Renewables Soar, But Fossil Fuels Continue To Rise as Global Electricity Demand Hits Record Levels (energyinst.org) 48
In a year when average air temperatures consistently breached the 1.5C warming threshold, global COâ-equivalent emissions from energy rose by 1%, marking yet another record, the fourth in as many years. From a report: Wind and solar energy alone expanded by an impressive 16% in 2024, nine times faster than total energy demand. Yet this growth did not fully counterbalance rising demand elsewhere, with total fossil fuel use growing by just over 1%, highlighting a transition defined as much by disorder as by progress.
Crude oil demand in OECD countries remained flat, following a slight decline in the previous year. In contrast, non-OECD countries, where much of the world's energy demand growth is concentrated and fossil fuels continue to play a dominant role, saw oil demand rise by 1%. Notably, Chinese crude oil demand fell in 2024 by 1.2%, indicating that 2023 may have reached a peak. Elsewhere, global natural gas demand rebounded, rising by 2.5% as gas markets rebalanced after the 2023 slump. India's demand for coal rose 4% in 2024 and now equals that of the CIS, Southern and Central America, North America, and Europe combined.
Crude oil demand in OECD countries remained flat, following a slight decline in the previous year. In contrast, non-OECD countries, where much of the world's energy demand growth is concentrated and fossil fuels continue to play a dominant role, saw oil demand rise by 1%. Notably, Chinese crude oil demand fell in 2024 by 1.2%, indicating that 2023 may have reached a peak. Elsewhere, global natural gas demand rebounded, rising by 2.5% as gas markets rebalanced after the 2023 slump. India's demand for coal rose 4% in 2024 and now equals that of the CIS, Southern and Central America, North America, and Europe combined.
Turn off the AI (Score:3, Interesting)
How do we fair if we turn off all of the AI bullshit?
Re: Turn off the AI (Score:1)
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In other news, AI isn't going to kill humans off using an army of terminators. It'll happen because of the crap we burn in order to power AI.
And all the marketing / ad tech (Score:2)
Will take care of the spam problem too, since that's also just ad tech.
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That and no civilization has ever lowered it's energy needs really, unless it was failing. Sure you can be more efficient, but you're still increasing usage.
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Fission on a large scale is too risky. During a big war many of those nuke plants will get either bombed into radioactive dust/rivers or neglected, triggering a nuclear winter, killing off 95% of humanity.
It's not the full solution. I hope fusion pan's out. Stellerators have Yuuuuge potential on paper. (I expect computing power will eventually make Tokomaks obsolete compared to stellerators.)
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Correction, bombing fission plants won't trigger nuclear winter by itself, just irradiate us all.
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WW1 and WW2 were not fiction.
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> won't create a nuclear winter
I already corrected that in a followup.
> It also won't irradiate us all.
If roughly 50 or more are hit, yes it will.
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During a big war many of those nuke plants will get either bombed into radioactive dust/rivers or neglected, triggering a nuclear winter, killing off 95% of humanity.
How about not having a big war?
If that's too difficult, H. sapiens is going down.
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Re:We need nuclear (Score:4, Insightful)
"Nuclear Power will solve the climate crisis, and it doesn't need a breakthrough or a TED talk, all it needs is a building permit" - Sabine Hossenfelder.
How does that deserve getting moderated as trolling?
I've seen people do the math and nuclear power with low cost thermal or pumped hydro storage could provide all the energy we need while taking our CO2 emissions so close to zero that it could be lost in a rounding error. It should be clear that's hardly likely to happen. As competitive nuclear fission is on costs compared to fossil fuels there's plenty of places on Earth were hydro, geothermal, onshore wind, and a little bit of natural gas would bring lower prices, CO2 emissions also so close to zero there's no point in counting any more, just as reliable (assuming sufficient storage) energy supplies, and competition required to keep nuclear fission honest on pricing and CO2 emissions.
Dr. Hossenfelder may not be an expert on "climate science" but she should be considered someone with enough knowledge in science, math, and statistics to understand how important nuclear fission is to reducing CO2 emissions and the global warming that comes with it.
As I see it the matter of global warming is a secondary issue that will drive near universal adoption of nuclear fission for supplying the energy we need. The primary drivers will be that of energy independence and the closely related issues of cost and freedom of energy trade from international politics. Fixing international politics is a difficult problem to solve, it is far easier to resolve the domestic opposition to nuclear fission that many nations around the world face. That can be fixed with education on the safety, reliability, and cost of nuclear fission. The data is available for all to see and scrutinize, but politics is muddying the waters.
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How does that deserve getting moderated as trolling?
You Because nothing gets built with only a building permit. The comment is just an underhanded punch using the largely discredited notion that regulation is what's preventing nuclear power plants from being built in the United States. I don't know if that is why it was moderated, but it is certainly one reason it should be.
I've seen people do the math
You can build math models operating on a bunch of false assumptions that solve all kinds of problems. What experience shows is that building nuclear power plants is expensive and slow w
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You Because nothing gets built with only a building permit.
Of course there's more to the process than just a permit but there will be no new nuclear power plants so long as governments refuse to issue permits. There's been bans on new nuclear in the USA from state governments in California, Illinois, and New York. There may be others but these are likely the most notable as these states have relatively large populations and therefore the most demand for energy in the USA, and is likely comparable to the energy demand of many nations. I recall Illinois and New Yo
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A different outcome than overtaking both nuclear and coal in the USA [eia.gov]? Are you trolling, because why would anybody want that?
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We'd want a different outcome because the increasing reliance on renewable energy and "peaker" natural gas to cover for the inherent intermittency of renewable energy means higher prices. Because the single cycle turbines used for "peaker" power are 1/3rd as efficient as combined cycle "base load" combined cycle we can see the same amount of natural gas fuel burned with renewable energy as without. That means not only higher costs for energy but no real reductions in CO2 emissions to show for it. We'd ge
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Well, the world largely forgot how to build nuclear power plants since new construction came to a near stop for decades. Most of the people with the required experience are retired, senile, or dead.
Which means actually building nuclear power plants requires recreating an industry that didn't work very well the first time around. We are talking decades before it will scale. You can do a math model for how long it will take with a bunch of assumptions. Many of which will turn out to be optimistic because starting with pessimistic ones brings you to the obvious conclusion that it will take too long, cost too much and is too uncertain of success. Especially when there are viable alternatives immediately a
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Which means actually building nuclear power plants requires recreating an industry that didn't work very well the first time around.
I'm not certain on the exact year but sometime around 1955 there was no such thing as a civil nuclear power plant. By sometime in 1975 the USA was putting one gigawatt of nuclear power generating capacity on the grid every month. 50 years later we are seeing nuclear power plants getting license renewals to operate for up to 80 years. That's "didn't work well"?
We are talking decades before it will scale.
The USA started from nuclear power being largely only a theory in 1955 to mass producing them by 1975. We have people trained in nuclear engineeri
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There's no guarantee on a return on investment. Especially not if the nuclear power plant isn't completed and brought online.
You obviously have not been paying attention to how utility regulation works. Their rates are set by law to guarantee them a return on their investment.
If there were viable alternatives available today then we'd not be seeing growth in fossil fuel burn rates.
See above. Utilities get a guaranteed return on their investment once approved. They are generally approved based on cost, not emissions. And they are getting push back on approval for new gas plants precisely because battery storage is becoming economically competitive and has lower emissions.
You are right, if you are going to use renewables to replace fo
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Because it's obviously untrue.
Look at the new nuclear plants in the UK. They have building permits, and they are still delayed, still massively over budget, still insanely expensive, still hugely subsidized, and still produce the most expensive electricity we have. We have a fairly poor safety record too, just to add the cherry on top.
Our government is now pissing away more money on modular reactors that don't solve any of the major problems. Meanwhile renewables are surging as fast as they can, with the ba
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This isn't just AI, we have millions of people that need climate control to survive. Don't rely on me for that one, go look at NPR and their recent series on climate change. Now amongst many things they list is Air Conditioning. I will also add: heating. The best way to do this, in many areas, isn't by burning na
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Now things like Air Conditioning doesn't actually have to increase grid load at all, because for well built houses, cooling demand strongly follows availability of sun light, so PV can pe
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Now things like Air Conditioning doesn't actually have to increase grid load at all, because for well built houses, cooling demand strongly follows availability of sun light, so PV can perfectly well cover that.
I so wish this nonsense would die.
The hottest part of the day isn't noon, it is about 4:00 PM when solar power output is beginning to wane. The outdoor temperature is starting to decline as sunset gets closer but that can still be many hours until the outdoor temperature is low enough that air conditioning needs has reached it's minimum in the time just before the sun rises again.
People can "cheat" their solar PV panels to the west to catch more sunlight power to better match the power required from air co
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What I see as a better plan is to leave the expensive rooftop solar PV out of this and just go with a Tesla Powerwall
I didn't know Tesla Powerwalls were a budget item, I thought they were pretty pricey. Especially compared to a few solar panels.
Your overall point that we are going to need storage to make full use of solar is correct. Solar does not peak at the hottest part of the day. So if we have enough solar to handle air conditioning, we will have excess solar at other times. We need to be able to store it to dispatch when needed.
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I can always tell someone with a lot of spare money / privilege because they talk about building new this, or wanting to ignore how we're meeting base load. They're also the people that assume people will buy new electric cars, or that delivery services will all be like the Amazon Rivian or USPS duckbill, brand spanking new.
The brutal reality is we're going to be doing a LOT of retrofit, and re-use. Why? Limited money / resources. That means those old, less efficient, houses
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Expense is a real concern.
That is particularly true because most of our climate change efforts are built around growing business opportunities and creating jobs. We really need to focus on conservation but there is no money in that or not much for large investors anyway.
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The main reason for the duck curve has little to do with solar radiation, but that it is still very common to let the houses heat up over the day and then suddenly cool down when people come home in the evening.
To make that claim is to not understand the definition of a duck curve. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
The duck curve is a graph of power production over the course of a day that shows the timing imbalance between peak demand and solar power generation.
Allowing a house to heat up during the day while unoccupied and then cooling it down at the end of the day will make the duck curve worse but that is hardly the cause. By about 6:00 PM the sun is low enough in the sky that solar power output is effectively gone but electric demand rises as people are cooking meals, doing laundry, charging their EV, and so on after the workday. Cooling load does indee
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So get out of the way!
The only thing in the way of nuclear is the nuclear industry itself, the construction industry, and economics.
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Still waiting for the Greens to apologise.
While they're at it, they could also apologise for all the other trendy themes of the day that they turned to after Atomkraft Nein Danke, that also proved to be totally wrong.
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https://www.oceanoculus.com/ne... [oceanoculus.com]
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Petroleum oil is a fossil fuel because the word "fossil" is derived from a word meaning "dug up". Something is a fossil by being pulled from the Earth. The meaning of the word "fossil" has evolved some over time but the original meaning of something being dug up never really went away. For something to be a fossil doesn't necessarily mean it has a biological origin, it can mean something with an origin in the Earth. There's evidence that plenty of fossil fuels do not have a biologic origin: https://en. [wikipedia.org]
Reality is a bitch (Score:1)
There is no clean way to produce the amount of electricity needed in the modern world. Renewables sound great, but so did nuclear... until reality set in. Don't get me wrong, nuclear is still good, just not unicorns and rainbows good like was originally presented.
We have no idea of what the actual cost is for solar as China has been dumping cheap panels on the market for years. We also have no real data on how much power is required to make them or what kind of toxic waste is involved with their manufactu
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AI! (Score:2)
AI will solve the electricity problem. In the meantime, all the electricity must be used for AI!