Energy efficiency: The low hanging fruit
Decoupling emissions from economic growth is seen as a key requisite for meeting climate targets. How do we achieve this? “Energy efficiency resources are infinitely expendable resources of ideas, depleting only stupidity, a very abundant resource,” says Amory Lovins.
Is it possible to have sustained economic growth whilst at the same time using less energy and generating fewer emissions? This is the basic question behind decoupling, whereby emissions and economic growth no longer need to go hand in hand.
Although research indicates that global economic growth has finally started outpacing CO2 emissions — data from the Global Carbon Project indicates that this trend has been occurring at double the rate over the past two decades — the feasibility of achieving sufficient decoupling worldwide is unclear, as highlighted in the most recent report from Working Group 3 of the Sixth Assessment by the IPCC, which was published in April 2022.
In fact, a recent report published in The Lancet Planetary Health, also reveals how high-income nations, characterized by their elevated per-capita CO2 emissions, are not managing to reduce carbon emissions in order to fulfill their commitments under the Paris Agreement while simultaneously pursuing overall economic growth at a fast enough pace, calling into question “green growth” claims.
Although research indicates that some countries have managed to achieve a certain amount of decoupling, the degree to which this has been done still leaves them well short of Paris-compliant rates. “At the achieved rates, these countries would on average take more than 220 years to reduce their emissions by 95%, emitting 27 times their remaining 1.5°C fair-shares in the process. To meet their 1.5°C fair-shares alongside continued economic growth, decoupling rates would on average need to increase by a factor of ten by 2025,” reads the Lancet report.
This calls into question recent claims that high income countries can lead the way and places further emphasis on finding solutions to decoupling. So, what are these solutions?
According to the International Energy Agency’ s latest report on how to achieve net zero in the energy sector, scaling up energy efficiency — alongside behavioural change and fuel switching — is one of the key mitigation options available to us which has the potential to double the rate of energy intensity improvements by 2030.
Energy efficiency is therefore seen as the “first fuel” in any clean energy transition as it represents the lowest hanging fruit as the quickest and most cost-effective CO2 mitigation option, which can both lower energy bills and strengthen energy security.
“Together, efficiency, electrification, behavioral change and digitalisation shape global energy intensity — the amount of energy required to produce a unit of GDP, a key measure of energy efficiency of the economy,” reads the IEA report, which also establishes energy efficiency as the single largest contributor to avoiding rising energy demand in the Net Zero Emissions by 2050 Scenario.
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