An updated roadmap to Net Zero Emissions by 2050 – World Energy Outlook 2022 – Analysis - IEA

An updated roadmap to Net Zero Emissions by 2050 – World Energy Outlook 2022 – Analysis - IEA: World Energy Outlook 2022 - Analysis and key findings. A report by the International Energy Agency. Report: The World Needs Lots of New Nuclear Energy, in a Hurry A global electricity system without carbon emissions by 2050 will require producing about two and a quarter times as much energy from nuclear reactors as was produced in 2022, or just over six terawatt-hours, up from 2.7 terawatt-hours, according to a new report from the International Energy Agency. That implies that additions to nuclear capacity, which totaled 8 gigawatts in 2022 (or seven or eight big reactors), will reach 37 gigawatts annually by 2035. Capacity additions would be nearly quadruple the recent averages. One implication of the report is that the world needs to find faster ways to build reactors. And ease of construction is one of the design goals of advanced reactors. In other words, the world needs a lot of fast reactors fast. And a lot of other kinds of reactors too. It predicts, though, that the biggest growth will come in wind and solar energy, which will increase nearly seven-fold. The projection also predicts tremendous growth in consumption; Electricity will displace gasoline and diesel, and other direct use of fossil fuels, and generation will grow by 3.3 percent a year, faster than global economic growth. Today, hundreds of millions of people lack reliable access to electricity, but that will fall to zero by 2030, according to the report, an update to the agency’s “Net Zero by 2050: A Roadmap for the Global Energy Sector.” The predicted increases in clean energy production seem ambitious, and, as the report notes, recent history does not indicate that we are off to a good start. Recovering from the Covid-19 pandemic, coal use surged and 2021 brought “the largest annual increase in global CO2 emissions from the energy sector ever recorded.”