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Over the 1971 -- 2015 time period, total energy use grew by a factor of about 2.4. Over this same time period, global population grew by a factor of 1.95, indicating that per capita energy use has gone down slightly. But over this same time global electricity production has grown by a factor of 4.5. Thus per capita use of electricity grows at a significantly larger rate than per capita energy use. Per capita energy use is also time-period dependent as summarized in Table 2:
Table 2 shows that there was a sharp rise in per capita energy use right after WW II which then stabilized by the end of the 20th century. The subsequent rise post-2000 is due to increasing development in previously undeveloped areas. Figure 2 shows that global electricity use was a factor of 1.71 higher in 2015 compared to 2000. Over this same time population increased by a factor of only 1.2. This is likely another indicator of increasing electrical use by the developing world.
For the most part, fossil fuels have seen little to no evolution in their use in the heating and transportation sectors. Therefore, evolution has occurred only in the electricity generation sector as shown in the 1973 vs 2015 comparison of Figure 3.
From this figure, three notable trends are apparent:
- The use of natural gas fired electricity has just about doubled its contribution to the world's electrical portfolio. The world has de facto chosen this path rather than the renewable energy path, over this time frame.
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Nuclear power has almost tripled its contribution to world energy. However, it seems unlikely that this rapid rate of growth can be sustained (see more in Section 3)
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Renewable sources of electricity generation only increased their contribution to the world's electricity portfolio by a mere 1.5% over this 32--year period. The lack of appropriate technology over this time frame is a contributing element to this slow growth of renewables. In particular, large unit wind turbine capacity did not occur until approximately 2005, but since then wind power has steadily grown, particularly in Germany, the UK, China and the US.
The results shown in table 3 are indicate the following:
- The OECD, aside from wind, has not shown very much growth in resources devoted to electricity use. Thus, OECD countries are increasingly reliant on net imports of electricity sources and that has with it associated political instability in the world.
- China is clearly ramping up its coal production and by now (2018) is responsible for about 50% of global coal production, yet China continues to import coal (primarily from Australia). At the same time, China is the clear world leader in ramping up renewable electricity generation by way of hydro and wind. The Three Gorges Dam, completed in 2008, is the world's largest at 18,000 MW. Since then, additional turbines and powerhouses have been added to make it a 22,500 MW Facility. Future plans, yet to be realized, are to harness some 65,000 MWs of power from rivers on the Tibetan Plateau. Also, in 2015 China added more wind power than the ROW combined.
- The Middle East starting discovering large pockets of natural gas (NG) in the early 1970s at a time when that resource was not immediately needed. These gas fields are generally located in or near the waters of the Persian Gulf. The country of Qatar is ideally located with respect to these off-shore gas fields and one of the first countries to export this product on a large scale. The overall large rate of growth for NG production in the Middle East has arguably been the single biggest factor in maintaining our use of fossil fuels as preference over investing in renewables.
- The ROW is discovering sources other than traditional coal and oil. Although this region has more limited resources, their development of new hydro and wind resources is a bright spot for future changes in the global energy mix.