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THIRD WORLD RESURGENCE

Carbon-free by 2050?

Replacing carbon fuels with renewable energy sources is clearly a necessary goal for a sustainable future. A recently released report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has examined the prospects of attaining this goal by 2050. While the report has much to commend it, as the following commentaries show, it is also seriously flawed in some respects.

Payal Parekh

THE Summary for Policy Makers of the long-awaited Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Special Report on Renewable Energy Sources and Climate Change Mitigation was recently released. The scientists analysed over 160 scenarios to calculate the potential of renewable energy to meet the world's energy needs in 2050. The most optimistic scenario predicts that renewables will constitute 80% of our energy matrix given that certain conditions are met. Renewable energies considered are bioenergy, solar energy, geothermal energy, hydropower energy, ocean energy and wind energy.

Renewables accounted for 12.9% of primary energy supply in 2008, although a vast majority of this was biomass. But this is changing quickly. Despite the global financial crisis, renewable energy capacity grew rapidly in 2009 relative to the cumulative installed capacity from the previous year. For example, wind power capacity increased by almost one-third, while solar power capacity increased by over 50%. Furthermore, the technical potential of renewable energy is not limiting; it exceeds projected future energy demand. Developing countries host over half of current global renewable energy capacity.

Renewable energy technologies are at different stages of maturity and can also have adverse impacts. For example, hydropower is a mature technology with limited capacity to grow in the coming years. Large dams have resulted in the displacement of millions of people across the world and have also irreversibly fragmented over half of the world's rivers. Hydropower clearly reflects the importance of weighing all of the impacts of a renewable energy source.

Other technologies such as using the potential, kinetic, thermal and chemical energy of seawater are at the demonstration and the pilot phase and require additional research and development.

Renewable energy is generally still more expensive than conventional technologies, but under certain circumstances renewable energy is price-competitive. Furthermore, if costs related to emission of greenhouse gases during the burning of fossil fuels were internalised, renewable energy technologies would likely be much more competitive than they currently are.

How do we get there?

Given that we are expecting nothing less than a paradigm shift in how we produce energy, it is no surprise that there will be some hurdles to jump over, but they are manageable.

The IPCC report estimates that investments in the order of $1.2-5.1 trillion are needed in the current decade and $1.4-7.2 trillion in the next. While this is no small amount, the annual averages of these investments are smaller than 1% of the world GDP.

Proactive policy measures will be essential to level the playing field between renewable energy and conventional energy sources. Feed-in tariffs, quotas and priority grid access are measures that subsidise renewable energy so that it can compete. As the price of renewables drops, the size of the subsidy also decreases.  Fiscal incentives also play an essential role. These include carbon taxes and rebates and grants to end-users for choosing renewable energy sources.

Policy measures will be more successful if they are paired with substantial public investment in research and development (R&D), as this often also results in investment by the private sector. In effect, the public policies and investment create a favourable environment for investment by the private sector, getting more bang for the buck.

Eradicating energy poverty

Fortunately the IPCC took on the 'double challenge' of simultaneously ensuring that energy is produced without greenhouse gas emissions and that the world's poor have a right to sustainable development. The relationship between the level of poverty and (lack of) access to energy is well established (United Nations, World Economic and Social Survey,2009). Over two billion people have little or no access to electricity, which relegates them to a life of poverty. Renewable energy can play an important role in breaking this cycle, since it lends itself well to decentralised energy distribution.

But as the excellent report Promoting Development, Saving the Planet by the United Nations' Department of Economic and Social Affairs (2009) very clearly showed, accessibility is also linked to affordability. Poor people spend a higher percentage of their income on energy. Therefore it is not enough to make renewables more competitive with fossil fuels. The price of renewables must drop significantly in order to become the choice of the poor.

Bioenergy: the complicated renewable

Currently the poor primarily burn firewood for cooking and heating. Unfortunately biomass burning is very inefficient and is a major cause of indoor air pollution in the world's poorest rural households.

Biomass burning is classified as renewable energy because a tree that is cut down and burned for fuel can be replaced by planting a new tree. Yet this practice is one of the leading causes of deforestation and habitat loss for endangered species.

Bioenergy is not limited to the burning of biomass. Some technologies are already available and others are at the development stage. For example, ethanol production from sugar and starch is commercially viable, whereas technologies such as production of fuels from ligno-cellulosis and algae are at the pre-commercial and research and development stage, respectively.

Unfortunately there are a number of potentially adverse environmental and social implications associated with bioenergy. Some studies suggest that the energy inputs to produce bioenergy are larger than the amount of energy produced, meaning that bioenergy does not reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Carrying out a life-cycle analysis of bioenergy requires taking into account the carbon stock of land that is cleared for growing bioenergy crops, emissions from fertiliser use, and emissions from transport and processing.

The social impact of bioenergy has proved to be even more devastating. Converting land to grow crops for fuel means that less land is available for growing food, resulting in higher food prices. In fact an internal World Bank report from 2008 estimated that bioenergy drove food prices up 75%.

Caveats

While the results of the IPCC report are generally positive and give hope that the pathway toward a low-carbon future exists, it is not enough. The report focused on scenarios that would keep greenhouse gas concentrations at 450 parts per million (ppm) and limit temperature rise to 2ēC, rather than the more stringent demand from over 100 countries of350 ppm and 1.5ēC. To reach the more ambitious goal, we need to be carbon-free by 2050. To be that ambitious, we need rigorous global cooperation that is based on fairness and equity to ensure the types of financing and technology sharing that can mainstream renewable energy.

Other ways of lowering greenhouse gas emissions and simultaneously meeting global demand for energy include energy conservation and efficiency, as well as changes in lifestyle. Other, more controversial solutions include fossil fuel switch, nuclear power, and carbon capture and storage (CCS). A study recently published by WWF and Ecofys (The Energy Report, 2011) looks at the whole suite of options and the various challenges and choices that society is faced with.

The IPCC report gets us started in the right direction. Now society must use this challenge of meeting people's energy needs in a fair and just way as an opportunity to find new paths forward. The energy revolution has taken off and is gaining speed.

Payal Parekh is a science and policy expert on climate change (www.climate-consulting.org).


Don't sacrifice the planet's arteries to save her lungs
Peter Bosshard

ACCORDING to a new report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the sky is the limit for the expansion of renewable energy. With an investment of slightly less than 1% of global GDP, renewable energy could contribute up to 43% of the world's energy supply by 2030, and 77% by 2050. Such an increase could stabilise the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere at 450 ppm and may be just enough to avoid catastrophic climate change. It would also boost energy access for the 1.4 billion people who currently live without access to electricity.

 The IPCC report presents a menu of actions such as feed-in tariffs for renewable energy that can be implemented immediately. It is cause for hope. From an environmental and human rights perspective, the new report has only one problem: against standard practice, it includes large hydropower projects among the technologies to be promoted. With this approach, the IPCC report ignores several key factors:

* Ecological impacts: While water is a renewable resource, the ecosystems that are destroyed by hydropower projects are not. Not least due to dam building, rivers, lakes and wetlands suffer from a higher rate of species extinction than any other major ecosystem. According to the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, freshwater ecosystems lost 50% of their populations between 1970 and 2000. The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN)'s Red List warns that 37% of all freshwater fish species are under threat of extinction. Large hydropower projects also have much more serious social impacts than the truly renewable sources of energy.

* Greenhouse gas emissions: Because of decomposing organic matter in reservoirs, dams emit greenhouse gases such as methane and CO2. In the case of shallow tropical reservoirs, the emissions from hydropower projects can be higher than those of thermal power projects with the same electricity output. Ivan Lima of Brazil's National Institute for Space Research estimated the total methane emissions from large dams at 104 million tons per year. Methane is a particularly potent greenhouse gas, and Lima's figure amounts to more than 4% of the total warming impact of human activities - roughly equal to the climate impact of the global aviation sector. (The figure includes reservoirs that were built for other purposes than hydropower, but not the emissions generated by the construction of dams.)

* Vulnerability to climate change: Countries need to diversify and decentralise their water and energy infrastructure in order to strengthen their resilience to the vagaries of climate change. In contrast, building big, clunky dams will make water and energy sectors more vulnerable. As a World Bank report found earlier this year, 'long-lifespan infrastructure, such as hydropower plants, is generally less adaptable to changes whereas short-lifespan infrastructure can be replaced in the long term as the climate changes.' The report warns that 'heavy reliance on hydropower creates significant vulnerability to climate change', and suggests that 'an adaptation response may require a policy decision to diversify away from hydropower.'

* Limited growth potential: Hydropower is a mature technology which has not seen major breakthroughs in past decades. The new IPCC report confirms that the technical potential of hydropower is vastly lower than the potential of wind, geothermal, solar and biomass energy. It also recognises that 'further cost reductions for hydropower are expected to be less significant than some of the other [renewable energy] technologies.' Because of large hydropower's serious impacts and limited growth potential, limited financial resources should not be squandered on subsidies for further dam building.

By listing large hydropower among the technologies that deserve support, the IPCC contravenes international standard practice. Across the world, policy tools - for example, portfolio standards, feed-in tariffs and tax credits - only tend to consider small hydropower projects as a form of renewable energy. Small hydropower is generally defined as projects of less than 10 megawatts.

Why has the IPCC downplayed the ecological impacts of large dams, including their contribution to climate change, and included large hydropower among the technologies that deserve public support? The sad truth is that in addition to several independent scientists, the IPCC selected a number of authors who have a vested interest in the outcome of the hydropower chapter. The nine lead authors of this chapter include representatives of two of the world's largest hydropower developers, a hydropower consultancy, and three agencies promoting hydropower at the national level.

I highly value the IPCC's difficult work, and have no sympathy for the climate change deniers who will probably attack the new report for their own motives. I do not question the personal integrity of the report's authors, and personally respect the one industry representative among them whom I know. Yet it is not appropriate for the IPCC to commission individuals with a business or institutional interest to prepare a report that is supposed to be unbiased and independent.

The authors' conflict of interest is reflected throughout the hydropower section of the report, which at times reads like a marketing brochure of the dam industry. The report ignores or downplays the evidence regarding the social and environmental impacts of dams that has been produced by the independent World Commission on Dams, and naively assumes that these impacts can essentially be mitigated. It further highlights the global changes of precipitation under climate change, but neglects the uncertainties regarding future rainfalls on the local level, which are much more relevant for hydropower projects.

Combating climate change must be part of a holistic effort to save the world's ecosystems. We cannot afford to sacrifice the planet's arteries to save her lungs. The new IPCC report demonstrates that there is a vast potential for energy technologies that have much lower environmental and social impacts than large  dams.  These are the solutions that deserve our full support.                                                           

Peter Bosshard is the policy director of International Rivers, a non-governmental organisation which works to protect rivers, defend the rights of communities that depend on them, and promote water and energy solutions for a just and sustainable world. The above is reproduced from his blog at www.internationalrivers.org/en/blog/peter-bosshard.

*Third World Resurgence No. 250, June 2011, pp 35-37
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