Energy Sector Not Ready for Rapid Rise of Renewables, Analysts Say
Energy Sector Not Ready for Rapid Rise of Renewables, Analysts Say - Yale E360
The rapid growth of wind, solar, and electric vehicles means that demand for fossil fuels is likely to peak this decade. Is the energy sector ready for the transition?
A survey of clean energy firms by the International Energy Agency (IEA) finds that not enough workers are pursuing the training needed to keep up with the rising number of skilled jobs. There is a great need, in particular, for trained electricians. “The unprecedented acceleration that we have seen in clean energy transitions is creating millions of new job opportunities all over the world — but these are not being filled quickly enough,” IEA chief Fatih Birol said in a statement.
At the same time, the oil and gas sector faces the prospect of being left behind by the shift to renewable energy. Currently, oil and gas firms account for just 1 percent of money invested in clean energy globally, according to the IEA. If countries meet their targets to ramp up renewables, then oil and gas companies could lose 25 percent of their value, analysts estimate.
The IEA finds that the oil and gas companies can apply some of their existing expertise to clean energy, transitioning, for instance, from drilling oil wells to drilling for geothermal energy, or from erecting offshore oil rings to erecting offshore wind turbines.
“The transition to clean energy is happening worldwide and it’s unstoppable,” Birol said. “It’s not a question of ‘if’, it’s just a matter of ‘how soon’ — and the sooner the better for all of us.”
If the world radically accelerates the transition to renewables, doing what’s needed to keep warming to 1.5 degrees C, then by 2030, the IEA says, the energy sector will add two jobs in clean energy for every one job it loses in fossil fuels.
ALSO ON YALE E360
Shifting Political Winds Threaten Progress on Europe’s Green Goals
Related Knowledge Center: ENERGY BASICS: renewables
Renewable energy sources — once the fuel of the future, then practical in specific, narrow applications — are increasingly economic mainstream sources of power generation. Hydropower was long the mainstay of U.S. renewable electricity generation, although wind power surpassed hydro for the first time in 2019, and solar continues its rapid growth. The continued growth of wind and solar, with their fluctuations, is tied in part to improvements in storage technology: batteries.