In 2018, the world energy system saw an unusual “double whammy”: an increase in both heating and cooling degree days. Potentially a sign of increased climate disruption, with greater extremes possible (even amid generalized warming of the global system), this ‘double whammy’ helped drive a major increase in energy use and carbon emissions globally.
This “double whammy” created an anomaly: according to traditional economic modeling, slowing economic growth and somewhat higher energy costs should have resulted in lower energy and carbon emissions growth.
Was this climate driven?
As discussed by Spencer Dale, BP’s chief economist, at the roll-out of the BP 2019 statistical review,
The ‘predicted’ line uses a simple framework of GDP growth and changes in oil prices (as a proxy for energy prices) to predict primary energy growth at a country level and then aggregates to global energy.
Although very simple, the framework is able to explain much of the broad contours in energy demand over the past 20 years or so.
This framework predicts that the growth in energy demand should have slowed a little last year, reflecting the slightly weaker economic backdrop and the strengthening in energy prices. Instead, energy demand picked up quite markedly.
Digging into the data further, it seems that much of the surprising strength in energy consumption in 2018 may be related to weather effects. In particular, there was an unusually large number of both
hot and cold days last year, which led to higher energy consumption as the demand for cooling and heating services increased.The increasing frequency and intensity of heating and cooling days was pretty widespread across many of the world’s major demand centres last year, particularly in the US, China and Russia helping to explain the strong growth in energy consumption in each of these countries
BP’s analysis suggests that roughly one-fourth of the global increased energy usage derived from this double-whammy phenomena — which might well be a resulting impact from increased climate disruption. And, that increased energy usage helped worsen the problem through increased energy demand using polluting energy sources (including increased coal use, globally, for the second year in a row).
Now, in terms of that increased energy usage globally, new renewable energy sources (primarily wind and solar) covered about a quarter of the increased demand. Massive, significant, double-digit growth continues … but is falling short of meeting increased energy requirements globally. E.g., we need clean power growth to expand even faster as a basic climate action mantra is “electrify everything … clean up the grid”. As per Dale,
even if renewables are growing at truly exceptional rates, the pace of growth of power demand, particularly in developing Asia, limits the pace at which the power sector can decarbonize. …
a shift towards greater electrification helps as a pathway to a lower-carbon energy system only if it goes hand-in-hand with a decarbonization of the power sector.
Electrification without decarbonizing power is of little use.
Dale’s assessment is that renewables would have had to grow more than twice as fast over the past three years just to keep up with increased energy demand — let alone drive ever more polluting energy sources off the grid.
If we focus solely on renewable energy, renewable generation over the past three years would need to have grown more than twice as quickly than it actually did. Rather than growing by a little over 800 Twh over the past three years, renewable generation would have needed to grow by over 1800 Twh.
A staggering number: that additional renewable generation of around 1000 Twh is roughly equivalent to the entire renewable generation of China and the US combined in 2018.
So in addition to the rapid growth in renewable generation we actually saw, the world would have also needed to have added the entire renewable generation of China and the US, in just three years, just to keep carbon emissions from the power sector flat.
One shouldn’t forget whose discussion this is — one of the oil majors — when absorbing the following assertion:
Alternatively, the same outcome for carbon emissions could have been achieved by replacing around
10% of coal in the power sector with natural gas.
Sure, when burned, natural gas emits roughly half the carbon dioxide compared to coal-fired electricity plants per kilowatt hour. That is, however, during combustion. BP’s analysis (“in line with industry standards” according to Dale during yesterday’s question and answer session) doesn’t include methane emissions and methane leakages in the well-to-burn calculations. Methane leakage — especially with the growing amount of shale natural gas — might eliminate the (and certainly reduces significantly any) climate benefits of burning natural gas rather than coal. While an oil and natural gas “major” desires, for business and revenue purposes, to maintain the concept of natural gas as a bridge to a cleaner energy system, the reality is that natural gas is a bridge to nowhere (other than climate catastrophe).
Returning to the “double whammy”
One of the continued ‘unknown’ fears in climate change analysis: when will (not) positive feedback cycles (such as melting Arctic ice leading to warming oceans driving faster melting/warming in the Arctic) mount to the point where they overwhelm the human impacts driving global warming and thus potentially overwhelm humanity’s ability to turn the tide on climate catastrophe. In 2018, the ‘double whammy’ of heating and cooling degree day increases might have accounted for roughly a third of increased energy demand. If that “third” hadn’t occurred, Dale’s “thought experiment” as to necessary renewable energy growth to meet increased energy demand might not have looked as daunting.
In any event, the key takeaways from the BP Statistical Review seem to be:
- We are going the wrong way on climate emissions — worsening, rather than solving, the problem(s).
- Renewable energy growth is impressive and having an impact … but needs accelerating.
- “Invisible hand” market won’t drive solutions (fast enough) — aggressive policy is required.
NOTEs:
- BP 2019 Statistical Review Page
- Past posts on BP / Spencer Dale