Work
06.March 2020 - 15:21
Women and Energy – Speech in Delhi, India Smart Grid Forum
Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen.
It is for me a sincere joy to speak here at this event. At first glance I wouldn’t see energy as a gender related issue, but at second glance I do. So I am happy to share what I see.
Let me explain. I am a mother of three children and nowadays a grandmother of two. I live in a cold country with long distances. My grandmother did not have the luxury to have warm tapwater to wash the bellies of her babies. My mother didn’t have that either with her youngest one but when I was born as the fifth sibling, she already had that luxury. Luxury that we take nowadays in Europe as granted. I grew up in that luxury, to such extent, that I did not need to think of energy. I was privileged enough to forget it. As a young mother I did not realize to be thankful when I washed the bellies of my babies. I actually ignored whole energy; I thought it was something very boring and bad for the environment. Especially bad was nuclear: Like most women of my generation, I opposed nuclear power instinctively. I only changed my opinion when I had to face the facts as a legislator, starting in the European Parliament in 1999. I had to adjust my negative stance on nuclear power anew, as I examined the energy statistics and noticed a couple of new aspects, uneasy, inconvenient. In general, I started understanding the inherently goodness and necessity of energy in general.
In 2018 I was in a COP climate meeting in Katowice in Poland. Young Greta Thunberg had just begun her climate tour and she was there too. I was looking at the activists as were insisting many things at the same: They were opposing nuclear. They were opposing the energy use of biomass, too. They were demanding to leave the fossile resources in the ground. “Leave it in the ground, leave it in the ground”, was echoing in the hall. And I was calculating in my head. Now these people are insisting something, that we have neither seen nor heard in reality. The only thing they were supporting was solar and wind. If the human kind should be left right now just solar and wind, those only energy forms that they actually accepted, it would mean mass deaths. I need to reming that at the moment solar and wind together contribute two percect of the global energy consumed. I agree that there is a huge potential in solar, as soon as we solve the problem of storage. But now we don’t have that yet. We need to accept that energy transitions take time, if we want to keep people alive.
Many who have realized the risk of climate change, have rightly understood that it is about our energy choices. Energy is not just another economic input. Energy is elementary, the missing factor of production for which there is no substitute, because, without exception, everything that humanity creates or does results from energy conversion. Climate policy is a subset of energy policy: to address climate you must address energy first. Yes, we have to get rid of the fossils sooner or later, and anyway, as energy sources they are limited, they will run out in course of time. But we have to understand that just a century ago, life was back-breaking. Plentiful energy made it possible to live without having to spend hours collecting firewood, polluting your household with smoke, achieving heat, cold, transportation, light, food and opportunities – whatever you needed. Life expectancy doubled because of energy. Plentiful energy, mostly from fossil fuels, has lifted more than a billion people out of poverty in just the past 25 years.
Many activists say that climate change means people are dying and we have to get rid of the wrong energy. But the fact is that weather-related disasters just a century ago killed half a million people each year. Today, despite rising temperatures but because of less poverty and more resilience, droughts, floods, hurricanes and extreme temperatures kill just 20,000 people each year – a reduction of 95 per cent. That is a morally commendable achievement. Therefore as a mother and grandmother, I want to remind that energy is a very good thing. So good that it is easy to forget and take it as granted.
Today around a billion people worldwide are without access to electricity. In 2040 more than half a billion people, increasingly concentrated in rural areas of sub-Saharan Africa, will still be without access to electricity. Do we accept that poverty? Do we accept it in the name of saving the environment? I think we shouldn’t. Even if it sounds trendy, we shouldn’t promote a low-energy civilization because it means the poor paying the price. A high energy world is required to fulfill the seventeen UN Global Goals of 2015, which we take best to express the general public good.
We have to realize just how different a move to renewables would be from past energy transitions. Almost every time society has replaced one source of energy with another, it has shifted to a more reliable and energy-dense fuel. This time, replacing fossil fuels simply with renewables would mean moving to fuels that are less reliable and more diffuse – until we solve the problem of storage in a sustainable way. Don’t understand me wrong: I do support renewables. But I do not support policymaking which is based on partial truths.
I enjoy speaking in this forum because I am convinced that in here energy is a serious question. It is not playing moral plays in our luxury bubble but asking how do we change the world in a sustainable way. We can agree that the world needs energy and we want efficient solutions with the help of smart technology. That’s why we are here and that is why we can consider this as core business of our planet.
A switch to nonfossil energy is environmentally desirable and necessary. How to get there as efficiently as possible is the real question.
My background in politics might explain my somewhat critical comments on the topic. I have a long history in European politics, and I will look at some mistakes we have done in Europe. I also wrote my doctoral thesis on that topis. But, most importantly, I will reflect on how we can accelerate energy transition – and how not.
I would start by facing the facts. Energy transitions on global scale are inherently prolonged affairs. We now have a truly global energy supply system relying overwhelmingly (∼85% in 2015) on fossil fuels. It will require generations of perseverance to change this. I am afraid there are no sustainable fast tracks. We have to understand the difficulty of the challenge. Therefore, I would like to elaborate the European story.
This presentation is based on the findings on past energy transitions by professor Vaclav Smil. He is the world leading expert in energy transitions and in the history of energy. He is also my colleague in the steering committee of Japanese ICEF, Innovation for Cool Earth Forum. Professor Smil has been reminding us that globally energy transitions don’t happen quickly. There may be some partial gains, but in the bigger picture, rapid speed and sustainable development don’t appear in the same sentence. The EU is a good example. We have made some fatal mistakes in the EU to meet green energy quotas with force.
“Germany produces half of energy with solar.” That was the headline on a German website of news in English six years ago. But the headline, totally wrong, was also a perfect example of why it is so important to analyse the language we use.
Analysis by the Fraunhofer research institute showed that the peak of Germany’s solar energy usage lasted for only 1 hour, and that the record share (50.6 percent) was due not only to hot, sunny weather but that day being a public holiday with lower than normal demand.
But the key error of that headline’s claim is that it was not half of energy use but it was half of electricity production. This confusion, mixing energy and electricity, the latter being only one fraction, takes place very frequently in energy debates. People reporting on alternative energy achievements should take a while to check their technical terms and the real numbers. Actually that headline could have said at that time: “Germany produces less than half a percent of its energy with solar.” Nowadays this figure is a bit highever, however. It is 1,3 percent.
Energy transition is necessary. It must happen. But at the same time, it is necessary to have a realistic appraisal of its progress. It must be based on the understanding of past energy transitions and on an accurate assessment of recent advances. We need a historical perspective when assessing the challenges of wind and solar. The intermittency, the volatility, the low energy return (EROI) and their consequences are still not widely understood. We need a combination of realism, new innovations and wise regulation.
When assessing European development, a superficial look might indicate great achievements. The EU statistics show that in 2018 its 28 members derived almost 19 percent of their total primary energy supply from renewable sources. The union appears to be well on its course of reaching the EU-mandated 20 percent mark by 2020. The shift away from fossil fuels should continue.
Many believe that wind turbines and solar panels, both heavily promoted and subsidized by many governments, lead the change toward the continent’s renewable future. Actually, “solid biofuels” continue to be by far the largest category. In plain English, solid biofuels are wood, the oldest of fuels, be it trunks directly harvested for heat and electricity generation and burned as chips, or large amounts of wood-processing waste. And if we add traditional hydro, we reach 69 %. There is also nothing new about hydroelectricity (its generation began in 1882). Old renewables, wood and water thus gave Europe more than two-thirds of its renewable energy supply in 2018. So we could say that wind and solar create the image, but the hard work is done by old renewables.
Burning logging and wood-processing wastes make sense; importing wood chips from overseas in order to meet green quotas does not. Here we did some serious mistakes in Europe. In 2013, the EU was burning more than 6 million tons of imported wood pellets. Nobody could guarantee it was sustainable or carbon neutral in terms of land use. Imports came mostly from North American and Russian forests, but Brazil too.
We have also had a biofuel hype, by converting grain crops into ethanol, oil crops into biodiesel, or corn into biogas. By 2012, the European Union derived about 13 percent of its renewables from these modern biofuels — but we have now begun to understand that their mass-scale production can have many negative consequences, ranging from higher food prices to excessive leaching of nutrients and enhanced soil erosion. Critical examinations of modern biofuels have uncovered many other inconvenient facts, not least the fact that crop-based fuels may actually increase (by 50 percent or even double) overall CO2 emissions.
In the best of all green worlds, only waste biomass (such as logging residues and crop residues that do not have to be recycled) should be used for energy, not crops grown on arable land that should produce food.
The EU’s promotion of wind and solar resources resulted in consumption shares higher than anywhere else, but the contributions are uneven and remain still small in absolute terms. There are good single performers but their contribution to the EU’s total primary energy supply remains still very small, even if it is growing: in 2018 almost 2 percent for wind and almost 1 percent for solar PV.
Germany has made the largest investment in solar and wind but has not reduced energy related emissions since 2009. It is the fossil fuels, not the renewables, that have filled the void of nuclear. Compared to Finland, Germany’s energy related emissions per produced kilowatt hour are 5 times higher. Our nuclear policy enables low emissions.
Densely populated and highly industrialized Europe in general, and Germany in particular, are still too dependent on imported Russian natural gas and Middle Eastern crude oil: they need more electricity generated domestically by new renewables such as wind and solar. They also should develop these resources in a gradual, organic manner, not by rhyming figures (20 by 20, 30 by 30). And all people reporting on those achievements should take a while to check their technical terms and the real numbers.
Many politicians base their belief that future energy transitions can be rapid or accelerated to the point where they can take only a few years or decades. We certainly hope that it can happen faster than the previous ones, but we have to careful not to create a wide gap between reality and political fantasies.
According to Vaclav Smil, the major global energy transitions have each taken 50 to 60 years. First came a change from wood to coal. Then from coal to oil. The U.S. is going through a third major energy transition right now, from coal and oil to natural gas. The current move to natural gas will also take a long time. According to Smil, there is no reason to believe that a change to renewable energy sources will be exceptionally fast. In rich countries, “old” renewables such as hydroelectricity are maxed out, so growth will have to come from new renewables such as wind, solar and biofuels.
But, Vaclav Smil argues, certain policies could hasten the rise of renewables. These include funding research into many technologies, ending unneeded subsidies, making sure prices reflect the environmental and health costs imposed by energy sources, and improving energy efficiency worldwide. And of course, it is always possible that a disruptive technology or a revolutionary policy could speed up the change. I would add to his list the use of smart solutions. This is what we did not have in earlier transitions. It can be the real game changer.
Most people think that the world’s energy consumption during the 19th century—the era of rapid industrialization—was dominated by coal, that the 20th century was the era of oil and that our current century will belong to renewable energy. Smil says the first two impressions are wrong; the last one remains to be seen.
Even with the rise of industrial machines, the 19th century was not run on coal. It ran on wood, charcoal and crop residues (mostly cereal straw), which provided 85 percent of all energy worldwide. Coal began to supply more than 5 percent of all fuel energy around 1840 but by 1900 still supplied only about half of demand. The rise from 5 to 50 percent took 50 to 60 years.
Likewise, in the 20th century, the biggest energy source was not oil but indeed coal. Bituminous coals and lignites reached the highest share of global fuel consumption, at about 55 percent, during the 1910s. But crude oil, already in use then, did not surpass coal until 1964.
And yet because coal’s declining relative importance was accompanied by a steady increase in global energy demand, in raw terms coal—not crude oil—ended up as the 20th century’s most important fuel. Only two major economies have accomplished the third fossil-fuel transition; natural gas sur- passed crude oil consumption in the U.S.S.R. in 1984 and in the U.K. in 1999.
Of course, these three sequences do not dictate the tempo of future global energy transitions. But the similar pacing of three global transitions over two centuries is remarkable. Worldwide the enormous investment and infrastructure needed for any new energy source to capture a large share of the market require two to three generations: 50 to 75 years. A real breakthrough in safe and inexpensive nuclear power or a truly cheap way to efficiently store massive amounts of energy generated by wind and solar could hasten another change; two days ago I listened to Fatih Birol from International Energy Agency and he was very positive, exactly because of India. He believes that the storage problem will be solved here. I want to congratulate the organizers of this forum that they are contributing something very relevant development for our planet.
Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen.
It is for me a sincere joy to speak here at this event. At first glance I wouldn’t see energy as a gender related issue, but at second glance I do. So I am happy to share what I see.
Let me explain. I am a mother of three children and nowadays a grandmother of two. I live in a cold country with long distances. My grandmother did not have the luxury to have warm tapwater to wash the bellies of her babies. My mother didn’t have that either with her youngest one but when I was born as the fifth sibling, she already had that luxury. Luxury that we take nowadays in Europe as granted. I grew up in that luxury, to such extent, that I did not need to think of energy. I was privileged enough to forget it. As a young mother I did not realize to be thankful when I washed the bellies of my babies. I actually ignored whole energy; I thought it was something very boring and bad for the environment. Especially bad was nuclear: Like most women of my generation, I opposed nuclear power instinctively. I only changed my opinion when I had to face the facts as a legislator, starting in the European Parliament in 1999. I had to adjust my negative stance on nuclear power anew, as I examined the energy statistics and noticed a couple of new aspects, uneasy, inconvenient. In general, I started understanding the inherently goodness and necessity of energy in general.
In 2018 I was in a COP climate meeting in Katowice in Poland. Young Greta Thunberg had just begun her climate tour and she was there too. I was looking at the activists as were insisting many things at the same: They were opposing nuclear. They were opposing the energy use of biomass, too. They were demanding to leave the fossile resources in the ground. “Leave it in the ground, leave it in the ground”, was echoing in the hall. And I was calculating in my head. Now these people are insisting something, that we have neither seen nor heard in reality. The only thing they were supporting was solar and wind. If the human kind should be left right now just solar and wind, those only energy forms that they actually accepted, it would mean mass deaths. I need to reming that at the moment solar and wind together contribute two percect of the global energy consumed. I agree that there is a huge potential in solar, as soon as we solve the problem of storage. But now we don’t have that yet. We need to accept that energy transitions take time, if we want to keep people alive.
Many who have realized the risk of climate change, have rightly understood that it is about our energy choices. Energy is not just another economic input. Energy is elementary, the missing factor of production for which there is no substitute, because, without exception, everything that humanity creates or does results from energy conversion. Climate policy is a subset of energy policy: to address climate you must address energy first. Yes, we have to get rid of the fossils sooner or later, and anyway, as energy sources they are limited, they will run out in course of time. But we have to understand that just a century ago, life was back-breaking. Plentiful energy made it possible to live without having to spend hours collecting firewood, polluting your household with smoke, achieving heat, cold, transportation, light, food and opportunities – whatever you needed. Life expectancy doubled because of energy. Plentiful energy, mostly from fossil fuels, has lifted more than a billion people out of poverty in just the past 25 years.
Many activists say that climate change means people are dying and we have to get rid of the wrong energy. But the fact is that weather-related disasters just a century ago killed half a million people each year. Today, despite rising temperatures but because of less poverty and more resilience, droughts, floods, hurricanes and extreme temperatures kill just 20,000 people each year – a reduction of 95 per cent. That is a morally commendable achievement. Therefore as a mother and grandmother, I want to remind that energy is a very good thing. So good that it is easy to forget and take it as granted.
Today around a billion people worldwide are without access to electricity. In 2040 more than half a billion people, increasingly concentrated in rural areas of sub-Saharan Africa, will still be without access to electricity. Do we accept that poverty? Do we accept it in the name of saving the environment? I think we shouldn’t. Even if it sounds trendy, we shouldn’t promote a low-energy civilization because it means the poor paying the price. A high energy world is required to fulfill the seventeen UN Global Goals of 2015, which we take best to express the general public good.
We have to realize just how different a move to renewables would be from past energy transitions. Almost every time society has replaced one source of energy with another, it has shifted to a more reliable and energy-dense fuel. This time, replacing fossil fuels simply with renewables would mean moving to fuels that are less reliable and more diffuse – until we solve the problem of storage in a sustainable way. Don’t understand me wrong: I do support renewables. But I do not support policymaking which is based on partial truths.
I enjoy speaking in this forum because I am convinced that in here energy is a serious question. It is not playing moral plays in our luxury bubble but asking how do we change the world in a sustainable way. We can agree that the world needs energy and we want efficient solutions with the help of smart technology. That’s why we are here and that is why we can consider this as core business of our planet.
A switch to nonfossil energy is environmentally desirable and necessary. How to get there as efficiently as possible is the real question.
My background in politics might explain my somewhat critical comments on the topic. I have a long history in European politics, and I will look at some mistakes we have done in Europe. I also wrote my doctoral thesis on that topis. But, most importantly, I will reflect on how we can accelerate energy transition – and how not.
I would start by facing the facts. Energy transitions on global scale are inherently prolonged affairs. We now have a truly global energy supply system relying overwhelmingly (∼85% in 2015) on fossil fuels. It will require generations of perseverance to change this. I am afraid there are no sustainable fast tracks. We have to understand the difficulty of the challenge. Therefore, I would like to elaborate the European story.
This presentation is based on the findings on past energy transitions by professor Vaclav Smil. He is the world leading expert in energy transitions and in the history of energy. He is also my colleague in the steering committee of Japanese ICEF, Innovation for Cool Earth Forum. Professor Smil has been reminding us that globally energy transitions don’t happen quickly. There may be some partial gains, but in the bigger picture, rapid speed and sustainable development don’t appear in the same sentence. The EU is a good example. We have made some fatal mistakes in the EU to meet green energy quotas with force.
“Germany produces half of energy with solar.” That was the headline on a German website of news in English six years ago. But the headline, totally wrong, was also a perfect example of why it is so important to analyse the language we use.
Analysis by the Fraunhofer research institute showed that the peak of Germany’s solar energy usage lasted for only 1 hour, and that the record share (50.6 percent) was due not only to hot, sunny weather but that day being a public holiday with lower than normal demand.
But the key error of that headline’s claim is that it was not half of energy use but it was half of electricity production. This confusion, mixing energy and electricity, the latter being only one fraction, takes place very frequently in energy debates. People reporting on alternative energy achievements should take a while to check their technical terms and the real numbers. Actually that headline could have said at that time: “Germany produces less than half a percent of its energy with solar.” Nowadays this figure is a bit highever, however. It is 1,3 percent.
Energy transition is necessary. It must happen. But at the same time, it is necessary to have a realistic appraisal of its progress. It must be based on the understanding of past energy transitions and on an accurate assessment of recent advances. We need a historical perspective when assessing the challenges of wind and solar. The intermittency, the volatility, the low energy return (EROI) and their consequences are still not widely understood. We need a combination of realism, new innovations and wise regulation.
When assessing European development, a superficial look might indicate great achievements. The EU statistics show that in 2018 its 28 members derived almost 19 percent of their total primary energy supply from renewable sources. The union appears to be well on its course of reaching the EU-mandated 20 percent mark by 2020. The shift away from fossil fuels should continue.
Many believe that wind turbines and solar panels, both heavily promoted and subsidized by many governments, lead the change toward the continent’s renewable future. Actually, “solid biofuels” continue to be by far the largest category. In plain English, solid biofuels are wood, the oldest of fuels, be it trunks directly harvested for heat and electricity generation and burned as chips, or large amounts of wood-processing waste. And if we add traditional hydro, we reach 69 %. There is also nothing new about hydroelectricity (its generation began in 1882). Old renewables, wood and water thus gave Europe more than two-thirds of its renewable energy supply in 2018. So we could say that wind and solar create the image, but the hard work is done by old renewables.
Burning logging and wood-processing wastes make sense; importing wood chips from overseas in order to meet green quotas does not. Here we did some serious mistakes in Europe. In 2013, the EU was burning more than 6 million tons of imported wood pellets. Nobody could guarantee it was sustainable or carbon neutral in terms of land use. Imports came mostly from North American and Russian forests, but Brazil too.
We have also had a biofuel hype, by converting grain crops into ethanol, oil crops into biodiesel, or corn into biogas. By 2012, the European Union derived about 13 percent of its renewables from these modern biofuels — but we have now begun to understand that their mass-scale production can have many negative consequences, ranging from higher food prices to excessive leaching of nutrients and enhanced soil erosion. Critical examinations of modern biofuels have uncovered many other inconvenient facts, not least the fact that crop-based fuels may actually increase (by 50 percent or even double) overall CO2 emissions.
In the best of all green worlds, only waste biomass (such as logging residues and crop residues that do not have to be recycled) should be used for energy, not crops grown on arable land that should produce food.
The EU’s promotion of wind and solar resources resulted in consumption shares higher than anywhere else, but the contributions are uneven and remain still small in absolute terms. There are good single performers but their contribution to the EU’s total primary energy supply remains still very small, even if it is growing: in 2018 almost 2 percent for wind and almost 1 percent for solar PV.
Germany has made the largest investment in solar and wind but has not reduced energy related emissions since 2009. It is the fossil fuels, not the renewables, that have filled the void of nuclear. Compared to Finland, Germany’s energy related emissions per produced kilowatt hour are 5 times higher. Our nuclear policy enables low emissions.
Densely populated and highly industrialized Europe in general, and Germany in particular, are still too dependent on imported Russian natural gas and Middle Eastern crude oil: they need more electricity generated domestically by new renewables such as wind and solar. They also should develop these resources in a gradual, organic manner, not by rhyming figures (20 by 20, 30 by 30). And all people reporting on those achievements should take a while to check their technical terms and the real numbers.
Many politicians base their belief that future energy transitions can be rapid or accelerated to the point where they can take only a few years or decades. We certainly hope that it can happen faster than the previous ones, but we have to careful not to create a wide gap between reality and political fantasies.
According to Vaclav Smil, the major global energy transitions have each taken 50 to 60 years. First came a change from wood to coal. Then from coal to oil. The U.S. is going through a third major energy transition right now, from coal and oil to natural gas. The current move to natural gas will also take a long time. According to Smil, there is no reason to believe that a change to renewable energy sources will be exceptionally fast. In rich countries, “old” renewables such as hydroelectricity are maxed out, so growth will have to come from new renewables such as wind, solar and biofuels.
But, Vaclav Smil argues, certain policies could hasten the rise of renewables. These include funding research into many technologies, ending unneeded subsidies, making sure prices reflect the environmental and health costs imposed by energy sources, and improving energy efficiency worldwide. And of course, it is always possible that a disruptive technology or a revolutionary policy could speed up the change. I would add to his list the use of smart solutions. This is what we did not have in earlier transitions. It can be the real game changer.
Most people think that the world’s energy consumption during the 19th century—the era of rapid industrialization—was dominated by coal, that the 20th century was the era of oil and that our current century will belong to renewable energy. Smil says the first two impressions are wrong; the last one remains to be seen.
Even with the rise of industrial machines, the 19th century was not run on coal. It ran on wood, charcoal and crop residues (mostly cereal straw), which provided 85 percent of all energy worldwide. Coal began to supply more than 5 percent of all fuel energy around 1840 but by 1900 still supplied only about half of demand. The rise from 5 to 50 percent took 50 to 60 years.
Likewise, in the 20th century, the biggest energy source was not oil but indeed coal. Bituminous coals and lignites reached the highest share of global fuel consumption, at about 55 percent, during the 1910s. But crude oil, already in use then, did not surpass coal until 1964.
And yet because coal’s declining relative importance was accompanied by a steady increase in global energy demand, in raw terms coal—not crude oil—ended up as the 20th century’s most important fuel. Only two major economies have accomplished the third fossil-fuel transition; natural gas sur- passed crude oil consumption in the U.S.S.R. in 1984 and in the U.K. in 1999.
Of course, these three sequences do not dictate the tempo of future global energy transitions. But the similar pacing of three global transitions over two centuries is remarkable. Worldwide the enormous investment and infrastructure needed for any new energy source to capture a large share of the market require two to three generations: 50 to 75 years. A real breakthrough in safe and inexpensive nuclear power or a truly cheap way to efficiently store massive amounts of energy generated by wind and solar could hasten another change; two days ago I listened to Fatih Birol from International Energy Agency and he was very positive, exactly because of India. He believes that the storage problem will be solved here. I want to congratulate the organizers of this forum that they are contributing something very relevant development for our planet.