Shahab Sabahi
Energy and Environment for Development – Policy Analysis Research Group
The story of technology and its benefit has been long dominated in the popular mind and to a large extent in reality that technology can transform our lifestyle and solve our problems. The second half of the 20th century, technology advancements in health, agriculture, manufacturing, communication, transportation and urban development have appreciably improved the quality and standard of life.
However human’s mastery of resources, environment and in sum the material world has rather slowly advanced and still young. Energy resources and the ways we extract and use them, are much the same as they were a generation ago.
Perhaps climate change and the fossil energy demands rise cause an energy system transformation. The transformation could boost by the rapidly falling cost of renewable energy generation technologies. We should not be fooled as the cost reduction is not the critical driver and the transformation is influenced and halted with two strong obstacles
First, the existing fossilized energy system which is politically supported. Fossil fuel producers have both powerful political allies and a powerful propaganda machine that denigrates alternatives. Furthermore the sector with over two trillion dollar in annual sales is the largest on the planet. (CSEinfo Peter Hartley 2010) Thus economic policies that affect the sector have global consequences are manipulated by these interest group. Yet what the sector and its defenders demand is, of course, precisely that it be let off the hook for the damage fossil fuel causes.
Second there is a technical issue with the renewable energy system. Despite the promising cost reduction in the technology development process, currently the renewable energy technologies generate energy only for fifty percent of their operating times. So it requires backup and standby energy generation systems to parallel with renewables make energy available for the whole time. It is translated to excess costs for the entire energy systems. The backup plants need to be fully invested however they are idled when renewable plants run.
To have a transformed and clean energy generation system and complete our mastery of energy resources, we should brush away the IF’s and obstacles.
} If the downward trend of cost reduction in renewable technology development and its backup system OR energy storage system continues (technology development)
} If the availability factor of renewable resources increases during operation (technology development and system integration)
} If we price coal-fired power right, taking into account the huge health and other costs it imposes (global governance and law)
} If political and financial class that is deeply invested in energy sector dominated by fossil fuels, does stop subsidising the extraction and use of fossil fuels (directly with taxpayers’ money and indirectly by letting the industry off the hook for environmental costs)
it’s likely that we would have clean air, enough affordable clean energy for all.
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