[MUSIC] Welcome back to 21st century energy transition. How do we make it work? In Lesson two, we're going to talk about past energy transitions and what lessons we can take from them to help us move into the future. Initially, humans had only the power generated from their own muscles, supplemented by primitive tools. Life was short, brutal and cold. By the time we tamed fire, we could cook and have some warmth in cold climates, particularly important as the ice ages advanced over North America, Europe, and Asia. Domesticating and harnessing the power of animals greatly increased the amount of energy available and supported the evolution and advancement of agriculture. Another major advance in human welfare. Harnessing the power of water and wind with early water wheels and windmills was another key advance in generating mechanical energy to pump water and mill grain. Coal provided portability and high energy density to power steam locomotives, revolutionizing land transportation while replacing sailing vessels for commerce and war at sea. Even though steam ships could go more places faster and more directly than sailing vessels, it took decades for steam to displace sales as the primary cargo movers at sea. Commercial drilling for oil and gas came on the scene in the mid 18 hundreds and continues to provide a huge share of humanity's energy needs today. Modern nuclear and hydroelectric installations provide immense quantities of electrical power available on demand. Even the large-scale hydro has been available almost 100 years and nuclear almost 50. Together, they provide less electricity than coal in 2021. Throughout history, humanity has progressed through the adoption of more and more powerful and abundant energy sources. Each transition was driven by something that could do the job better and cheaper than the previous source. But transition takes time and is still ongoing today. In Canada, we could not have the high quality of food, shelter, comfort, and transportation that we take for granted today without these modern energy sources. However, in many parts of the world, people still don't have access to modern energy supply. We call this energy poverty and we will talk about it later in the course. When we look at factors to be considered in building an efficient, effective energy transition. While early transition spanned centuries, this graph of historical energy consumption in the United States shows that we have moved relatively quickly in the past 200 years from primitive biomass, wood, and animal products to coal and then to petroleum, oil, and natural gas and nuclear as the primary global energy sources. While these latest energy transitions have been more rapid, it still took decades for each new source to displace the last energy leader. And even when new energy sources became the leaders, the old energy sources remained in play, creating more diverse energy systems. Today, fossil fuels, coal, oil, and gas still provide more than 80% of the total energy consumed worldwide. Renewables, wind, solar, hydro, geothermal, and modern biofuels are growing. But not sufficiently to cut significantly into the share of energy generated by fossil fuels. And the overall demand for energy means that even with these alternatives our fossil fuel consumption continues to rise. As we can see from the record of energy supply for 2009 through 2019. Here's another interesting way to visualize recent energy transitions in the G20, the world's 20 leading economies. As we can see in 1965, oil in red and coal in pink powered the world with contributions from hydroelectricity in orange and natural gas in blue in different countries. Now, let's play it forward and watch the changes as the years roll by. [SOUND]. By 1997, nuclear in yellow was playing a significant role and natural gas had become very important. Together, they had cut into market share for both oil and coal, renewables were just appearing as talk turned to climate change and the Kyoto protocol. The first international commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions was signed. Let's keep going. [SOUND]. Over the next 22 years to 2019, oil, natural gas, and coal continue to dominate the energy picture in every single G 20 nation. Nuclear share fell off after the accidents at Chornobyl, three mile Island, and Fukushima. Hydroelectricity continued to be important, but it shared declined as other energy sources grew faster. Renewable energy sources also had a visible impact in 18 of the 20 countries, most notably with offshore wind, in Denmark and the UK and biofuels in Brazil think about that for a minute. 22 years since the Kyoto agreement, when most nations of the world committed to reduce GHG emissions and adopt renewables, only three countries source more than 10% of their energy from renewables. [MUSIC] Vaclav Smil is a highly accomplished researcher and writer and apparently is Bill Gates's favorite author. I've read many of his books too, although they contain so much information, it can be hard work to get through them. More importantly, Smill is the world's foremost scholar on the history of energy transitions. He has many lessons to teach on how energy transitions start, how quickly they proceed, and how humanity's energy supply develops. As a result, Dr Smil has charted energy transitions since the 1800s and here we see one of his very insightful summaries. In 1840, coal supplied 5% of the world's energy supply. It revolutionized industry transportation and heating hugely increasing the amount of energy available to humanity. After 60 years, it supplied 50% of the world's energy. In 1915, oil supplied 5% of the world's energy. Over the next 60 years, it supported the transition from horse and buggy to automobiles and became the fuel of choice for rail and on the sea. Playing an important role in world wars I and II. In that time it grew to supply 40% of the world's energy needs. Natural gas arrived on the scene in 1930. And over the next 60 years grew to a 25% share of the world's energy supply, displacing other fuels for heating buildings and power generation. Its share has continued to grow through 2021 as abundant cheap gas from hydraulic fracturing or fracking displaced coal and emerged as a primary fuel for electrical generation. Modern renewables, wind, solar, geothermal, and liquid biofuels achieved 5% of world energy supply only in about 2015. While their growth has been explosive, they have a long way to go, particularly as other energy sources have grown as well. Comparing the 60-year growth curves from previous transitions, it appears dubious that renewables can supply 50% of energy supply in that time. In a series of recent papers, Smil has made some important observations about the 21st-century energy transition to date. Let's think about these points. History shows that neither the dominant sources of primary energy nor the common energy converters can be displaced rapidly and completely in short periods of time. Every past energy transition has taken decades and no energy source has reached 50% of the world's energy supply since coal did it at the turn of the 20th century. Global energy transition has been, so far, overwhelmingly a shift in electricity generation that has had only a small effect on the decarbonization of the overall primary energy supply. Most of what we hear about low emission energy sources is about power generation, wind, solar, and other renewables replacing coal and gas-fired electricity. 25 years after Kyoto were only now seriously considering how to replace fossil fuels in industrial processes like manufacturing steel and making cement. The Toyota Prius hybrid electric vehicle was released the same year as Kyoto 1997. But today electric vehicles have only a small but growing global market share. Global growth of new renewables has not been extraordinarily rapid. Progress has been gradual even in the case of the most determined, deliberate, and costly shift achieved through Germany's Energiewende. Here are the German data for the past 30 years, renewables in yellow have grown at a remarkable rate. And while their contribution to electrical power generation is substantial, they are still a relatively small player in the total energy picture. A very similar story can be told in most high-income countries. [MUSIC] So let's ask ourselves, why do energy transitions happen? Do we have the appropriate motivations today for the 21st-century energy transition? Past energy transitions have been driven by new energy sources becoming available that offer big benefits over the status quo. Such as a new source replaces dwindling supplies as when coal replaced wood after the force of England had been decimated. Or petroleum replaced whale oil as the whales were hunted towards extinction in the 19th century. A new source is cheaper like natural gas replacing coal for power generation. A new source is less polluting like nuclear and natural gas, electrical generation, replacing coal. And above all, a new source offers better energy density. We can do a lot more things with energy and concentrated forms. Like travel 500 km on a tank of gasoline, something we could have dreamed of before oil. So are these drivers for energy transition happening now? The world is not running short of coal, gas, uranium, or oil, although some sources are getting more difficult and expensive to find. There are many analyses comparing costs of installing different new energy sources. As illustrated in this chart from Lazard.com, which shows broad ranges of prices per megawatt hour of electricity delivered. However, we must consider reliability of our power sources as well. It doesn't matter how cheap the power is if it's not available because the sources produce only intermittently. We'll explore these questions further. This is the big 21st-century transition driver. Reducing greenhouse gas emissions and pollution. While some people call carbon dioxide pollution, it is in fact an essential component of the atmosphere supporting life. And there is no scientifically defined optimum level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. It is, however, a strong greenhouse gas. Pollution from coal, oil, and to a lesser extent natural gas consists of very small particles that make up smoke or particulates and toxic gasses such as nitrogen oxides and sulfur dioxide, as we see in this picture of big city smog. I'll repeat the point reduction of GHG emissions and pollution is an indisputable and important driver for the 21st-century energy transition. But we also need to ask questions about environmental issues arising from producing the resources and equipment, we need to reduce emissions and pollutants. Again, we'll cover that later in the course. Another huge question with much to discuss. Let's hear about energy density from Osama Baig a nuclear engineer with Ontario power generation. >> Now let's jump into an average power plant size, which is around 500 megawatts, and say this 500-megawatt plant was being refueled every single year. Three different fuel sources which is cold, uranium vision, and also hydrogen fusion. So coal, natural uranium and also deuterium and trillium, which is the fuel source for nuclear fusion reactions. If you were to fuel a 500-megawatt plant for one whole year on coal, it would take up 21,000 real cart loads of coal. That's a lot of coal. Now, if you compare that to uranium vision, it would only take up one rail cart load to fuel that 500-megawatt plant for one whole year. And lastly, for nuclear fusion, the fuel source deuterium and trillium, it would only take up one pickup truck worth of fuel. >> Solar and wind facilities occupy huge areas of land and sea because of their very low energy density. We can't power a commercial airliner with batteries but the range of battery electric vehicles is improving rapidly as energy density improves in batteries. Nuclear fission and nuclear fusion have tremendously high energy density as we'll discuss later in the course. So, now, that we have lots of lessons from past energy transitions to think about as we move forward, Let's wrap this lesson up with some predictions from Vaclav Smil. Here are two predictions to think about. Is Vaclav Smil right? Will the 21st-century energy transition follow a similar course to energy transitions throughout human history? Or can we make it happen more quickly given the many issues humanity faces today? Well, that's what this course is all about. Before we address those questions directly, however, we're going to talk about the major energy sources available to us today, old and new around the world. Will be much better prepared to assess the transition once we understand the tools we have available to us to make it happen. [MUSIC]
