Energy Expo: World at Turning Point

One of the most moving speakers at the Energy Congress was Dr. Hermann Scheer. Scheer has been a member of the German Bundestag for the Social Democratic Party of Germany since 1980. He is the author of A Solar Manifesto, a groundbreaking book on renewable energy and of The Solar Economy: Renewable Energy for a Sustainable Global Future published in 2002. Dr. Scheer also serves as General Chairman of the World Council for Renewable Energy (WCRE) and is the president of EUROSOLAR, a non-partisan European renewable energy organization.

According to Sheer, the truth, as he sees it, is that our world currently faces a turning point, and we are at the borderline of the present global energy system based on at least 10 reasons. Here are Sheer's 10 reasons:

1) The liquid oil and natural gas resources--that is 60 percent of present commercial supplies and demands - run out. Proposals to extend the lifetime of the fossil energy system by using so-called non-conventional fossil energies will lead to tremendous price progressions and would definitely overstress the ecosphere.

2) The ecological limit of fossil energy consumption is closer than the limit of the resources.

"It's time for a general shift to renewable energies," Sheer emphasized. "This is the elementary challenge of our century. There is no time for further postponements."

3) The curve of cheap fossil reserves, and therefore its supply possibility, decreases. On the other hand the curve of energy demand will increase.

"Only renewable energy can avoid a crossing of the two curves of demand and supply in the near decades. If renewable energy is not introduced in a broad scale and in time the dangers of global economic crisis and energy conflicts will be the consequence," Sheer said.

4) The atomic option remains a negative vision. Even the usable uranium reserves will run out within five decades based on the present number of atomic power plants. The prolongation of the fission materials by reprocessing and fast breeder reactors will lead to incalculable additional costs and risks.

"It is irresponsible to leave future generations the atomic waste management for more than 10,000 years. And the peaceful use of atomic energy becomes more and more the bridge to a global proliferation of atomic weapons, which must be avoided in any case," Sheer noted. "Which political system can be kept stabile for thousands of years? Not a comeback of atomic energy is at stake, but the immediate acceleration of renewable energies."

5) The future option of atomic fusion is a non-option. No supporter of atomic fusion is asked and speaks about the costs, which will be at least three times higher than for atomic fission.

"They all ignore the prognosis of the former head of the plasma fusion center of MIT, Mr. Litsky, that if the fusion program produces a reactor, no one will want it," Sheer said. "And they ignore the fact that there is no need for another energy option if we take advantage of the solar potential which is annually 15 thousand times higher than the annual world fossil and nuclear energy consumption. The fusion prospective is unrealistic. The renewable energy prospective is real."

6) Because energy is a basic need of life, we can't leave these basic decisions for future energy supplies only to comparisons on actual energy costs and to the energy market. The costs for the outrunning conventional energies go up and the main victims are the third world countries. During the oil crisis between 1973-1981 there was an increasing of the public debt of the developing countries from $200 billion to $1.2 trillion because of the energy prices. Alone the increasing oil prices in this year leads to $60 billion more oil importation costs for the developing countries.

"Since the outrunning conventional energy costs go up renewable energy costs will go down because they are almost exclusively technology costs except for biomass. And the history of technology shows that all technology costs are digressive in the cost of technological progress and mass production," Sheer said. "The acceleration of renewable energy is not an economic burden, it is unique and new opportunity for the world economy.

7) Conventional fossil atomic energies have multiple negative macroeconomic side effects, such as the increasing need to protect globalized power lines against attacks, the high water consumption for mining extractions, and for heating power stations, as well as the currency costs for importation and the environmental and health damages. In contrast renewable energy sources have multiple positive macroeconomic benefits because they help to avoid all these negative effects.

"The practical challenge is the creation of policies for the transformation of these macroeconomic benefits into microeconomic incentives for application," Sheer said.

8) Only with renewable energies can we come to real energy efficiency. In the long, global, conventional energy chains, from the mines and wells to the customers, sometimes over distances of more than 20 thousand miles, there are many energy losses at each station, and each station is a cashier. Only with short energy chains, based on the use of indigenous renewable energies, can energy losses be reduced radically.

Sheer said that the central work for renewable energy research and development is to make short energy chains possible. "This is an absolute priority for new storing technologies and not only with hydrogen," he added.

9) Conventional energies are politically privileged everywhere in the world by large amounts of public money for research and development, by military protection costs, which are increasing rapidly, and by $300 hundred billion of subsidies annually. Alone for atomic energy there was a worldwide public promotion in a total amount of more than $1 trillion since the 1950s. In contrast to this, renewable energies are, up until now, politically discriminated nearly everywhere. Less than $50 billion of the taxpayer's money was spent in the last 30 years to promote renewable energies.

Internationally, Sheer said, there are governmental institutions for promoting atomic energy, like the International Atomic Energy Agency, but there is not one for renewable energies. "Time is overdue to overcome the double standard against renewables," he said.

10) For thirty years governments and international institutions have been aware of the limits of conventional energies and its broad damaging consequences. Since the oil crisis in the 1970's, the global 2000 report of the Carter Administration, the United Nations Environmental Conference in 1982, the Rio Conference in 1992 and the Johannesburg Conference in 2002, they have avoided the central point - the replacement of non-renewable energies by renewable energies.

"One element to circumvent the central point is the wording on sustainable energy," Sheer noted. "Because only renewable energies are, by definition, sustainable, let's speak directly about it. But the avoidance to come to the central point is a kind of mental barrier. All these international activities seemed to work on the assumption that global problems would require mainly common global actions. They tried to develop a global consensus for action. But consensus is always comfortable, no doubt, for the participating people. On the other side, consensus means, always, that the slowest mover decides about the speed. The result was the attitude of globally talking and nationally postponing. It is an indispensable contradiction to get speed and to have consensus at the same time."

Sheer concluded by saying that the consensus principle leads to what he calls a 'practical paralyzer.' "All remarkable progresses for renewable energies could not stop the already running facts that the global fossil energy consumption increases faster than the introduction of renewable energies," he said. "That means, up until now, world civilization continues its run into the fossil energy trap, and into mounting energy dependencies. The result of all these facts and trends is that the need to speed up renewable energy promotion is a must. For all countries to do this is in their own interest. No one should wait any longer for others or for an international consensus."