Renewable revolution: low-carbon energy by 2030

For the world to avoid catastrophic climate change and an insecure economic future, this transition must be accelerated. Shifting to a sustainable energy system based on efficiency and renewable energy will require replacing a complex, entrenched energy system. This document explores the context and potential of the renewable energy in the world and presents a green scenario for the USA for 2030 and global scenarios for the same year.

The paper reports that the synergy between renewable energy and energy efficiency occurs in the following ways:

• improvements in energy efficiency make it easier, cheaper, and faster for renewable energy to achieve a large share of total energy production, while reducing emissions
• wherever renewable energy technologies displace thermal processes, the result is a major reduction in the amount of primary energy required
• direct use of solar energy does not require any energy conversion technology to provide desired energy services
• many renewable technologies are well-suited for distributed uses, generating fuels, electricity, and heat close to where it is consumed and thus reducing transmission and transportation losses.
  

The report discusses the following strategies for enhancing the global transition towards a renewable world:

• put a price on carbon that increases over time
• enact policies that overcome institutional and regulatory barriers and path-dependencies and drive the required revolution
• develop a strategy for phasing out existing, inefficient carbon-emitting capital stock that includes elimination of fossil fuel subsidies.
  

The publication has the following implications for developing country policy-makers:

• synergies between energy efficiency and renewable energy result in more benefits than either of these instruments on their own
• improvements in energy efficiency combined with scale-up of already available renewable technologies may result in large emission reductions and a halfway transition towards a renewable world in the following two decades
• a combination of political will and adequate policies is required for achieving such transformation.
  

These are the related research questions for CDKN:

• is climate change a pollution or a development problem?
• how to produce synergies between energy efficiency and renewable energy technologies in developing countries?