10 Jun (NucNet): The share of low-carbon energy technologies, including nuclear, would need to increase eight percent by 2020 under a new scenario designed to “keep the door open” to limiting the average global temperature increase to no more than two degrees Celsius, the International Energy Agency has said.
The agency said that in its “4-for-2 °C Scenario”, the share of low-carbon technologies including renewables, nuclear and CCS, reaches 40 percent in 2020, up from 32 percent today.
But this is still “well short” of the required level of almost 80 percent in 2035 under the “450 Scenario”, which shows what is needed to set the global energy sector on a course compatible with “a near 50 percent chance” of limiting the long-term increase in average global temperature to 2 °C.
In the 4-for-2 °C Scenario͕, presented in a report released by the IEA today, the agency proposes four policy measures that can “help keep the door open to the 2 °C target through to 2020 at no net economic cost”.
The four policies are:
- Adopting specific energy efficiency measures (49 percent of the emissions savings);
- Limiting the construction and use of the least-efficient coal-fired power plants (21 percent);
- Minimising methane (CH4) emissions from upstream oil and gas production (18 percent);
- Accelerating the (partial) phase-out of subsidies to fossil-fuel consumption (12 percent).
To achieve targets set in the 450 Scenario, electricity generation from nuclear power needs to increase by almost 1,800 terawatt hours in 2035 – or about 40 percent – over the level achieved in the 4-for-2 °C Scenario.
The report, which highlights the need for intensive action before 2020, says governments have decided collectively that the world needs to limit the average global temperature increase to no more than 2 °C, but negotiations on any final agreement have not finished. According to the IEA, any agreement will not emerge before 2015 and new legal obligations will not begin before 2020.
Today’s report says the energy sector is the single largest source of climate-changing greenhouse gas emissions and limiting these is an essential focus of action.
Amid major international economic preoccupations, there are worrying signs that the issue of climate change has slipped down the policy agenda, the report says.
Global greenhouse gas emissions are increasing rapidly and, in May 2013, carbon-dioxide (CO2) levels in the atmosphere exceeded 400 parts per million for the first time in several hundred millennia.
Warning that the world is not on track to limit the global temperature increase to 2 °C, the IEA urged governments to swiftly enact the four policies.
“Climate change has quite frankly slipped to the back burner of policy priorities. But the problem is not going away – quite the opposite,” IEA executive director Maria van der Hoeven said in London at the launch of the report.
Noting that the energy sector accounts for around two-thirds of global greenhouse-gas emissions, Ms van der Hoeven added: “This report shows that the path we are on is more likely to result in a temperature increase of between 3.6 °C and 5.3 °C, but also finds that much more can be done to tackle energy-sector emissions without jeopardising economic growth.”
The IEA report, “World Energy Outlook Special Report, Redrawing the Energy-Climate Map”, is online:
www.worldenergyoutlook.org/media/weowebsite/2013/energyclimatemap/RedrawingEnergyClimateMap.pdf
Follow NucNet on Twitter @nucnetupdates
