Renewable Energy and Climate Change Mitigation: An Overview of the IPCC Special Report

Abstract

Renewable energy systems currently meet only around 7–8 % of the total global heating, cooling, electricity and transport end-use energy demands (Traditional biomass provides around 6.3 % of global primary energy and all other renewables around 6.7 %, but end-use energy is a more useful statistic used in this context). However, rapid growth in renewable energy has been apparent in recent years as a result of improved technology performance efficiencies and lower costs being demonstrated. Given appropriate support policies, renewables have the economic potential to significantly increase their share of total energy supply over the next few decades. The IPCC Special Report on this subject released in May 2011, covered cost trends, opportunities and barriers. This chapter summarises the findings of that report (The author, who was a Co-ordinating Lead Author for “Integration” of this IPCC report and co-author of the Summary for Policy Makers (SPM) and Technical Summary, acknowledges the inputs from around 150 co-authors and staff of the IPCC Technical Support Unit who contributed to writing the report and producing the SPM on which this chapter is largely based. See http://srren.org for the full report, list of authors, and extensive list of references that support the assessment). Most renewable energy resources are dependent on the local climate so there is a risk that they may be impacted by climate change. The size of the technical potentials of renewable energy resources and their geographic distribution could be affected, but there remains much uncertainty. The potential of renewable energy resources, even if significantly reduced, will still far exceed the projected global demand for primary energy, at least out to 2050. All mitigation scenarios show that renewable energy could provide a large share of energy demand in all regions.