A new report from the European Renewable Energy Council (EREC) and Greenpeace International concludes that renewable energy could provide all global energy needs by 2090. “Energy [R]evolution: A Sustainable World Energy Outlook” provides a blueprint how. (Download the 210-page report here.)

The blueprint calls for a structural shift to decentralized power systems, among other things. No big shock there, but it’s genuinely encouraging to see the appearance of such practical, long-term, stepwise prescriptions for governments.

“Countries such as China and India are well placed to take the enormous investment opportunity presented by the energy revolution,” said G. Ananthapadmanabhan, an international programme director at Greenpeace International. “It would be retrogressive for them to focus on fossil fuels to power their rapid economic growth.”

Hallelujah, brother! Even if it’s no surprise to hear Greenpeace take this kind of position, I couldn’t have put it better myself.

Turns out China’s hydropower push isn’t limited to giant centrally managed projects like the controversial Three Gorges Dam… An army of small hydro plants with capacities of less than 25MW are lighting up local areas at a growing rate. For the most part, the plants are supplying local needs, not feeding the national grid — which is good news, considering that construction has helped preserve woodlands and combat erosion. The plants are enabling communities that would otherwise rely on deforestation for cooking and heating fuel needs to switch to electric.

The outcome of this bottom up approach? The small plants generate 50,000 MW total today, a figure that is growing at about 6,000 MW annually, according to this summary by Bruno de Wachter in the Leonardo ENERGY blog.

For more detail, see a longer article from India’s Hindu Business Line, which links the trend to Indian consultant V.K. Damodaran — a U.N. expert who has long championed small hydropower solutions for rural communities without getting much traction in his native country, India.

Excellent, idea-rich roundtable interview with Martin Hoffert of NYU and Amy Myers Jaffe of Rice University on possible approaches for the next administration to get serious about transforming the entire energy system of the U.S.

NPR Science Friday (originally broadcast Sept. 26, 2008) … listen here:www.sciencefriday.com/program/archives/200809262

These are two experts with a command of literally all the best technology ideas making the rounds, but they are speaking on the political dimension, as well. They both compare the scale of effort that’s needed to the Apollo space program and the national war effort of the World War II era. (Senator Obama has been using Apollo language on the campaign trail recently, as well.)

Founding Principle #2: This Weblog also intends to expand on the notion that so-called "emerging economies" such as China and India are better positioned to pioneer 21st-century energy economies (and prove alternate infrastructural models) than the mature industrial powers in North America, Western Europe and Japan.

Why? First, because the wealthiest countries of the 20th century are over-invested in the past. 

• Politically, they are hindered by powerful economic actors with vested interests in maintaining the status quo – or at least in delaying change as long as possible. High-growth markets, on the other hand, have the capacity to more easily jump to new models and paradigms, rather repeating the economic development steps taken by their historical forebears.

Second, because they must.

• These countries cannot afford to continue building their economies based on the inefficient, dirty models adopted in the late 19th and 20th centuries, when fossil-fuel energy was both cheap and superabundant. Not only are fossil fuel supplies insufficient, both their national and global environments are already too damaged to make following the same route once again a possibility.
• The demographics and economic growth of these countries create enormous demand for energy. First the populations are huge, growing, and becoming more affluent. The result is pressure: Per-capita appetite for energy is growing. These populations are also predominantly youthful. While Western environmental policies are motivated by improving the outlook for future generations, the future generations of China, India and other developing nations are already on earth — and in numbers equivalent of several future generations of Americans or Western Europeans.
• Finally, population densities in these countries are much higher than those seen in the history of the wealthy nations, meaning that the pain of polluting and wasteful approaches has a more immediate and severe impact on quality of life.

I don’t believe that these countries must generate all the technical innovation necessary to enable new, clean energy models from within. My prediction is simply that they are best-positioned to show the world how to implement these models and prove how they can work on a mass scale. This not only can happen, in my view, it is a key prerequisite for improving global human prospects. Once deployed successfully in economies of the one billion people range, green energy technologies would gain economies of scale that would make them much more easily adoptable by the rest of the planet — even in the poorest of nations would then leap at the opportunity to follow suit.

Let me explain that point: Today, the biggest barrier in the way of acting on the impulse to do the right thing, i.e. deploying sustainable energy infrastructure, is the fact that 20th-century fossil-fuel based systems are the “safe,” default option. They’re inexpensive (in terms of capital expenditure per power-generation capacity), they guarantee the big capacity that energy-hungry nations need, and reliable professional expertise on how to build and run them is abundant. And of course, they come from mature, competitive industries — if you have the capital to spend, a large number of established companies will come and fight to make you the best offer. More importantly, banks are willing to offer loans to build such tried-and-true technologies — the business cases are well known. The alternative approaches that we must pioneer in the 21st century, by contrast, require much harder work in terms of due diligence, appear significantly more expensive (i.e. capex per megawatt) and require a greater stomach for financial risk. It’s unexplored territory.

My hypothesis is that any significant initiative in China or India, based on sheer size alone, would dissolve much of the above barrier. Based on economies of scale, it would reduce prices dramatically, establish a track record and clearer business-case assumptions, thus reducing perceived financial risk and freeing up credit. Thus, the enlightened self-interest of these countries stands to serve as an essential engine for the greening of the planet as a whole.

These are my current bedrock assumptions, subject to challenge of course. Entries in the 21st Century Power weblog will hopefully bring news, data and insight that relates to the above hypothesis.

21st Century Power is a Weblog about realizing sustainable energy infrastructure — the technologies, the economics thereof, and the political drivers.

It is dedicated to the notion that energy is the lifeblood of all economic activity on the planet — and that sustainable energy is thus critical to the survival of civilization as we know it.

My thinking on this topic has been long and deep, but (until now) fairly quiet. You won’t find much published evidence, save for here — my comments on a September 15, 2006 article, "The Energy Harvest," by New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman.

Though I respect Friedman greatly, he was at the time holding up Brazil’s sugarcane ethanol industry as a model for the U.S., and I felt I had to respectfully point out the fatal flaw in such biofuel approaches: That they are by definition unsustainable in a world where maintaining food supplies is in fact a bigger problem than scarcity of energy:

"Very nice column, but you and many other writers hopping on the ethanol bandwagon these days need to acknowledge in future coverage that crops don’t magically grow from nowhere. They need input to develop cellulose, sugar and other nice things.

This leads to the question: What makes the crop yields at those sugarcane farms you visited so high at such a reasonable cost? It’s fertilizer, which is made from OIL.

Ethanol’s Achilles heel as an oil substitute is that when there’s no more oil, the world’s agricultural productivity is going to drop dramatically. It is being propped up at an unsustainably high level by mass use of oil-based fertilizer. So the end of oil means end of our ability to produce this amazing oil substitute in adequate quantities.

But at that point, we may well not care so much about fueling our cars, because we’ll be too busy as a global population of six billion people fighting over a food supply sufficient to feed only two or three billion!"

The world came around to my view (if tragically) 7 months later, when global food prices shot up to crisis levels, triggering hunger and riots in the developing world (April 2008). Although only a tiny percentage of the world’s arable land had been converted to biofuel crops, this new development was immediately recognized as a catalyst – and it focused unprecedented global attention on the fuel-versus-food conflict that I’d flagged.

A little aside: According to estimates recently cited by an FAO economist, 25-40 percent of the increase in food prices stemmed from biofuels, which are are expected to keep food commodity prices 10-15 percent higher than they would have been otherwise for some time to come.

Given the above, we can only imagine how these effects could be exacerbated by the longer-term problem I also pointed to: the disappearance of oil-based fertilizers and the soil productivity levels they prop up.

This story is far from over. Watch this space.