© Ruslan Shamukov/TASS
Wind and solar projects can provide over a third of the world's electricity by 2030. Conclusions of the kind have been outlined in a mid-summer report by the Rocky Mountain Institute, a US-headquartered NPO specializing in clean energy. So, the sector is entering a phase of exponential growth, the document reads. This means that wind and solar projects are forecast to generate at least 33 percent of the world's electric power against the current 12 percent to entail to a drop in fossil fuel power generation and cheaper electricity.
It only remains to be seen how biased this study is, and whether the RMI forecast will come true. In the meantime, hydrocarbons remain in high demand amid the ongoing renewables advance, having a still very moderate impact on coal, oil and gas. The most promising hydrocarbon energy source is natural gas considered a transitional fuel type given the frenzied popularization of renewables.
The EU has pinned high hopes on the sun and wind. Brussels is fully committed to reducing carbon emissions so as to slow down the pace of global warming. But when it comes to direct funding of climate programs by specific states of the Old World, their governments suddenly start soberly assessing political and economic stakes required for the "great" transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy.
The European Union and Great Britain seek to achieve a "climate neutral" economy by 2050. Still, local "green camp" politicians will hardly escape the issue of growing protest sentiment, though surveys show certain support for reduced emissions. But the "zeal" weakens abruptly when it comes to clarifying people’s willingness to alter their lifestyle or embrace any additional costs as a sacrifice on the "green doctrine" altar.
For example, a really sensitive area is electric car "promotion". Last fall, EU member states reached a consensus on waiving sales of non-electric cars by 2035. Naturally, this is fraught with resistance, since reformatting the industry can hardly be seamless to the social field. We should expect a response from factory owners and executives producing fossil fuel cars, as they cannot welcome the changes outlined. They will strongly resist the goals of an accelerated deep industry transformation, rightly drawing the government’s attention to the high social risks over inevitable production curtailment, job cuts, strike threats, and the lack of major investment in revamping plant capacities. Plants producing gasoline and diesel cars are obviously going to be phased out, not restructured. The reason for that is lacking subsidies for pipeline renewal — financial coverage won’t be enough for everyone. After all, the lacklustre eurozone saw a recession in the first quarter, Eurostat says, though characterized as "the mildest possible" amid skyrocketing energy prices.
And adapting all the production lines for electric vehicles is all but inexpedient, because this will entail the need to close many field-oriented enterprises. The same fate awaits adjacent facilities making spare parts and outfit for fossil fuel cars.
Whether it is worth the cost is both an economic and fundamental issue — are e-cars eco-friendly at all? Back in 2019, a curious study by Professor Christoph Buchal with the Munich Institute for Economic Research found that cutting-edge diesel vehicles were less harmful than electric ones. On average, the latter provide 20 percent more carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions.
Indeed, e-cars themselves do not pollute the atmosphere, but battery charging is up to power plants. And power grid energy is not "green" at all, featuring a kind of mix instead, in which the hydrocarbon component occasionally prevails (there may be also shares of renewable, atom or hydrogenation energy). Germany, for one, produces over a half of its electricity using renewables (57 percent in May 2023), with fossil fuels presenting the smaller part (it refers not only to natural gas and fuel oil, but also to the notorious brown coal the country is rich in; the nuclear component has been there until mid-April 2023, too).
Also, much energy is required to extract and process lithium, nickel, cobalt and manganese — the key metals needed for accumulator production.
Buchal's study input is as follows: e-car batteries are assumed to serve for a decade, and the average annual mileage of tested samples (electric and diesel cars) is 15,000 km. Thus, CO2 emissions of the popular TeslaModel3 will be equal to 156-181 grams per kilometer. Tesla’s opponent of the same class and equipment, a diesel Mercedes-Benz C220d shows noticeably less — 117-137 g/km.
Electric cars generally turn out to have failed their eco-mission. Objectively, we can only talk about the transfer of pollution sources from big urban centers to the outskirts.
This eloquently reveals the entire fallacy of the EU course to blindly accelerate the "big energy transition", which is primarily stimulated by their political bias towards Russia’s hydrocarbons, not by expediency or common sense. Today, perhaps the only objective global energy strategy is a gradual replacement of fossil fuels with less pollutive ones (renewables, atom).
