6 ms·

World Energy Outlook 2022

87 points by nabla9 4y ago

londons_explore 4y ago
I'm always impressed by these reports... I do wonder about their impartiality though - there are a lot of people who could stand to gain if they could influence these numbers.
- tuatoru 4y ago
  Look at figures 3 and 5 in this paper[1] to see how impressive the IEA's track record has been. TL;DR: They have been systematically getting it very wrong, always in favour of fossil fuels. 1. https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(22)00410-X https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(22)00410-X
  - londons_explore 4y ago
    It's tricky to criticize them for that though - few experts would have predicted the precipitous price drops of solar & wind tech. Nearly nobody in an industry that manufactures goods can foresee a way to sell the goods they make for less than ~half of what they currently sell for. Yet sometimes prices can go down by a factor of 10x or 100x or more in ways few predict.
    - cycomanic 4y ago
      They got it wrong multiple times though. Maybe adjust the models after you got it wrong twice? And they didn't get it wrong just a bit, their most optimistic projection got it wrong by orders of magnitude. If we look at the paper, they actually show what are more realistic projections are. I'm not sure if malice or incompetence is really a better judgement of the work though.
      - robos 4y ago
        But they weren't predictions were they? They were forecasts based on the current policies at the time. So basically a warning to govs that more policies were required to sustain growth...
        tuatoru 4y ago
        The policies weren't forthcoming, but the price drops still happened.
  - RandomWorker 4y ago
    I would say this favour renewable in some way. Spurring over investment in terms of government subsidies and taxes on fossil fuel because the uptick in renewables is not fast enough.
stuaxo 4y ago
I wonder if they are still underestimating renewables like they have done consistently in the past - https://climatenexus.org/climate-change-news/iea-historically-underestimates-renewables-overestimates-fossils/ https://climatenexus.org/climate-change-news/iea-historicall... ^ There are versions of this article that come out every year or two.
- rcMgD2BwE72F 4y ago
  They're now underestimating EVs. Hence oil consumption that will continue to grow til mid 30's.
- RandomWorker 4y ago
  We are really bad at understanding exponential growth. Look at Texas for example solar is taking off there: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_Texas https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_Texas Growth is basically exponential because once payback times hit a certain threshold people start buying. A friend of mine is making 10/12k in sales commissions every month going door to door selling solar. This is a very lucrative business.
- pfdietz 4y ago
  IEA is required to get a certain amount of its budget from data and publication sales. Not only does this make that data unavailable to the public due to price, it provides perverse incentives to slant the data to make it more saleable to those willing to pay the high price. They are catering to customers who want to use IEA products to slant discussions.
londons_explore 4y ago
The report analyzes 3 futures... > [paraphrased] Stated Policies Scenario (STEPS) shows the future assuming governments follow their published energy plans. The Announced Pledges Scenario (APS) assumes that all aspirational targets announced by governments are met on time and in full. The Net Zero Emissions by 2050 (NZE) Scenario maps out a way to limit global warming to 1.5 °C. The 3 scenarios are wildly different... And whats worrying is that I suspect the reality probably won't even be as good as the STEPS future, because expensive environmental policies tend to be the first thing to get dropped when a country is struggling for economic growth. If I could purchase shorts on the polar bear population, I think it would be a pretty safe bet...
- raspberry1337 4y ago
  >If I could purchase shorts on the polar bear population, I think it would be a pretty safe bet... Ah yes, the polar bears. When I was in middle school we watched An Inconvenient Truth by Al Gore and I wrote a well-referenced essay on how polar bears would probably be extinct by 2020, as he says in the documentary. Since then, their numbers have steadily increased [1]* https://insight.factset.com/polar-bears-bullish-or-bearish-outlook#:~:text=The%20numbers%20indicate%20that%20polar,recently%20(all%20%2B%2F%2D15%25) https://insight.factset.com/polar-bears-bullish-or-bearish-o.... Maybe you should find a way to short Florida beach properties instead, since they should all be below water in about 10-15 years?
  - another_story 4y ago
    After they were over hunted, much like everything in the area in the 1800 to 1900s their numbers have rebounded due to more strict rules around hunting and the fur trade. That doesn't mean their habit is not under serious threat.
    - zosima 4y ago
      Their habit is not under serious threat, simply because it isn't. Polar bears who are used to living in temperatures between -30C and 20C or so, will not mind neither 1.5C increase in average temperature nor even twice or four times that. What would make anyone believe that they would?
tkk23 4y ago
>"Energy markets and policies have changed as a result of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, not just for the time being, but for decades to come." It's sad that a war can driving massive change but not the insight that we are destroying the stable climate as we know it. Are we still going to meet those energy targets if the weather escalates and destroys more and more infrastructure and harvests?
- bullen 4y ago
  I think it the opposite, war started because we are running out of energy.
  - luckylion 4y ago
    Who's running out of energy? The Russians certainly aren't. Ukraine? They've didn't have a lot energy to begin with. Europe? Germany has vast gas reserves it could tap with fracking, it just chooses not to.
    - rcMgD2BwE72F 4y ago
      >Germany has vast gas reserves it could tap with fracking, it just chooses not to. It's like saying France could easily end the war in Ukraine today, they just choose not to nuke Moscow.
      - hunterb123 4y ago
        It's not at all, that's a terrible emotional analogy that's 100% ridiculous. But since you're insinuating fracking is as bad as nuking a city... you do realize that emissions went down in the US while electricity generation rose due to nat. gas displacing coal thanks to fracking? Were you fine with Germany outsourcing their energy to Russia, even though the production of the energy was dirtier than what Germany could have made itself?
        SuoDuanDao 4y ago
tuatoru 4y ago
From the Key Findings for Electricity:- "Solar PV capacity additions expand from 151 gigawatts (GW) in 2021 to 370 GW in 2030 and almost 600 GW in 2050, while wind capacity additions double to 210 GW in 2030 and rise to 275 GW in 2050." Yeah, nah. Annual PV capacity production of around 400 GW in 2023 and 1 - 2 TW in 2030, based on publically announced investments. Probably more that Duckduckgo hasn't found for me. I haven't looked at wind, but given what's been in the news recently, 210 GW is low by a factor of five as well. Looks like they're still using the same broken modelling methods, and the same broken integrated assessment model software.
- baxtr 4y ago
  It's amazing how they have been wrong on this and still continue making the same assumptions every single year (see other comment).
  - hef19898 4y ago
    Either they are wrong or they are indirectly predicting the bancruptcy of the PV industry at large. I'd bet at the former, all that additional production capacity will be used one way or another.
- tupac_speedrap 4y ago
  Yeah, to be fair solar PV can be hard to estimate in countries with lots of feed in solar panels because it is decentralised.
  - tuatoru 4y ago
    Module production is quite centralised, with about 80% of it in China, and another 10% or more in South-East Asian countries, set up there by Chinese companies to get around the US tariff imposed in 2019 or so. (Korea produces some of the cells but doesn't assemble modules, AFAIK. Japan, also a few cells.) The Europeans want to re-animate their domestic manufacturing for energy security reasons, after letting it die five or six years ago. First Solar is trucking on in the USA. India has ambitions to expand its production a lot. Not too many other places, to my knowledge.
roenxi 4y ago
I like to compare the fossil fuel projections with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_oil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_oil .
- RandomWorker 4y ago
  Oil and gas will always exist. At some point when fracking leaves the picture we will get net zero fuels from recovered co2. It will never end.

87 points by nabla9 4y ago

I'm always impressed by these reports... I do wonder about their impartiality though - there are a lot of people who could stand to gain if they could influence these numbers.

tuatoru 4y ago
Look at figures 3 and 5 in this paper[1] to see how impressive the IEA's track record has been. TL;DR: They have been systematically getting it very wrong, always in favour of fossil fuels. 1. https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(22)00410-X https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(22)00410-X
- londons_explore 4y ago
  It's tricky to criticize them for that though - few experts would have predicted the precipitous price drops of solar & wind tech. Nearly nobody in an industry that manufactures goods can foresee a way to sell the goods they make for less than ~half of what they currently sell for. Yet sometimes prices can go down by a factor of 10x or 100x or more in ways few predict.
  - cycomanic 4y ago
    They got it wrong multiple times though. Maybe adjust the models after you got it wrong twice? And they didn't get it wrong just a bit, their most optimistic projection got it wrong by orders of magnitude. If we look at the paper, they actually show what are more realistic projections are. I'm not sure if malice or incompetence is really a better judgement of the work though.
    - robos 4y ago
      But they weren't predictions were they? They were forecasts based on the current policies at the time. So basically a warning to govs that more policies were required to sustain growth...
      - tuatoru 4y ago
        The policies weren't forthcoming, but the price drops still happened.
- RandomWorker 4y ago
  I would say this favour renewable in some way. Spurring over investment in terms of government subsidies and taxes on fossil fuel because the uptick in renewables is not fast enough.

stuaxo 4y ago

I wonder if they are still underestimating renewables like they have done consistently in the past - https://climatenexus.org/climate-change-news/iea-historically-underestimates-renewables-overestimates-fossils/ https://climatenexus.org/climate-change-news/iea-historicall... ^ There are versions of this article that come out every year or two.

rcMgD2BwE72F 4y ago
They're now underestimating EVs. Hence oil consumption that will continue to grow til mid 30's.
RandomWorker 4y ago
We are really bad at understanding exponential growth. Look at Texas for example solar is taking off there: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_Texas https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_Texas Growth is basically exponential because once payback times hit a certain threshold people start buying. A friend of mine is making 10/12k in sales commissions every month going door to door selling solar. This is a very lucrative business.
pfdietz 4y ago
IEA is required to get a certain amount of its budget from data and publication sales. Not only does this make that data unavailable to the public due to price, it provides perverse incentives to slant the data to make it more saleable to those willing to pay the high price. They are catering to customers who want to use IEA products to slant discussions.

londons_explore 4y ago

The report analyzes 3 futures... > [paraphrased] Stated Policies Scenario (STEPS) shows the future assuming governments follow their published energy plans. The Announced Pledges Scenario (APS) assumes that all aspirational targets announced by governments are met on time and in full. The Net Zero Emissions by 2050 (NZE) Scenario maps out a way to limit global warming to 1.5 °C. The 3 scenarios are wildly different... And whats worrying is that I suspect the reality probably won't even be as good as the STEPS future, because expensive environmental policies tend to be the first thing to get dropped when a country is struggling for economic growth. If I could purchase shorts on the polar bear population, I think it would be a pretty safe bet...

raspberry1337 4y ago
>If I could purchase shorts on the polar bear population, I think it would be a pretty safe bet... Ah yes, the polar bears. When I was in middle school we watched An Inconvenient Truth by Al Gore and I wrote a well-referenced essay on how polar bears would probably be extinct by 2020, as he says in the documentary. Since then, their numbers have steadily increased [1]* https://insight.factset.com/polar-bears-bullish-or-bearish-outlook#:~:text=The%20numbers%20indicate%20that%20polar,recently%20(all%20%2B%2F%2D15%25) https://insight.factset.com/polar-bears-bullish-or-bearish-o.... Maybe you should find a way to short Florida beach properties instead, since they should all be below water in about 10-15 years?
- another_story 4y ago
  After they were over hunted, much like everything in the area in the 1800 to 1900s their numbers have rebounded due to more strict rules around hunting and the fur trade. That doesn't mean their habit is not under serious threat.
  - zosima 4y ago
    Their habit is not under serious threat, simply because it isn't. Polar bears who are used to living in temperatures between -30C and 20C or so, will not mind neither 1.5C increase in average temperature nor even twice or four times that. What would make anyone believe that they would?

tkk23 4y ago

>"Energy markets and policies have changed as a result of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, not just for the time being, but for decades to come." It's sad that a war can driving massive change but not the insight that we are destroying the stable climate as we know it. Are we still going to meet those energy targets if the weather escalates and destroys more and more infrastructure and harvests?

bullen 4y ago
I think it the opposite, war started because we are running out of energy.
- luckylion 4y ago
  Who's running out of energy? The Russians certainly aren't. Ukraine? They've didn't have a lot energy to begin with. Europe? Germany has vast gas reserves it could tap with fracking, it just chooses not to.
  - rcMgD2BwE72F 4y ago
    >Germany has vast gas reserves it could tap with fracking, it just chooses not to. It's like saying France could easily end the war in Ukraine today, they just choose not to nuke Moscow.
    - hunterb123 4y ago
      It's not at all, that's a terrible emotional analogy that's 100% ridiculous. But since you're insinuating fracking is as bad as nuking a city... you do realize that emissions went down in the US while electricity generation rose due to nat. gas displacing coal thanks to fracking? Were you fine with Germany outsourcing their energy to Russia, even though the production of the energy was dirtier than what Germany could have made itself?
      - SuoDuanDao 4y ago

tuatoru 4y ago

From the Key Findings for Electricity:- "Solar PV capacity additions expand from 151 gigawatts (GW) in 2021 to 370 GW in 2030 and almost 600 GW in 2050, while wind capacity additions double to 210 GW in 2030 and rise to 275 GW in 2050." Yeah, nah. Annual PV capacity production of around 400 GW in 2023 and 1 - 2 TW in 2030, based on publically announced investments. Probably more that Duckduckgo hasn't found for me. I haven't looked at wind, but given what's been in the news recently, 210 GW is low by a factor of five as well. Looks like they're still using the same broken modelling methods, and the same broken integrated assessment model software.

baxtr 4y ago
It's amazing how they have been wrong on this and still continue making the same assumptions every single year (see other comment).
- hef19898 4y ago
  Either they are wrong or they are indirectly predicting the bancruptcy of the PV industry at large. I'd bet at the former, all that additional production capacity will be used one way or another.
tupac_speedrap 4y ago
Yeah, to be fair solar PV can be hard to estimate in countries with lots of feed in solar panels because it is decentralised.
- tuatoru 4y ago
  Module production is quite centralised, with about 80% of it in China, and another 10% or more in South-East Asian countries, set up there by Chinese companies to get around the US tariff imposed in 2019 or so. (Korea produces some of the cells but doesn't assemble modules, AFAIK. Japan, also a few cells.) The Europeans want to re-animate their domestic manufacturing for energy security reasons, after letting it die five or six years ago. First Solar is trucking on in the USA. India has ambitions to expand its production a lot. Not too many other places, to my knowledge.

roenxi 4y ago

I like to compare the fossil fuel projections with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_oil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_oil .

RandomWorker 4y ago
Oil and gas will always exist. At some point when fracking leaves the picture we will get net zero fuels from recovered co2. It will never end.