Improved energy efficiency could save equivalent to China’s demand
Copenhagen, Jun 8 (EFE).- An improvement in energy efficiency could lead to savings in global consumption by 2030 equivalent to China’s current annual demand, the International Energy Agency (IEA) said Wednesday.
Doubling the improvement of the current global rate of energy intensity – the ratio between energy consumption and gross domestic product (GDP) – from 2 percent to 4 percent a year could save 95 exajoules (EJ) of final energy consumption by the end of this decade compared with a pathway based on today’s policy settings, according to the new analysis, released at the IEA Global Conference on Energy Efficiency, held in Sonderborg in southern Denmark.
That saving would in turn reduce global CO2 emissions by an additional 5 billion tonnes a year by 2030, about a third of the efforts required for the world to reach net zero emissions by the middle of the century, the report added.
The improvement in efficiency would also result in savings in global spending on energy by the end of the decade.
Households alone could save $650 billion a year on electricity bills, according to the report.
The amount of natural gas that the world would save would be equivalent to four times what the European Union (EU) imported from Russia in 2021, while the reduction in oil consumption would be around 30 million barrels of oil per day, three times Russia’s average production last year.
Energy efficiency improvement would also help create an additional 10 million jobs in fields such as building retrofits, manufacturing and transport infrastructure, the report said.
The analysis singled out transport and construction as the sectors with the greatest potential for energy efficiency gains, along with heavy industry and manufacturing.
“Most of these opportunities involve readily available technologies and would fully pay for themselves through lower running costs, especially at today’s high energy prices,” the analysis said.
The IEA recalled that without the gains made in efficiency in the last two decades, the growth of global emissions of polluting gases would have almost doubled.
“Energy efficiency is a critical solution to so many of the world’s most urgent challenges – it can simultaneously make our energy supplies more affordable, more secure and more sustainable,” IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol said.
“But inexplicably, government and business leaders are failing to sufficiently act on this. The oil shocks of the 1970s set in motion major advances in efficiency, and it is utterly essential that efficiency is at the heart of the response to today’s global energy crisis,” he added. EFE
alc/pd/lds
