According to researchers from the University of South Australia, the global energy system is going to be faced with an inevitable trade-off between the urgent need to fight climate change and the risk of energy shortfalls. Such was the conclusion made by Associate Professor James Hopeward and civil engineering honors students Shannon O’Connor, Richard Davis and Peter Akiki. Together, they have developed a new research tool to evaluate various scenarios of global energy development.
The new model, dubbed GREaSE (Global Renewable Energy and Sectoral Electrification), was created to analyze scenarios that are not covered by conventional energy and climate models. The researchers started working on it in 2023, with the results recently published in the journal Energies.
Using GREaSE algorithms, the authors simulated a range of plausible future scenarios, from a rapid decline in fossil fuel production to scenarios with varying degrees of energy consumption and electrification. Their general conclusion was always the same: the transition to renewable energy sources is inevitable. It will be either a conscious step to reduce greenhouse gas emissions or a forced measure caused by the depletion of fossil fuel reserves.
However, the achievement of the climate goals set out in the Paris Agreement, especially when it comes to curbing global warming to 1.5°C, requires quick emission cuts. This is extremely hard to do: even with a rapid expansion of renewable energy, it will not be able to offset the volumes lost due to the phasing out of coal, oil and gas quickly enough. This could lead to a 20–30-year gap between energy supply and demand.
While renewable energy is expected to meet most of our energy needs by 2050, we will have to rethink our approaches to energy consumption and be ready for temporary constraints until then. The study emphasizes that abandoning climate goals to continue using fossil fuels will only delay the inevitable transition and exacerbate its consequences. James Hopeward warns that nuclear energy is not a solution to the problem either, since its potential is limited and it would scale up even more slowly than wind and solar.
“When we hear about climate change, we’re typically presented with two opposing scenario archetypes: unchecked growth in fossil fuels, leading to climate disaster, or utopian scenarios of renewable energy abundance. We would like to consider a more realistic option in between, and to understand what risks it carries. 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 climate change,” he says.
The researchers hope that their simple, free-of-charge and open model will help expand the conversation on the future of the global energy industry and climate policy.
