Implications of net energy-return-on-investment for a low-carbon energy transition
By L. King, Jeroen van den Bergh. Nature Energy, 2018
143 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Low-carbon energy transitions aim to stay within a carbon budget that limits potential climate change to 2 °C—or well below—through a substantial growth in renewable energy sources alongside improved energy efficiency and carbon capture and storage. Current scenarios tend to overlook their low net energy returns compared to the existing fossil fuel infrastructure. Correcting from gross to net energy, we show that a low-carbon transition would probably lead to a 24–31% decline in net energy per capita by 2050, which implies a strong reversal of the recent rising trends of 0.5% per annum. Unless vast end-use efficiency savings can be achieved in the coming decades, current lifestyles might be impaired. To maintain the present net energy returns, solar and wind renewable power sources should grow two to three times faster than in other proposals. We suggest a new indicator, ‘energy return on carbon’, to assist in maximizing the net energy from the remaining carbon budget. Energy systems are transitioning from fossil fuel sources to renewable sources with lower net energy generation. Using the concept of energy return on investment, this study finds that net energy per capita is likely to greatly decrease without more efficiency savings or energy infrastructure.
Subfields: Environmental Engineering, Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/24f2ffd301ce2d8075ebce2ef3760d2536c1ca79
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In Environmental Engineering
In Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment
Citations in the corpus
- Dynamic Energy Return on Energy Investment (EROI) and material requirements in scenarios of global transition to renewable energies (2019, background): “King and van den Bergh [59] analysed the implications in terms of net energy use of the scenarios proposed by the IEA & IRENA [60] (framed in gross energy), considering a range of EROI for energy technologies, identifying a potential “energy trap” scenario when considering EROI of technologies from ”