Comment by audunw

I only skimmed the article but there didn’t seem to be much written about how much of that non-electric fossil fuel is waste heat. I know there are versions of the energy source-sink graph which shows wasted energy. Why didn’t the author use it? Weird.

There are studies on how much energy is required to decarbonise everything, not just local electricity production. The energy required is far less than what you’d think if you look at the primary energy of all the energy we use today.

One aspect of this is what you see with the transition to EV or from gas to induction cook tops. It comes with a huge reduction in wasted energy.

The other aspect is the transition to heat pumps, which is over 100% efficient, so you need a lot less energy to provide the same amount of heat. There are now commercial industrial heat pumps that has reached 200°C, which enables the use in more industrial applications.

The third is the transition to recycling. At some point we will have enough materials for all that we need to do. The green energy transition requires a big temporary jump in the amount of lithium and copper we need. But once all vehicles have been transitioned to EVs, most of those material will come from recycled materials, cutting the energy required to acquire those materials to a tiny fraction of what we need now.