Brother, Can You Spare 22 Terawatts?

Big ideas for the future of energy

Ronald Bailey | November 24, 2006

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The flip side of the climate change conundrum is energy. Burning fossil fuels—coal, oil, gas—produces 80 percentof the world's commercial energy. They also produce 61 percent of the greenhouse gas emissions that are thought to be increasing the earth's average temperature. In the past, energy production scaled directly with a country's gross domestic product (GDP). More energy produced more GDP.  But some analysts believe the connectionbetween GDP growth and energy is loosening, which, if true, is good news because it means that fueling future economic growth will be easier to achieve.

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However, Daniel Nocera, a professor of chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, writes a sobering analysis of the challenge of supplying adequate energy to the world in 2050. In his article, "On the Future of Global Energy" in the current issue of Daedalus (unfortunately not online), Nocera begins with the amount of energy currently being used on a per capita basis in various countries and then extrapolates what that usage implies for a world of 9 billion people in 2050. For example, in 2002 the United States used 3.3 terawatts (TW), China 1.5 TW, India 0.46 TW, Africa 0.45 TW and so forth. Totaling it all up, Nocera finds, "the global population burned energy at a rate of 13.5 TW." A terawatt equals one trillion watts.

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Nocera calculates that if 9 billion people in 2050 used energy at the rate that Americans do today that the world would have to generate 102.2 TW of power—more than seven times current production. If people adopted the energy lifestyle of Western Europe, power production would need to rise to 45.5 terawatts. On the other hand if the world's 9 billion in 2050 adopted India's current living standards, the world would need to produce only 4 TW of power. Nocera suggests, assuming heroic conservation measures that would enable affluent American lifestyles, that "conservative estimates of energy use place our global energy need at 28-35 TW in 2050."  This means that the world will need an additional 15-22 TW of energy over the current base of 13.5 TW.

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Comments

|10.30.09 @ 4:32PM|#

Okay, 22 terrawatts. Assuming you get an average of around 0.2 KW per square meter, you will need 110 billion square meters, or 110,000 square kilometers. About the size of Bolivia, roofed over.

Cost? Solar is currently running about $5 billion per GW. So figure $110 trillion.

Now, a small modular nuclear plant producing 25 MW is $25 million each. Figure we need about ten thousand...$25 trillion.

Which do you think the world is going to pick?