Economic Growth Up. Carbon Emissions Flat. We Can Do This. March 13, 2015

UPDATE: GDP up, Carbon down. See below, and graph above.

As a well informed observer just reiterated to me this is a BFD, folks. Chris Mooney’s story in the Washington Post worth a look:

For anybody who cares about the planet, that’s very good news. After all, the previously tight link between economic growth and the use of more energy — leading to more emissions — has seemed an almost invariant fact of the modern industrial world. Indeed, observations like these have driven some on the environmental left to posit that economic growth itself is incompatible with environmental protections. So what changed? The IEA reports that there were several factors involved — China shifting more to renewables, even as OECD countries also advanced renewable energy and combined that with more energy efficiency. Certainly, that’s been the story in the U.S. electricity industry of late. “For the first time demand is untethered to GDP,” said Alex Laskey, the president of Opower, which works with utility companies to help them connect with customers. “And that’s because of efficiency, self generation, and so on….we can make do with less.”

I’ve reported in the past that American households, despite the proliferation of gadgets, continue to get more efficient, and household electricity use is flat or falling. And, if we can believe these numbers, natural gas is helping by displacing coal generation.

Last year, I also posted on reporting in the Wall Street Journal heralding the “decoupling” of energy use and economic growth:

Rebecca Smith of the Wall Street Journal has consistently been delivering the unwelcome news for electric utilities about changing times, and this morning she’s done it again. I won’t often recommend a Murdoch paper as a resource, but do read the whole thing at the link if you can. It’s darkly comedic, for example: Sherry Pfister, a retiree who once worked at the Palo Verde nuclear power plant 45 miles west of Phoenix, says she didn’t hesitate to lease solar panels for her home in Waddell, Ariz., and says the panels have cut her utility bill by a third. “Why isn’t everybody doing it?” she wonders. Turns out that growth in the economy no longer requires growth in the electricity sector. One CEO marvels, “It’s a new world for us.” As the video above shows, that new world of decoupled growth and electricity began in the 1970s. But Utility Executives have never been hired to be forward thinking. Perhaps that will change sometime soon..

For Energy executives, 2014 was the “We are no longer in Kansas” moment.

Rebecca Smith in the Wall Street Journal:

When customers of American Electric Power Co. AEP +2.69% started dialing back on power consumption in early 2009, company executives figured consumers and businesses were just pinching pennies because of the recession. Five years and an economic recovery later, electricity sales at the Columbus, Ohio-based power company still haven’t rebounded to the peak reached in 2008. As a result, executives have had to abandon their century-old assumption that the use of electricity tracks overall economic conditions.

Utility executives across the country are reaching the same conclusion. Even though Americans are plugging in more gadgets than ever and the unemployment rate had dropped at one point to a level last reported in 2008, electricity sales are looking anemic for the seventh year in a row. Sluggish electricity demand reflects broad changes in the overall economy, the effects of government regulation and technological changes that have made it easier for Americans to trim their power consumption. But the confluence of these trends presents utilities with an almost unprecedented challenge: how to cope with rising costs when sales of their main product have stopped growing. Sales volume matters because the power business ranks as the nation’s most capital-intensive industry. When utilities are flush with cash, they buy lots of expensive equipment and raise dividends for investors. When they’re selling less of their product, they look for ways to cut or defer spending. Regulators typically allow utilities to charge rates that are high enough to cover their basic expenses, but that doesn’t guarantee them strong profits. Utilities typically need to expand sales volume by 1% or more a year just to maintain their expensive, sprawling networks of power plants, transmission lines and substations, says Steven Piper, an energy analyst for SNL Energy, a research company. “That’s where the existential crisis is coming from,” he adds.

BBC:

The growth in global carbon emissions stalled last year, according to data from the International Energy Agency. It marks the first time in 40 years that annual CO2 emissions growth has remained stable, in the absence of a major economic crisis, the agency said. Annual global emissions remained at 32 gigatonnes in 2014, unchanged from the previous year. But the IEA warned that while the results were “encouraging”, this was “no time for complacency”. “This is both a very welcome surprise and a significant one,” said IEA Chief Economist Fatih Birol.

Lindsay Abrams in Salon:

Global carbon dioxide emissions from the energy sector stalled in 2014, the IEA found, news that the group’s Chief Economist Faith Birol called “both a very welcome surprise and a significant one.” The big news is that this was the first time in forty years that emissions have stalled while the economy grew 3 percent — suggesting, said Birol, that the two are “decoupling.” And it means, the IEA said in a press release, that our efforts to mitigate our contribution to climate change may already be having more of an an effect than we thought. Among the possible reasons for the lack of growth, the agency cites OECD countries’ push for renewable energy and stricter energy efficienct standards and a shift, in China, from coal to renewables. Indeed, a Bloomberg New Energy Finance analysis of China’s emissions found that the fell, last year, for the first time since 2001. The number we’ve stalled at –32.2 billion metric tons pouring into the atmosphere in both 2013 and 2014 — is, of course, still much too high if we’re to avoid risking the “severe, pervasive and irreversible” consequences of climate change; saying the problem hasn’t gotten worse is a far cry from the “drastic” action the IPCC says is needed. Better to say, then, that we’re in the process of doing it — and still need to ramp it up significantly.

Forbes:

A key stumbling block in the effort to combat global warming has been the intimate link between greenhouse gas emissions and economic growth. When times are good and industries are thriving, global energy use traditionally increases and energy-related carbon dioxide emissions also go up. Only when economies stumble and businesses shutter — as during the most recent financial crisis — does energy use typically decline, in turn bringing down planet-warming emissions. But for the first time in nearly half a century, that synchrony between economic growth and energy-related emissions seems to have been broken,