes it’s clean. Yes it’s green. And it’s also much cheaper than it used to be.
But how relevant is it? According to the International Energy Agency IEA), hydroelectric, solar and wind power will together supply barely 4 per cent of global energy demand by 2040.
That makes renewable power look pretty unimportant.
But, watch out – energy statistics, like most statistics, must be interpreted with caution. Narratives composed of numbers may appear to be more objective than those composed of words, but that’s all the more reason for vested interests to exploit their ambiguous qualities (or should that be quantities?).
For a start, official energy prognosticators have a pretty consistent record of underestimating the rate of renewable energy expansion. As with most new technologies, forecasters tend to err on the side of caution. Fair enough.
Then there’s the distinction to be made between energy and electricity. You’d be amazed just how often politicians and journalists confuse the two. Energy includes not just electricity but also fuels used for heating and hot water, industrial processes and transport. The key renewable technologies – i.e. wind turbines and solar photovoltaic panels – generate electricity, and the debate about how much we should use them relates to the electricity sector only. Therefore, to try to prove their irrelevance by using statistics relating to overall energy demand is pulling a fast one. It’s like saying that the Team GB cycling team won a disappointing number of swimming medals.
But there’s an even the trickier issue in energy statistics: the distinction between primary and secondary energy. A crude definition (pun intended) is that primary energy is energy in its original form as extracted from nature e.g. coal, oil, natural gas, biomass etc. Secondary energy is what you get when primary energy is transformed to produce a carrier of energy – such as electricity. (There are various complications to these definitions, but to get on with it, I’m simplifying).
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