Energy policies within one country can have significant unforeseen consequences, two UK researchers warn. For example, ambitious renewables targets in western countries could have serious repercussions in developing nations. Their analysis points to a ‘pressing need’ for synchronising policies across the economy as a whole, including assessing consequences overseas.
Oliver Inderwildi of the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment at the University of Oxford, and David Ward of the Culham Science Centre, used the UK target for renewable energy as an example of how one policy can have dramatic potential impacts, both locally and globally. The UK has been set a target of generating up to 15% of final energy demand by 2020 by the EU.
‘We find that wind, for electricity, and imported biomass, for heat, transport fuel and electricity, almost has to be the way forward for the UK, at least on the short timescale of the 2020 targets,’ says Ward. But the amounts of biomass necessary to meet the target far exceed what the UK can supply itself, so imports will have to increase significantly, leading to local and global impacts.
Interested to know more? Read the full article in Chemistry World here…
Read the article from EES:
Global and local impacts of UK renewable energy policy
D. J. Ward and O. R. Inderwildi
Energy Environ. Sci., 2013, Advance Article
DOI: 10.1039/C2EE22342B
