Submitted by Taps Coogan on the 10th of May 2017 to The Sounding Line.

Via Euan Mearns’s blog Energy Matters, easily one of the best sources of information on all forms of energy, comes a collection of charts which goes a long way towards destroying the media narrative of a blossoming ‘green’ global economy and greatly improving globally efficiency.

As the following chart shows, the growth in global GDP per ton of CO2 released into the atmosphere has actually been slowing since 2000. Despite the global environmental awakening of the last decades, the world has been doing an increasingly poor job reducing the CO2 emissions produced per unit of economic growth.

An even more inconvenient truth, despite years of record increases in renewable energy capacity and literally trillions of dollars of investment in wind and solar, the amount of CO2 released per standard unit of energy consumed globally (from all sources) hasn’t improved since 2000.

It may seem hard to reconcile these charts with the endless stories about the burgeoning green economy, sustainable development, and rapid growth in renewable capacity. In actuality, it’s simple to understand.

Energy consumption varies several fold throughout the day and the year. In nearly all of the largest energy consuming countries, peak consumption occurs around dinner time in mid-winter when the sun is not shining. One can install all the solar and wind capacity they want, but on the many, many windless evenings, when demand is at its peak, solar and wind capacity is completely useless. Intermittent renewable capacity from solar and wind will always have to be matched 100% by conventional on-demand power sources so long as people expect the lights to work at night and the TV to turn on when the wind isn’t blowing. In this way, it is impossible for renewable sources to be cheaper than conventional sources when one includes the cost of the conventional power capacity required to maintain an equivalent level of reliability.

Generally speaking, developed countries have little to no energy demand growth, but do have large conventional on-demand power bases already installed. Installing renewable capacity offsets fuel consumption at conventional power plants but does not reliably increase grid capacity. Developing countries, whose power demands are growing rapidly, do not have sufficiently large existing conventional power production to provide on-demand back up capacity. Thus, they must build conventional power capacity regardless of whether they also build new renewable capacity. This makes new renewable capacity completely duplicative in cost (unless someone else pays for it). The result is that while developed countries’ economic and carbon efficiency is improving, developing countries are going in the opposite direction.

Without large scale cheap energy storage, the dream of significantly reducing fossil fuel emissions via wind and solar will remain one that only developed nations can afford to indulge in (so long as their energy demands don’t begin to rapidly grow again).