More work needed to find and develop new energy technologies
It’s going to take some serious research and development to hit the UK’s climate targets. That was the message from Professor Jim Skea, Research Director of the UK Energy Research Centre (UKERC) at an event in London last week. The technologies necessary to decarbonise currently aren’t up to scratch, he argued – cutting emissions is going to take more research and development (R&D), and it’s going to need to be better targeted.
Snapshot of energy R&D
While it might be nice to think that human society is forward-thinking when it comes to finding new ways to produce energy, history suggests that we generally have rather more basic motives – with figures from the International Energy Agency (IEA) showing that spending on energy R&D closely tracks what the price of oil happens to be doing:
Energy R&D in IEA countries. Figure source: presentation by Prof. Skea. Data source: IEA
Image - Oil prices 1970-2010 (note)
Price of oil per barrel ($). Costs in 2011 prices in light green, costs in real terms in dark green. Source: BP Statistical Review of World Energy 2012
In the late 1970s, with the world in the grips of an oil crisis, the level of spending on finding alternative ways to generate heat and electricity rocketed. But as oil prices fell, the desire to do things differently appears to have ebbed away.
In the UK the picture was even starker. Huge investment in nuclear R&D in the seventies and early eighties faded, and at one point in the early noughties IEA figures show that the UK was spending just £30 million per year on energy R&D:
Energy R&D in the UK. Figure source: presentation by Prof. Skea. Data source: IEA
In fact, the IEA data suggests it’s only over the last decade that spending on energy R&D has really begun to climb again in a sustained way. Professor Skea noted that the UK is now spending more on energy R&D annually than we were back in the 1970s, in real terms.
Meeting climate targets needs R&D
Although in the past changes in the oil price might have been the main driver of increased R&D spending, nowadays decarbonisation is also on the agenda.
Meeting a global target of halving carbon emissions by 2050 will require major advances in the technologies used to generate electricity, Professor Skea said. And according to the IEA there has been a change in what R&D spending is focusing on, with research on energy efficiency, renewables and carbon capture and storage (CCS) all growing. The ‘other’ category in the chart above mostly represents efforts that have gone into smart grids, while spending on nuclear remains relatively low.
Image - Technology mix for emissions reductions (note)
The IEA’s breakdown of technologies needed to meet emissions reductions. Source: IEA
The IEA predicts that just under half of emissions reductions by 2050 will need to come from changes to the electricity sector. Professor Skea said that this will have to happen through the development of renewables, fossil fuels with carbon capture and storage (CCS), and a bit more nuclear. The rest will need to come from improvements in energy efficiency.
The graph above demonstrates that R&D spending must continue to increase, especially given that CCS isn’t yet available at commercial scale. With this in mind, it may be that decarbonisation will come to be the primary driver of energy innovation and R&D spending in the future.