Greasing the wheels of the energy transition to address climate change and fossil fuels phase out

The worldwide vitality system could also be confronted with an inescapable trade-off between urgently addressing local weather change versus avoiding an vitality shortfall, in line with a brand new vitality state of affairs device developed by College of South Australia researchers and published within the open-access journal Energies.

The World Renewable Vitality and Sectoral Electrification mannequin, dubbed “GREaSE,” has been developed by UniSA Affiliate Professor James Hopeward with three civil engineering graduates.

“In essence, it’s an exploratory tool, designed to be simple and easy for anyone to use, to test what-if scenarios that aren’t covered by conventional energy and climate models,” Assoc Prof Hopeward says.

Three Honors college students—Shannon O’Connor, Richard Davis and Peter Akiki—began engaged on the mannequin in 2023, hoping to reply a vital hole within the vitality and local weather debate.

“When we hear about climate change, we’re typically presented with two opposing scenario archetypes,” Assoc Prof Hopeward says.

“On the one hand, there are scenarios of unchecked growth in fossil fuelsleading to climate disaster, while on the other hand there are utopian scenarios of renewable energy abundance.”

The scholars posed the query: what if the extra possible actuality is someplace in between the 2 extremes? And whether it is, what may we be lacking when it comes to dangers to individuals and the planet?

After graduating, the staff continued to work with Assoc Prof Hopeward to develop and refine the mannequin, culminating within the publication of “GREaSE” in Energies.

Utilizing the mannequin, the researchers have simulated a variety of believable future eventualities, together with speedy curtailment of fossil fuels, excessive and low per-capita demand, and completely different eventualities of electrification.

In response to Richard Davis, “a striking similarity across scenarios is the inevitable transition to renewable energy—whether it’s proactive to address carbon emissionsor reactive because fossil fuels start running short.”

However reaching the speedy cuts needed to satisfy the 1.5°C targets set out within the Paris Settlement presents a severe problem.

As Ms. O’Connor factors out, “even with as we speak’s speedy growth of renewable energythe modeling suggests it could’t develop quick sufficient to fill the hole left by the phase-out of fossil fuels, making a 20-to-30-year hole between demand and provide.

“By 2050 or so, we could potentially expect renewable supply to catch up, meaning future demand could largely be met by renewables, but while we’re building that new system, we might need to rebalance our expectations around how much energy we’re going to have to power our economies.”

The modeling doesn’t present that emissions targets must be deserted in favor of scaling up fossil fuels. The researchers say this is able to “push the transition a few more years down the road.”

Assoc Prof Hopeward says it’s also unlikely that nuclear power might fill the hole, because of its small world potential.

“Even if the world’s recoverable uranium resources were much larger, it would scale up even more slowly than renewables like solar and wind,” he says.

“We have to face facts: our long-term energy future is dominated by renewables. We could transition now and take the hit in terms of energy supply, or we could transition later, once we’ve burned the last of the fossil fuel. We would still have to deal with essentially the same transformation, just in the midst of potentially catastrophic local weather change.

“It’s a bit like being told by your doctor to eat healthier and start exercising. You’ve got the choice to avoid making the tough changes now, and just take your chances with surviving the heart attack later, or you get on with what you know you need to do. We would argue that we really need to put our global energy consumption on a diet, ASAP.”

The researchers have designed the mannequin to be easy, free and open sourcewithin the hope that it sparks a wider dialog round vitality and local weather futures.