Dr. Brian Poe

Replacing fossil fuels may not be nearly as daunting a challenge for governments as that persistent 80%-plus share of primary #energy suggests. Because burning fuels to generate power, drive vehicles and heat buildings wastes much of those fuels’ energy as heat, about two-thirds of the primary energy that goes into the global system is lost before it does anything useful. A growing number of energy analysts point out that the energy transition does not require all that waste energy to be replaced, joule for joule, with renewable energy. Believing otherwise is what Canadian chemical engineer Paul Martin has called the “primary energy fallacy”. Or as the Oxford professor Jan Rosenow says “we don’t need to replace waste”. Rosenow is the lead author of a forthcoming study that attempts to quantify the scale of the primary energy fallacy by modelling a highly electrified global economy running on renewable power. It suggests we could get exactly the same amount of useful energy we have today with about half as much primary energy. #climate ft.com/content/1a40a3af-933b…