Demand for electricity is growing faster than the roll-out of renewable energies, leading to a surge in the use of heavily polluting coal and undermining efforts to reach carbon neutrality, the IEA warned on Thursday.<\/p>\n
Electricity demand is expected to grow by 5 percent this year, much more than the 1 percent drop it experienced last year as the global economy tumbled into recession thanks to restrictions to stem the coronavirus pandemic.<\/p>\n
“Renewable electricity generation continues to grow strongly — but cannot keep up with increasing demand,” the International Energy Agency said in a semi-annual report on the electricity market.<\/p>\n
Renewable power production expanded by 7 percent in 2020 and the IEA expects it will grow by 8 percent this year and by more than 6 percent next year.<\/p>\n
“Despite these rapid increases, renewables are expected to be able to serve only around half of the projected growth in global demand in 2021 and 2022,” it said.<\/p>\n
That will leave fossil fuel power stations to cover around 45 percent of extra demand this year.<\/p>\n
Coal-fired power stations whose emissions are particularly harmful to the environment and contribute to global warming, are expected to exceed pre-pandemic levels this year. The IEA believes they could hit a record high in 2022.<\/p>\n
That will drive a rise in emissions of CO2, a gas that contributes to global warming, which could hit a record level in 2022.<\/p>\n
While nations are increasingly committed to reaching net-zero emissions by mid-century in order to limit climate change, the IEA calculates that in order to reach that goal emissions from the power sector need to be falling now.<\/p>\n
Use of coal needs to fall by more than 6 percent a year.<\/p>\n
“Stronger policy actions are needed to reach climate goals,” the IEA report said as nations are set to hold a major climate summit later this year.<\/p>\n
While renewable power is growing at an impressive rate, “it still isn’t where it needs to be to put us on a path to reaching net-zero emissions by mid-century,” said Keisuke Sadamori, who heads up energy markets and security at the IEA.<\/p>\n
“To shift to a sustainable trajectory, we need to massively step up investment in clean energy technologies — especially renewables and energy efficiency,” he was quoted as saying in a statement.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Demand for electricity is growing faster than the roll-out of renewable energies, leading to a surge in the use of heavily polluting coal and undermining efforts to reach carbon neutrality, the IEA warned on Thursday. Electricity demand is expected to grow by 5 percent this year, much more than the 1 percent drop it experienced last year as the global economy tumbled into recession thanks to restrictions to stem the coronavirus pandemic. “Renewable electricity generation continues to grow strongly — but cannot keep up with increasing demand,” the International Energy Agency said in a semi-annual report on the electricity market. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":39,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[132],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-426341","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-power"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/426341","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/39"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=426341"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/426341\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=426341"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=426341"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=426341"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}