95% Renewable Energy World Possible by 2050 with NO Technology Breakthroughs

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This is a great post on an even greater recent study showing that we can get to a 95% renewable energy world by 2050 with no technology breakthroughs at all. Check it out:



No Breakthroughs Necessary: 95 Percent Renewable Energy Possible By 2050 (via Desmogblog)

It’s a commonly held belief, even within the climate action advocacy community, that significant technological breakthroughs are necessary to harness enough clean, renewable energy to power our global energy demands. Not so, says a new study published this month, which makes an ambitious case for…


DeSmog Blog (6 Posts)


  • jonesey

    Amory Lovins and the Rocky Mountain Institute come to pretty much the same conclusion: nearly 100% renewables by 2050, with essentially flat demand, with only incremental, normal advances in technology.

    They make a compelling case that there is a tremendous business opportunity in the changing energy economy. Those companies (and countries, as another commenter said) that lead will have a large economic advantage over those that lag.

    And as for the EIA, they are a great source of information about what has happened in the past. Their predictions have always been terrible. Go back and find EIA predictions from 10, 20, 30 years ago (600 new nuclear plants, really?) and you’ll see a consistent pattern of missing the mark by a long shot. They consistently overestimate future demand/consumption growth.

  • dynamo.joe

    I don’t think the problem will ultimately be political will or greed, it will be NIMBYs.

    You had another article saying 90% of the population favor renewables or solar, I forget. But I bet those numbers go way down if you add the phrase “in you neighborhood”.

    How much trouble did that wind farm off Rhode Island run into with people saying “you will ruin my view”?

    I remember reading articles about a proposed solar plant in the San Luis Valley that was going to use SES stirling cycle solar. But at a public hearing people were crying “I moved from the city to get away from the noise and now you are going to fill my valley with engines”. And “I came here to live with nature not look at a stupid solar farm”. Never mind the fact that stirling engines don’t really make a lot of noise and that solar farms look alot like lakes from a distance.

    You could call this a political problem, but unless the gov’t is will to be really heavy handed these kinds of people can easily use the same arguments and tactics that are used against Nuke plants against large solar and wind farms.
    As for the greed, the so called “entrenched fossil fuel interests” could actually give a crap less about fossil fuels. They care about profit margin and if you show them that they can increase that profit margin by migrating to solar or wind they will happily screw you over using wind as their tool rather than oil wells.

    • jonesey

      Well, I guess you’ll just have to call me a YIMBY. I wanted solar “in my neighborhood” so much that I put it on my roof! I think my neighbors’ south-facing asphalt-shingle roofs are a sad sight — I cringe at all of the wasted PV potential.

      I don’t think I’m the only one. Take a look at any city in Germany.

      • dynamo.joe

        I don’t think you are the only YIMBY, but I think there are plenty of the other kind.

        I’m sure that if you tried to install a large wind farm here on the front range of the Rocky Mountains, there would be people who would say “why would you want to ruin that million dollar view, put it somewhere else, like out on the plains”.

        Anyway, the point is everyplace is someone’s favorite place. Some percentage of those will believe that a large industrial presence will spoil that “most beautiful spot in the world”. And some percentage of those will be wiling to take action to prevent it.

  • logicek

    I see this as a race to energy independence among the world’s nations. Those who are left in the dust with outdated energy sources lose big. Those who lead win big. Now, do you want to be a loser or a winner?

  • Bob_Wallace

    Sounds like what this study has done is take Jacobson and Delucchi’s 2009 study that showed how we could get 100% of the world’s energy needs from renewables and arrive at that place in 20 years and stretch it out to 40.

    They even point out the same thing holding us back – political will.

    http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=a-path-to-sustainable-energy-by-2030

    Jacobson and Delucchi also worked through land and resource issues and calculated the number of wind turbines/solar panels we’d have to manufacture.

  • http://yrihf.com John Bailo

    We obviously have renewable sources…the addition of hydrogen for storage solves the final problem. Example:


    Hydrogen fueling stations produce electricity, heat, and hydrogen fuel

    Two companies have announced a memorandum of understanding for marketing tri-generation stationary fuel cell power plants. The two companies include Air Products and FuelCell Energy. The two companies are working on market development to provide stationery Direct FuelCell power plants that are able to produce hydrogen, clean electricity, and usable heat.

    http://www.slashgear.com/hydrogen-fueling-stations-produce-electricity-heat-and-hydrogen-fuel-01249783/

    • Anne

      Hydrogen is an inefficient storage mechanism. You lose a lot of the energy. For now it is much more efficient to the renewable energy directly. The grid can nearly always absorb it since renewables are still a relatively small part of the energy mix.

      Longer term, a healthy mix of technologies, including on-demand sources like biofuels, hydro and geothermal combined with a strong HVDC grid backbone, demand management and storage in electric vehicles goes a long way in dealing with the variability, I doubt if very much grid storage is necessary.

      • http://yrihf.com John Bailo

        Hydrogen is an Energy Protocol.

        Anyone can contribute to the Hydrogen Grid.

        It efficiently exchanges energy will less loss than high voltage power lines.

        It creates a soft, loosely coupled grid, where production can be local with solar and wind and hydropower.

        • Bob_Wallace

          No, hydrogen loses a lot more energy in the electricity -> hydrogen -> electricity routine than is lost in transmission. Especially with HVDC lines.

          Hydrogen has to compete against pump-up hydro and battery storage. Pump-up is about 85% efficient, batteries are 90+%.

          Overall system cost and ease to site are the other considerations. Hydrogen probably has a siting advantage over pump-up but not over batteries. Capex, I don’t know how that plays out, but fuel cells are not cheap and batteries seem to on the path to cheap.

  • Anne

    Most of the “it can’t be done” stems from oversimplification. I suspect this often happens on purpose, according to ideologic guidelines.

    The oversimplification is basing your back-of-the-envelope calculation on primary energy as a kWh figure and then using that as a basis for determining the amount of wind turbines or solar panels that we need.

    This crude approach ignores the fact that some kWh’s are more equal than others. Electricity is more equal than coal or oil.

    A conventional car travels about 1 km on a kWh of petrol. An electric vehicle can do >4 km on a kWh. That’s 75% less electric kWh’s needed.

    Heat pumps to heat buildings have a COP of 3 or more. That is 70% less electric kWh’s needed.

    In Europe, road transport and space heating accounts for (very roughly) half of primary energy use. So the assumptions make all difference.

    The fact that this report reaches the conclusion “it can be done” is simply a matter of the correct assumptions.

  • jburt56

    With ultracapacitors you could run on solar alone and have enough for comprehensive waste reprocessing.

    • Luke

      Ultra capacitors however, DO need a breakthrough in order to be able to provide a useful amount of power for a useful amount of time.