Renewables will cover almost all of global electricity demand growth out to 2025, becoming the world’s top source of electricity within three years, new figures reveal. Carbon Brief analysis of figures in the International Energy Agency (IEA) electricity market report 2023 shows that renewables, combined with resurgent nuclear power, will more than cover growth in electricity demand between 2022 and 2025. This means clean-energy sources will start displacing fossil fuels. As a result, global power-sector carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions will plateau or decline, despite rapidly rising demand. Below, Carbon Brief runs through the report’s key findings via five charts.  1. Electricity demand......The IEA notes that global GDP growth projections have been revised down for almost every country due to the energy crisis, with the UK taking a particularly big hit. Nevertheless, it says that global electricity demand growth will rebound strongly in 2023. It says another 2,500 terawatt hours (TWh) of demand will be added by 2025, predominantly in Asia. This 9% growth would take overall demand to 29,281TWh. It is equivalent to adding an EU-sized chunk of demand to the global electricity system – in only three years. The IEA says growth will be concentrated in Asia, as shown in the chart below. By 2025, China will account for a third of global electricity demand, up from 5% in 1990 and 25% in 2015. Combined with strong growth in other parts of Asia, by 2025 the region will make up more than half of global electricity demand, the IEA says, “for the first time in history”. Although electricity use will grow steadily in Europe and North America, their share of global demand will decline as Asia’s expands. 2. Renewable growth...... The IEA goes on to say that renewables and nuclear will “dominate” electricity demand growth: “Renewables and nuclear energy will dominate the growth of global electricity supply over the next three years, together meeting on average more than 90% of the additional demand.”........and 3 more- read on......   https://www.carbonbrief.org/renewables-will-be-worlds-top-electricity-source-within-three-years-iea-data-reveals/?utm_source=cbnewsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=2023-02-11&utm_campaign=This+week+Renewables+leading+power+source+by+2025+Slashing+fertiliser+use+Tropical+carbon+loss

 The global energy crisis is driving a sharp acceleration in installations of renewable power, with total capacity growth worldwide set to almost double in the next five years, overtaking coal as the largest source of electricity generation along the way and helping keep alive the possibility of limiting global warming to 1.5 °C, the IEA says in a new report. Energy security concerns caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have motivated countries to increasingly turn to renewables such as solar and wind to reduce reliance on imported fossil fuels, whose prices have spiked dramatically. Global renewable power capacity is now expected to grow by 2 400 gigawatts (GW) over the 2022-2027 period, an amount equal to the entire power capacity of China today, according to Renewables 2022, the latest edition of the IEA’s annual report on the sector. This massive expected increase is 30% higher than the amount of growth that was forecast just a year ago, highlighting how quickly governments have thrown additional policy weight behind renewables. The report finds that renewables are set to account for over 90% of global electricity expansion over the next five years, overtaking coal to become the largest source of global electricity by early 2025. “Renewables were already expanding quickly, but the global energy crisis has kicked them into an extraordinary new phase of even faster growth as countries seek to capitalise on their energy security benefits. The world is set to add as much renewable power in the next 5 years as it did in the previous 20 years,” said IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol. “This is a clear example of how the current energy crisis can be a historic turning point towards a cleaner and more secure energy system. Renewables’ continued acceleration is critical to help keep the door open to limiting global warming to 1.5 °C.”   https://www.iea.org/news/renewable-power-s-growth-is-being-turbocharged-as-countries-seek-to-strengthen-energy-security            Read the report  The current global energy crisis brings both new opportunities and new challenges for renewable energy. Renewables 2022 provides analysis on the new policies introduced in response to the energy crisis.....Explore report      

Wind turbines are already skyscraper-sized – is there any limit to how big they will get?  In 2023, some 100 miles off the   of north-east England, the world’s largest wind turbines will start generating electricity. This first phase of the Dogger Bank offshore wind farm development uses General Electric’s Haliade X, a turbine that stands more than a quarter of a kilometre high from the surface of the sea to the highest point of the blade tip.  So why are turbines increasing in size at such a rapid rate, and is there a limit to how big they can go? In short, the first answer is to reduce the cost of energy and the second is that there must be a limit – but nobody has put a number on it yet. But in fact, costs quickly reduced to the extent that offshore wind farm developers were soon committing to selling their electricity at much lower prices. Today, developers are building wind farms such as Dogger Bank where they have committed to prices below £50 per megawatt-hour. This makes offshore wind competitive with other forms of power generation, effectively removing the need for subsidy.

     I have been arguing for some time now that we’ve reached the point in human history where we should stop setting stuff on fire: coal, oil, biomass, or in this case the “natural gas” that’s found on cookstoves across the country. The most important reason is because all that combustion is cooking the planet—but a new study published this week reminded us all of another huge virtue. It found that 13% of childhood asthma in the country can be attributed to kids living in houses with gas stoves. That’s 650,000 kids—20 Fenway Parks worth of wheezing young people. “It’s like having car exhaust in a home,” Brady Seals, a co-author of the research, told the Washington Post. “And we know that children are some of the people spending the most time at home, along with the elderly.” This isn’t the first study to come up with similar findings. Earlier efforts found that children in households with gas stoves were 42% more likely to come down with asthma. And of course the effect is magnified in poorer households, which are smaller and less likely to be equipped with adequate ventilation. It would be cruel to report this news if there weren’t easy ways to fix the problem—after all smoking cigarettes is optional, but cooking dinner isn’t. Happily, we live at a moment when the problem is easily fixed. The magnetic induction cooktop, like the electric heat pump, is a miraculous piece of technology. It uses…magnets to heat up pots and pans and cook your food. (Don’t ask me how). The stove doesn’t get hot (see the picture above of the man sticking his hand next to the pan of boiling water) but the food does. And it’s cheap. This link will take you to an Amazon offer of an induction cooktop for less than $60. I used this model quite happily for years (as did the thousands of other reviewers) until we broke down and installed a full induction cooktop. You do need a pan made of an alloy that attracts magnets—I wager that if you take one off your fridge and try sticking it to your pots you’ll likely find a few. (Cast iron works, and stainless steel. Your good stuff—the All-Clad, the Le Crueset—should work). And it cooks just fine. If you want to boil water, it’s much faster than a cooktop. You can control the heat quite accurately; I like to use a wok, and it works for that. It works for everything. The natural gas industry hates this technology, just like they hate heat pumps; their entire business model is, ‘we dig stuff up and set it on fire.’ One of the classic pieces of recent environmental journalism came from Rebecca Leber in Mother Jones when she showed how the gas lobby was paying social media influencers to insist that somehow cooking over a blue flame produced better food. “#cookingwithgas makes food taste better,” says Camille, an LA-based foodie who poses artfully with her spatula, to her 16,700 followers. This is not true. What is true, as Leber reported, is the following: Shelly Miller, a University of Colorado, Boulder, environmental engineer who has studied indoor air quality for decades, explains that when a stove burns natural gas—just as when a car burns gasoline—that combustion reaction oxidizes molecules in the air to create nitrogen oxides, which can make us sick. “Cooking,” she says, “is the No. 1 way you’re polluting your home. It is causing respiratory and cardiovascular health problems; it can exacerbate flu and asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease in children.”Some environmental problems are hard to solve. But this one shouldn’t be. All in all, living in a house with a gas range is a risk factor equivalent to living in a house with secondhand cigarette smoke!     https://billmckibben.substack.com/p/turn-off-the-gas?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email