ENERGY SUPPLY TECHNOLOGIES

New and Emerging Energy Supply Technologies



New and Emerging Energy Supply Technologies

Introduction

New energy technologies will play a decisive role in fulfilling our present needs as well as those of future generations. They may also break the tight link between economic growth on one hand and increasing energy demand and damaging environmental effects on the other. But research is expensive, technology often needs a long time to develop, and it is rarely certain that investment in a particular line of research or a new technology will turn out to be profitable. This is one of the conclusions of a recent Green Paper by the European Commission, which analyses in detail the present and future energy situation of the European Union. It recommends strongly that research into new technologies should have high priority. Emerging technologies, says the Green Paper, are likely to have an appreciable effect on the production, transport and consumption of energy in the 21st century(Bruton, 2013, pp. 3-10 ).

Research in new energy technologies

Since emerging technologies under the Wharton definition are closely related to science-based innovations, it seems natural to examine the world's expenditure on energy R&D. Our starting point is the IEA's comprehensive analysis of government energy R&D expenditure by country. The energy research carried out by any country reflects that country's priorities in energy policy(Kreutz, 2011, pp 105-108). Thus the two IEA member countries most committed to nuclear power, France and Japan, also give high priority to nuclear research. Countries such as Denmark and Germany concentrate their research on renewable energy, where they believe the future lies. The UK and the USA have less tradition of “picking winners”, and focus much of their government energy R&D on generic research instead. There are large differences between different countries' expenditures on government energy R&D as a percentage of GDP. At the top of the table are countries such as Japan and Finland, which spend nearly 0.09% of their GDP on government energy R&D(Bent et al, 2011 pp. 33-44). Denmark ranks near the middle, and at the bottom are countries such as the UK, which spends only 0.005% of its GDP on government energy R&D. Overall, nuclear energy - both fission and fusion - accounts for the largest slice of government energy R&D: 38% according to the OECD/IEA (1999) and more than 50% according to the WEC (2001). According to the IEA, total expenditure on government energy R&D has been falling since the end of the 1980s at the rate of around 15% in ten years (Figure 12), but with relatively large variations from year to year and between individual countries(Nielsen, 2011, pp 225-229). In 2002, for example, the new Danish government halted around three-quarters of the country's targeted energy research programmes.

New energy technologies

In recent years a number of “millennium papers” from international energy organisations such as the WEC and the IEA have reviewed energy technologies for the 21st century. The IEA has identified a number of promising energy technologies that could reduce CO2 emissions within the timescale ...