Where Do We Get Most Of Our Energy (Hint: Not Renewables)

The world is mostly run on fossil fuels (81%). Nuclear makes up 5%, with 14% from renewables. Solar panels and wind turbines contribute 0.8%.

When you hear 14% renewables, you will likely think ‘wow, things are going pretty well with the switch to renewables’. But these renewables are not the ones you hear about. The biggest contributor is humanity’s oldest fuel: wood.

4.91% is known as biomass as we also burn food (ethanol) and energy forest (trees or woody shrubs) in the rich world. This is, for instance, the American forests, cut down and shipped across the Atlantic to be burnt in European power plants to be called green and CO₂ neutral – of course, that is only true when the new woods have grown up in 50-100 years.

4.93% of its use takes place in the poor world where people still use wood (dung, cardboard, etc…) to cook and keep warm. This leads to terrible indoor air pollution – it is actually the world’s deadliest environmental problem, killing some 4.3 million people each year. We should definitely hope the poor will have to use less polluting wood in the future.

The other main contributor of renewables is 2.5% hydropower. In total, that makes up 12.4%. The last 1.6% comes mostly from geothermal energy (0.57%) and wind turbines (0.61%) along with solar heaters in China, tidal power etc. (0.26%) and solar panels (0.19%).

Contrary to the weight of news stories on how solar and wind is taking over the world, solar panels and wind turbines really make up a very small part of the global energy mix. (I started out coloring solar panels yellow [see graph below], but the thin sliver at the top became invisible.)

These stats come from the latest global energy overview from the most respected institution, the International Energy Agency (the OECD for energy) in its World Energy Outlook 2017 from November 2017. Unfortunately, the full report and much of the statistics is not free. Moreover, the split into individual renewables like wind, solar PV, etc… is not made public (though the IEA model keeps track of them all).

The data from the newest estimates of power demand for 2016 (p648). It also shows the split into individual renewables obtained from a data request to IEA
Power Generation Analysis, World Energy Outlook: Energy Demand Division, Directorate of Sustainability, Technology, and Outlooks.

http://www.iea.org/weo/

You can see the split for the major renewables for 2016 and 2040, assuming the Paris promises will be kept, here:

https://www.facebook.com/bjornlomborg/photos/a.221758208967.168468.146605843967/10156494580633968/?type=3&theater

All data is Total Primary Energy Supply, which is the International Energy Agency’s own main measure, also used in all their graphs for global energy balances.

Remember, this is very different from just electricity, which is how solar and wind is often described. Electricity makes up a smaller part of the total energy consumption, and global warming concerns go to all energy emissions, not just the smaller subset of electricity.

Bjorn Lomborg is the Author of ‘Cool It’ and ‘Skeptical Environmentalist’, and the director of the Copenhagen Consensus think-tank.

Read more at Lomborg’s FaceBook post here