Today's blog was "phoned in" by Sean Cuthbert, one of the Lloyd's Register Group's leading climate change experts. Here is the audio file to listen to Sean's recap of the IEA meeting and his discussions with Executive Director Tanaka, as well as Head of the IEA Energy Efficiency Unit, Dr Jollands and Mr Kerr, the Senior Energy Analyst with their Energy Technology Policy Division at the IEA.
Here is the transcript of Sean's phone blog.
IEA Briefing and the Rebound Effect
Sean Cuthbert
Good morning I’m Sean Cuthbert from Lloyd’s Register Energy. And this morning I attended the International Energy Agency’s (IEA) morning session with regards to renewable energy, the energy outlook to 2050 and essentially a summary of their technology outlook reports as well.
The morning started off with the brief address by Executive Director Tanaka who talked about the road energy outlook for 2009, that was released a couple of months ago. He highlighted that post Copenhagen there will need to be a revised outlook and he expects the IEA to publish that in the Spring of 2010. What he stressed and actually, what is just started kicking off right now is that the CO2 emissions must be de-coupled from GDP growth if we are to achieve any of the emissions reductions that have been talked about in Copenhagen over the past couple of weeks.
Just taking off right now is the talk by the Energy Minister of Sweden, which is addressing that specific question of de-coupling CO2 emissions from GDP growth as the Swedish government has taken big strides in that direction and she is giving an overview of the successes and the things to look out for in taking that journey.
Just in summary there were six sessions this morning. A couple of them are very applicable to what I have talked about in both my interviews and my blogs on previous occasions. I will start first with the energy sector implications post Copenhagen and what we are looking at in terms of requirements 2020 and also 2050. Essentially the IEA is predicting 77% additional growth from fossil fuels up to 2050 and coal will have most of that growth. Obviously that’s very much a concern for CO2 emissions as I talked about in episode four with the large amount of CO2 emissions from coal plants. To mitigate this, the IEA is promoting a cap and trade system very similar to what has already been done for the EU ETS and also what is being done in the US. And within that cap and trade system they’re looking at a 2020 carbon price, a stable carbon price of about fifty dollars per ton. That is aggressive and it is also optimistic, certainly within the discussions here in Copenhagen that would seem to be optimistic. However Business As Usual, or BAU as it’s called here, is really not an option. This exceeds the IPCCC estimate in terms of Business As Usual giving a six degree rise in temperature by 2050, obviously the adaptation costs for that will be excessive.
One of the other sessions that was of particular interest was the Energy Efficiency session which talked about the twenty five energy efficiency recommendations over seven sectors that the IEA have provided to its government members. These are essentially policy actions and what the presentation was about was evaluating those policy actions to assess the implementation and whether that implementation has been successful in terms of achieving the energy efficiency goals.
I asked the presenter at the end with regards to the projections for CO2 savings, or CO2 emission savings or CO2 mitigation as it’s called, whether those projections actually accounted for the rebound effect, whether that rebound effect is direct, indirect or macro economics. This is the rebound effect that I described in episode four. The presenter replied that saying in a very definitive way that yes they did account for the rebound effect although of course there are many uncertainties with the rebound effect as there is with any projection. However, their accounting of that rebound effect is based on a meta-analysis done by the UK Centre for Energy Research and they essentially came to the conclusion that the rebound effect in various sectors will vary either from 0% or nothing all the way up to greater than 100%. So, that means that by introducing energy efficiency you actually increase your energy use by over a hundred percent, which is obviously something that we don’t want to do, very interesting results there.
Post the morning sessions, I did have a chance to talk with the Executive Director Tanaka with regards to the IEA’s role and stakeholder engagement and technology adoption. I used the example of carbon capture and storage where of course the technology adoption and stakeholder engagement or as we could term it is as a public acceptance of CO2 storage and Executive Director Tanaka was very forthcoming with the IEA’s role in that yes they are definitely looking at stakeholder engagement, they want to help their member companies with that, they want to help their member companies help the public to understand the safety and risks associated with CCS using the same example.
I then had a chance to talk with Mr Tom Kerr who is a Senior Energy Analyst with their Energy Technology Policy Division at the IEA and Mr Kerr is the leader their Energy Technology Roadmaps that they produce. Interesting about the conversation with Mr Kerr is that IEA has realised that sociable behaviour plays a significant role in technology adoption and the implementation of CO2 mitigation policies. As Mr Kerr put it, “IEA has historically been a group of economists and technology people.” Now they have realised that they need to broaden that and look at more the societal behaviours that are associated with technology adoption and also moving to a clean energy world. Mr Kerr has invited Lloyd’s Register to be part of that review process where they are publishing a book in probably about September 2010 that will have a rather significant chapter on societal behaviours and technology options and Mr Kerr has invited us with our expertise in corporate cultures, corporate safety culture, understanding human behaviours and organisational behaviours to be part of that review process.
I also had a chance to talk with Dr Nigel Jollands. He is the Head of the Energy Efficiency Unit within the IEA and I had a chance to talk with Dr Jollands in further depth with regards to energy efficiency and the rebound effect as it turns out Mr Jollands is very well versed of course in the rebound effect and is something that he has been asked on other occasions previously. He has asked me to contact him with regards to understanding the rebound effect in greater detail and how the IEA accounts for that in their projections.
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