Clean energy technologies aren't being deployed fast enough, putting the world on track for a temperature increase of at least six degrees Celsius under current policies, the International Energy Agency said Wednesday.
Clean energy technologies aren't being deployed fast enough, putting the
world on track for a temperature increase of at least six degrees Celsius under
current policies, the International Energy Agency said Wednesday.
A two-degree Celsius temperature rise in average global temperatures is widely
seen as the safe limit to prevent disastrous climate change.
In particular, current policies aren't stimulating sufficient investment in
developing carbon capture and storage--seen by many as a key clean energy
technology--to strip out and store emissions from highly polluting coal- and
gas-fired power plants as well as industrial processes.
This lack of progress on CCS could potentially result in higher carbon
emissions over the next few decades for the duration of the lifetime of the
coal power plants that are currently being built and higher costs in cutting
emissions in the future, said the IEA's Deputy Executive Director Richard
Jones.
"CCS is trapped in its infancy and coal is continuing to dominate power
generation. The outlook for clean coal is disappointing," Jones told 23
ministers gathered in
London
to
discuss the progress of clean energy deployment.
Despite recent concerns over climate warming gases from the burning of fossil
fuels, the world still relies heavily on coal: in the past decade around half
the world's energy needs were met by coal, primarily in electricity generation,
Jones said.
More coal plants are being built to meet surging power demand in rapidly
growing economies such as
China
and
India
. Nearly
half of the new plants are using what Jones described as "sub-optimal
technology," which is significantly more polluting and less energy
efficient than the new "ultra super-critical" coal power plants,
Jones said.
Such plants being built with sub-optimal technology number in the hundreds in
countries such as
China
and
India
,
Jones said.
"The longer we go without more CCS-favorable policies, the larger [the
problem] becomes," he said.
Around 70 CCS projects are on the drawing board. Although there are four CCS
projects in operation, none of the schemes are in power generation, instead
capturing relatively pure streams of carbon dioxide from gas extraction in
places such as the
North Sea
,
Canada
and
Algeria
,
Jones said.
This is a far cry from the IEA's 2009 roadmap for CCS, which called for 100 CCS
projects by 2020 in order to reach 3,400 by 2050.
More investment in research and development, better regulatory frameworks and
more demonstration projects are urgently required, Jones said.
In its annual progress report tracking the clean energy sector, published
Thursday, the IEA said that under current policies energy use would increase by
a third by 2020 and carbon dioxide emissions would almost double by 2050,
resulting in a global temperature increase of at least six degrees Celsius.
Technologies such as energy efficiency in the building and industrial sectors
and improvement in vehicle fuel efficiency are also making halting progress,
the report from the Paris-based energy watchdog said.
However, progress is being made on renewables, such as onshore wind energy and
solar panels. Onshore wind has grown an average 27% a year over the past
decade, and solar photovoltaic has grown at 42%, albeit from a small base, the
report said.
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