Renewables to the Rescue

Some have seen the drastic action taken in response to Covid 19 as a small-scale ‘dress rehearsal’ for what we will have to do to limit the potentially much larger impacts from climate change issues: we will have to cut back fully on activities leading to carbon emissions while ramping up ‘green’ approaches.

With that in mind, there have been pressures on Governments to ensure that their post-C19 corporate restart/rescue funding programmes stimulate ‘green’ technology options.

The UK government’s advisory Climate Change Committee Chair, Lord Deben, said: ‘The steps that the UK takes to rebuild from the COVID-19 pandemic can accelerate the transition to a successful and low-carbon economy and improve our climate resilience. Choices that lock in emissions or climate risks are unacceptable.’

Renewable energy will obviously be one major focus. As I noted in a recent Blog on my new renewables book, the International Energy Agency’s Executive Director Dr Fatih Birol, said that ‘the plunge in demand for nearly all major fuels is staggering, especially for coal, oil and gas. Only renewables are holding up during the previously unheard-of slump in electricity use’, and the IEA said that, despite continued economic constraints, ‘renewables demand is expected to increase because of low operating costs and preferential access to many power systems.’

Renewable energy had already been strongly promoted as a response to climate change and air pollution problems, for example in proposed Green New Deals in the UK and in the USA, but they are now being pushed in the EU and elsewhere as part of the post-Covid recovery. For example, Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission president, said: ‘By using the European Green Deal as our compass, we can turn the crisis of this pandemic into an opportunity to rebuild our economies differently and make them more resilient. We can make our society and our planet healthier by investing in renewable energy, by driving clean cars, by renovating our houses and making them energy efficient’.

The renewable energy contribution varies within the various Green News Deal, but, in most, renewables are seen as supplying up to 70-80% of power by 2050, in some cases more.  That would take money and effort, including a huge industrial effort to build the necessary hardware. It is technically and economically possible, but it does raise some wider issues.  Who will be driving all this? Some critics worry the renewables have already been taken over by corporate interests, and they do not want to see this extended. They fear that market pressures lead to commercially-driven projects that are not always what are needed socially and environmentally. That was one of the contentions made in Michael Moore’s controversial  film ‘Planet of the Humans’. And in a separate video Michael Moore has indicated his concerns about large-scale corporate involvement.

It may be true that some big utility-led green energy projects in the USA have been poorly thought out and that we need to think carefully about how renewables are developed - on what scale, and in what way. Sadly, ‘Planet of the Humans’ just seems to say ‘away with them all’ and surprisingly spends no time looking at community-scaled locally-owned projects. It may be that these initiatives are considered be too small to matter, at least the US context.  But in Germany about half of the 50 GW or so of green energy projects are small scale and locally owned, including by individual ‘prosumers’ and local energy co-ops.

It may be hard to expand that all the way up to 100%, with there being issues over system integration and the economies of scale of small versus large projects, but the potential for mixed systems with small local projects along-side larger ones, all feeding into a balanced grid system, needs to be explored. Some of the Green Deal proposals suggests having municipal control of some of the larger projects, within a broadly socialised energy system. That is a long way for the ‘one house, one acre and cow’ version of decentralisation that underpins some US thinking, though updated to ‘one house one acre and a PV/battery pack’! That doesn’t mean that large scale environmentally dubious projects like big hydro large tidal barrages should get support, or that we can avoid thinking through the role of biomass of various types. Attention certainly also needs to be paid to the conditions of work under all options: we need a socially and ethically just and fair transition.  But if we don’t over-react to the problems, it ought to be possible to come up with a democratically agreed and social and environmentally acceptable package, with a large input from community-scaled projects, as well hopefully product as conversion/diversification projects in an industrial switch to green energy system manufacture.

It has often been said that the post-Covid 19 world will be very different from what has gone before, in part since we have seen how good it was to avoid the pollution associated with some of the things we used to rely on. The emission cut backs that will be needed to deal with climate change will have to be very much larger than those the resulted from the C19 lockdowns, which, perhaps surprisingly, only amounted to around 8% globally overall,  or 17% at peak, so it will not be easy. But the social and economic gains from doing this could be significant, depending on how it is done. As, UN Climate policy head Patricia Espinosa said ‘Covid-19 is the most urgent threat facing humanity today, but we cannot forget that climate change is the biggest threat facing humanity over the long term. Soon, economies will restart. This is a chance for nations to recover better, to include the most vulnerable in those plans, and a chance to shape the 21^stcentury economy in ways that are clean, green, healthy, just, safe  and  more  resilient.’

                                   

Will we go that way? It would make a lot of sense.  A study from Oxford University claimed that green economy recovery packages for repairing the economy after the coronavirus crisis will deliver higher economic returns, short term and longer term, than conventional stimulus spending.  In my next two posts I will look at some specific longer term post-covid scenarios for the UK and the USA.