{Earth}What are the biggest energy challenges facing humanity?

What are the biggest energy challenges facing humanity?

This concerns major political, economic and social issues
A recent report by the World Energy Council argues that the Energy industry is facing a decades-long transformation. However, the changes that are taking place are far more far-reaching, with major political, economic and social implications, and may require each of us to make some fundamental changes in our behavior.

There is no doubt that changing our sources of energy is one of the great challenges facing the planet today. BBC Future Now recently sat down with a panel of experts to discuss what obstacles we must overcome Now and what technologies might provide the answers.

Perhaps the biggest question posed by scientists, policy experts and companies in the interviews is how to respond to the expected surge in energy demand in the coming decades.

Jim Watson, director of the UK Energy Research Centre, explains: "there are still a lot of people in the world -- about 1.2bn -- who do not have access to modern Energy services. "There is going to be a big increase in demand in Asia, Latin America and parts of Africa."

There are still many people in the world -- about 1.2 billion -- who do not have access to modern energy services. Asia, Latin America and parts of Africa will see big increases in demand.
Jim Watson is director of the UK Energy Research Centre
There are still about three billion people in the world who cook and heat their homes using simple stoves or burning wood, animal waste or coal. As developing countries become more industrialized, they will need access to reliable electricity supplies. In countries that have entered a period of rapid development, the expansion of the middle class and associated lifestyles will lead to increased energy consumption as wealth increases.

Martin Freer, director of the Birmingham Energy Institute at the university of Birmingham, said: "globally, the biggest Energy challenge will be refrigeration. As the middle class population of India and China grows, the demand for air conditioners will increase accordingly. According to the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, demand for cooling will outstrip demand for heating by the middle of the century. In fact, it is estimated that world energy consumption will increase by nearly 50 percent by 2040.

But how can we meet this growing demand in the face of a global agreement to reduce carbon dioxide emissions without losing ice caps and sinking low-lying areas below sea level?

In fact, the picture of the world is not necessarily that bad. A fifth of the world's primary energy supply already comes from renewable sources such as wind, solar, hydro and geothermal. The sector is expected to grow at an annual rate of 2.6 percent through 2040.

Until recently, the main source of renewable energy was hydropower, with the fastest growth coming from wind. But with new advances in solar panel technology, which allows them to generate electricity even on cloudy days, solar power has surged.

In the UK, for example, solar power has added more than 12 gigawatts to the grid in the past 12 months - the equivalent of a full coal-fired power station. Global solar power generation grew by 50% last year. Researchers in many countries are working on new photovoltaic cells that can be printed on flexible sheets to further reduce the cost of solar power.

Image copyrightGETTY IMAGES
The Image caption
Since the dawn of commercial oil drilling, we've extracted more than 135 billion tons of oil to power our cars, fuel our power plants and heat our homes
But plugging these new energy producers into the existing grid will not be easy.

"One of the big challenges of deploying intermittent renewables like wind and solar is its impact on the grid," Watson said. In many western countries, the grid that powers homes and offices has been around for decades and aims to provide steady, reliable electricity. However, wind and solar power are so dependent on the weather -- and, in the case of solar, the time of day -- that they do not necessarily provide most of the electricity during peak demand.

"Traditionally, summer has been much smoother for grid operators than winter," Watson explains. Now, although demand is low in the summer, solar power is bringing peak generation. They have to balance that because they can't store a lot of power yet. It's a new way of doing business for them."

The solution in most countries is to stockpile more reliable energy. This means that nuclear, natural gas and even coal-fired power stations are idle or running low, but they can always boost output if the wind drops or the sun falls below the horizon.

According to Robert Armstrong, director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Energy Initiative, that would limit the amount of renewable Energy actually used. Armstrong's model suggests that without energy storage, only about 10 percent of the electricity we use would be met by solar power. "The reason is that solar energy is concentrated in the middle of the day, so you need facilities in the evening and in the morning to meet demand. There are also questions about who will build it and who will pay for it."

One solution is to expand the distribution of the grid - creating so-called "supergrids". The basic idea is that if energy is Shared more widely, a particular part of the grid is more likely to be illuminated by the sun or windy.

These schemes envisage connecting the power grids of several countries so that electricity can be Shared among them. Supergrid proposals have been discussed in Europe and the United States in recent decades.

There have even been recent calls for a Global power grid, an idea backed by China's state grid, which has formed the Global Energy Interconnection Development and Cooperation Organization.

Some countries are already taking action. Britain is building new underwater power connections to power grids in France, Belgium, Denmark, Ireland and Norway, capable of importing and exporting 11 gigawatts of electricity. In Asia, Japan, Russia, China, Mongolia and South Korea are also moving toward building supergrids.