Three Ways of Looking at Electricity
No. 08 | Ma7 28, 2024
We have another year of global electricity data, and with it more evidence of wind and solar power’s role in today’s and tomorrow’s grid. Logistic curves are easy in theory but hard in practice; fun to model but rate to observe. The latest Global Electricity Review from independent energy think tank Ember has one of those rare curves, which I explore here.†
I have spent weeks playing with Ember’s data, and hours deep into charts. If there are thirteen ways of looking at at blackbird, there are at least as many (if not many multiples more) of looking at energy data.‡ Here are three ways that tell us about our present moment, and hint at the future.
Market share
In 2001, hydropower and other renewable resources were just under 19% of the global electricity mix. Wind and solar were all of 0.2% of the global supply mix, and “other renewables” like geothermal and biomass generated six times more.
By 2023, hydropower’s contribution to the global electricity mix had declined by almost three percentage points, though it had of course increased in absolute terms as global electricity demand increased. Other renewables doubled their share, to just under 2.7% of the mix.
Wind and solar expanded by more than 13% in absolute terms, to 13.35% of the global electricity mix in 2023. That places wind and solar just slightly below hydropower as a global power supply resource. In 2024, wind and solar will probably provide more power to global grids than hydropower.
Future supply mix trends to watch:
When wind and solar (3,900 terawatt-hours in 2023) catch up to natural gas (6,600 terawatt-hours in 2023)
When wind alone (2,300 terawatt-hours last year) surpasses nuclear power (2,700 terawatt-hours last year)
When solar (1,600 terawatt-hours in 2023) surpasses wind
When solar surpasses every other supply source
Increments of demand
In 2001, global electricity demand grew by 222 terawatt-hours. That year, fossil fuel-fired power increased by 212 terawatt-hours. Wind and solar generation increased by all of seven terawatt-hours.
Last year, global electricity demand grew almost three times as much - 627 terawatt-hours - and wind and solar generation increased by 513 terawatt-hours. Two decades ago, wind and solar could meet only 3% of incremental electricity demand growth; now, these two sources meet more than 80% of the global increase in electricity demand.
Speed and scale
One of the electricity sector’s received truths, so to speak, is the notion that nuclear power in its peak growth era added more absolute and relative power to the grid than any resource before it or since.
At its peak in the 1980s, nuclear generation was increasing my more than 200 terawatt-hours a year. In relative terms, nuclear’s ascent peaked in 1975, when its incremental generation was enough to increase nuclear’s share of generation by 1.5% in one year.
Wind and solar have since blown well past nuclear’s absolute power addition. Given the much larger scale of the system, however, their combined increase in share of electricity generation has only just reached the same milestone: 1.5% increasing share in one year.
But there is a sleeper in global electricity data, easily forgotten in today’s power mix but absolutely essential not to the power (literal and figurative) and geopolitics of its time: oil. Oil-fired power, in fact, both grew proportionally faster and represented more of the electricity mix than nuclear or renewables.
In 1971, oil’s share of the global electricity mix increased by more than three percent year-on-year. Two years later, in 1973, oil-fired power was just under a quarter of global power generation. We know what happened next, and why.
Oil-fired generators supplied about 800 terawatt-hours of electricity last year, while non-hydro renewables supplied five times as much. That spread will only widen over time. But it is worth remembering what a significant role oil played in electricity five decades ago, and how other resources, in particular coal and nuclear power, rotated around it in an age of oil shocks.
Ember’s Global Electricity Review is free, open-source, and richly-documented. I am proud to be a member of its advisory board.
The Ember Global Electricity Data Explorer is here.
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.
Wallace Stevens, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird
Other writing
“It’s a safe bet that anyone reading this post works with information. You either create it through your business processes, or absorb it to feed those processes. In fact, you probably both create and consume important information constantly, even if you have not thought of information in a producer-consumer way.
You are simultaneously information’s creator and its captive, and that latter state is a centuries-old pain point in business.”
Transforming information into intelligence at Halcyon.
“We are awash in energy transition and decarbonization information, and of a type and volume that overwhelms any human information capability to index, classify, or rank. As we put it internally: the well-meaning methods of disclosing a torrent of information amount to a denial of service attack on those building the energy and infrastructure future.”
30,000 times 45V at Halcyon.
