Climate blind spot: Report calls for new focus on renewable heat and fuels

Despite record global growth in the world’s supply of electricity from solar and wind, a new report from think tank REN21 has warned that not enough attention is being paid to the supply of renewable heat and fuels.

The Renewables in Energy Supply report, launched Tuesday, warns that a failure to evolve this part of the clean energy supply chain is hampering the global climate effort, by prolonging reliance on coal, gas, oil and nuclear.

According to REN21, “wide-ranging barriers are preventing renewable energy from contributing effectively to meeting the world’s climate and development goals.”

Specific barriers highlighted by REN21 include a lack of attention to all energy carriers and a failure to diversify renewable energy technologies beyond the dominant technologies of wind and solar.

Deficiencies in global energy policies was also highlighted as a barrier, along with bottlenecks in permitting and grid connections, unequal investment levels in different regions, and the continued share of large investments in fossil fuels.

The underlying issues highlighted by REN21, however, are the unequal focus on the electricity sector over the equally important heating and fuel sectors.

Currently, the total global energy is split between the three sectors, but electricity generation actually accounts for the lowest share of the three with only 22%, while heat accounts for 49% and fuel 29%.

The focus on the electricity sector is unsurprising and has succeeded in its record efforts to decarbonise thanks to long-term policy attention that has enabled market and technology development and driven down costs.

However, across all sectors, renewables cover only 12.7% of the total energy system, a relatively low share in the larger scheme of things.

With a record 30% share of the electricity sector, the renewable share of the heating and fuel sectors is much worse, at only 9.9% and 3.7% respectively.

“The record growth of renewables in the electricity sector is positive news,” said Rana Adib, executive director of REN21.

“However, we need to more than double this growth and to achieve deep electrification of the heat and transport sectors.

“We also need to invest heavily in grid infrastructure to address climate change and to provide access to over 700 million people living without electricity, mainly in Africa and Asia.”

Of course, electricity will always play a huge role in the global energy supply – and there are hopes that it will account for a greater share than fuels.

But according to the International Energy Agency’s (IEA) net-zero scenario and the International Renewable Energy Agency’s (IRENA) 1.5-degree Celsius scenario, electricity will supply only half of the world’s total final energy in 2050.

Thus, according to REN21, greater attention must be paid to renewable heat and renewable-based fuels as well as the greater diversification of renewable energy technologies.

“This clearly means that we cannot continue to neglect the other carriers – renewable heat and fuels – if we are serious about cutting emissions and addressing the climate, energy and poverty crises,” said Adib.

“It took time, investment and policy attention to expand to 30% renewable power. We now need to award heat and fuels similar policy attention to achieve the critical shift we need.

“To shield us from new crises, policy makers must immediately ramp up efforts in all renewable energy technologies, including hydropower, geothermal, ocean, CSP and bioenergy.

“If we don´t quickly evolve these alongside solar PV and wind, we will still need to depend on coal, oil and gas, and nuclear for our energy supply well into the future.”