US is back with a vengeance
THIS IS not the time for energy transition, this is the time for energy addition,” said the US energy secretary Chris Wright to cheering applause. He was speaking at one of the largest energy conferences, ceraweek, at Houston last month, and the room was overowing with energy company heads and other experts. Attending the week-long conference, it was clear to me that our world has changed. Still, it is important to understand what and why this complete rejection of climate change policies is happening in a world that is warming rapidly with catastrophic weather impacts. This is not the time to bury our heads in the sand and think that the Donald Trump administration’s energy policy will not lead to massive changes in their world and ours. What is its reasoning for this shift? First, the gross national debt of the US has reached $36 trillion; interest payments are larger than what the country spends in defence. So, the answer is to “re-industrialize” and not “deindustrialize”, in the words of the US energy secretary. This thrust on onshore manufacturing will require more energy and more energy infrastructure. Second, China has taken the lead in many new areas, from supply chains and manufacturing of electric vehicles to solar. The Trump administration says it must not lose the Articial Intelligence (AI) race to China. This means building energy-intensive data centres at a pace not seen before. The country has some 5,000 data centres today which consume 3 per cent of its grid-based electricity. This is expected to increase exponentially, and data centres are projected to consume 8-12 per cent of the electricity by the end of the decade. All of this means more generation of electricity. Till now, as the country had reached its peak growth levels, electricity demand had more or less stagnated. Now it is expected to increase. Then, what will be the source of this “new” power generation? The Trump administration says it cannot depend on renewables to supply this electricity. Wright told the audience that renewables only met 3 per cent of US energy demand in spite of the huge investment, and so energy transition is not real. This, of course, is misleading because in terms of electricity generation, renewables have now overtaken coal in the US, contributing to 15-17 per cent of the electricity in the past year. But if total energy is taken as the measure, including the consumption of oil in transport and industry, the share of renewables in the energy mix decreases. But this is not semantics for the Trump administration. It is convinced that there is a need for reversing the previous administration’s energy policies that were “myopically focused on climate change”. It also says this has led to increased cost of electricity, adding to the burden of households (again, there is no data on this but then the game is about perception and persuasion). So energy growth will be from the fossil fuel natural gas (there is even talk of coal) and the US administration is fast-tracking all that is needed to increase its production and generation. This will add to emissions of greenhouse gases, but as the energy secretary said, carbon dioxide, unlike carbon monoxide, is not a pollutant. Climate change is just a footnote in the US' plans I am writing all this not to depress you, but to make it clear that we must not live in a fool’s paradise. This new brown-energy policy of the world’s largest historical polluter and second highest greenhouse gas emitter annually will have horrendous ramications. What should we do? Let’s continue to discuss this. DTE @sunitanar
