Energy development

• 1. Introduction

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  Energy development sits at the center of nearly every human activity, from lighting a room to feeding a nation. In 2024, fossil fuels met 86% of the world's energy needs. That figure, up from 81% in 2005, tells a story of just how deeply the modern world runs on coal, oil, and natural gas. Yet the same fuels that powered the Industrial Revolution in the 18th and 19th centuries now sit at the heart of a global debate about climate, security, and survival.

  The questions this documentary will explore are not small ones. How did humanity arrive at such deep dependence on fuels that cannot be replenished? What are the real costs of nuclear power, beyond the headline accidents? Can renewable energy actually replace the fossil fuel system at the scale the world requires? And what role does efficiency play when the total demand for energy keeps rising? The answers cut across geology, economics, engineering, and politics. They also cut across time, from Paleolithic hot springs to proposed power stations orbiting the Earth.

• 2. The Fossil Fuel Backbone

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  Coal does not form naturally at a rate that would support human use. That single fact, quiet and geological, underlies much of the tension in modern energy policy. Yet fossil fuels remain the dominant primary energy source precisely because the infrastructure to use them already exists and because liquid fuels derived from petroleum deliver a high amount of usable energy per unit of weight or volume.

  The three main types of fossil fuels are coal, petroleum, and natural gas. A fourth, liquefied petroleum gas, is derived principally from the production of natural gas. Heat from burning these fuels goes either directly into space heating and industrial processes or is converted into mechanical energy for vehicles and electricity generation. Fossil fuels are part of the carbon cycle; they release solar energy that was stored in the fuel millions of years ago.

  The environmental and security costs are considerable. Oil dependence has led to war, the funding of radical groups, monopolization, and socio-political instability. Extracting the most accessible deposits first means that costs rise as society works its way deeper into the remaining reserves. Combustion releases carbon dioxide as the main contributor to recent climate change, alongside nitrogen oxides, soot, fine particulates, sulphur dioxide, carbon monoxide, hydrocarbons, mercury, arsenic, lead, cadmium, and traces of uranium.

  In 2010, governments worldwide were subsidizing fossil fuels by an estimated $500 billion a year. That same year, analysts estimated that maintaining current production levels for another 25 years would require roughly $8 trillion in investment. Conventional oil production peaked, by conservative estimates, somewhere between 2007 and 2010, a milestone that William Stanley Jevons had anticipated in a different form back in 1865 when he published The Coal Question and warned that coal reserves were being depleted.

• 3. Nuclear Power's Ledger

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  Nuclear power plants, excluding naval reactors, provided about 5.7% of the world's energy and 13% of the world's electricity in 2012. That global contribution rests almost entirely on the fission of uranium. By 2013, the International Atomic Energy Agency counted 437 operational reactors in 31 countries, along with approximately 140 naval vessels using nuclear propulsion, powered by some 180 reactors.

  Analysis of fatalities per unit of energy generated has found that nuclear power causes fewer deaths than coal, petroleum, natural gas, or hydropower, each of which carries its own toll from air pollution and accidents. Yet the economic costs of nuclear accidents are high, and meltdowns can take decades to clean up. The three major plant accidents on record are the Three Mile Island accident in 1979, the Chernobyl disaster in 1986, and the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster in 2011.

  Fukushima proved to be a turning point in policy. The accident displaced 50,000 households after radioactive material leaked into air, soil, and sea. A global survey by Ipsos published in 2011 found nuclear fission to be the least popular energy source among respondents. Germany subsequently decided to close all its reactors by 2022. Italy banned nuclear power outright. The International Energy Agency halved its estimate of additional nuclear generating capacity to be built by 2035.

  The economics of new nuclear construction remain contested. Plants carry high capital costs but low direct fuel costs. In Eastern Europe, projects in Bulgaria and Romania have struggled to secure financing. Since the 1970s, nuclear fuel has displaced about 64 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent in greenhouse gas emissions that would otherwise have come from burning fossil fuels, a figure that proponents of the technology cite as evidence of its climate value. Research into extracting uranium from seawater using polymer ropes coated with a selective absorbent material is ongoing, and geologic processes carry uranium to the sea in amounts comparable to what such a process would extract, which could eventually make that source effectively sustainable.

• 4. Renewable Energy's Rise

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  Hydropower generated 16.6% of the world's total electricity in 2015 and 70% of all renewable electricity. China was the largest producer, with 721 terawatt-hours in 2010, representing around 17% of domestic electricity use. Three hydroelectric plants exceed 10 gigawatts in capacity: the Three Gorges Dam in China, the Itaipu Dam straddling the border of Brazil and Paraguay, and the Guri Dam in Venezuela. The average cost of electricity from a hydro plant larger than 10 megawatts runs between 3 and 5 US cents per kilowatt-hour.

  Wind power reached 336 gigawatts of global capacity by June 2014 and at that point accounted for around 4% of total worldwide electricity usage. By 2010, Denmark was drawing 21% of its stationary electricity from wind, Portugal 18%, Spain 16%, Ireland 14%, and Germany 9%. By 2011, there were moments when wind and solar power together supplied more than 50% of electricity in Germany and Spain. The two largest offshore wind farms on record at the time were the 630 MW London Array and Gwynt y Mor, both in the waters around the United Kingdom.

  Global wind power capacity grew by 12% in 2021. Biofuel production reached 105 billion liters in 2010, up 17% from the year before, and supplied 2.7% of world transport fuels. The United States and Brazil together accounted for 90% of global ethanol production that year. The European Union was the world's largest biodiesel producer, accounting for 53% of total biodiesel production in 2010.

  Geothermal energy had 11,400 megawatts of online capacity across 24 countries in 2012, and the cost of producing geothermal power fell by 25% over the two decades preceding 2001. Marine renewable energy remained in its earliest stage of development, though China alone approved 100 ocean energy projects in 2019. At least 30 nations already had renewable energy contributing more than 20% of their energy supply when the source was written, and national markets were projected to keep growing strongly.

• 5. Efficiency as a Resource

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  Compact fluorescent lights use two-thirds less energy than incandescent bulbs and may last between 6 and 10 times longer. That single substitution illustrates the broader principle: efficiency does not create new energy, but it makes existing supplies stretch further.

  The International Energy Agency has estimated that improved efficiency in buildings, industrial processes, and transportation could reduce global energy demand in 2050 to around 8% smaller than today's level, while serving an economy more than twice as large and a population of roughly 2 billion more people. Energy efficiency and renewable energy are described as the twin pillars of sustainable energy policy.

  Insulating a home reduces the heating and cooling energy needed to maintain a comfortable temperature. Installing natural skylights cuts the electricity needed for illumination. These examples are prosaic, but their aggregate effect at scale is significant. In many countries, efficiency is also framed as a national security benefit because it reduces dependence on imported energy and slows the depletion of domestic reserves.

  Research covering OECD countries has found that wind, geothermal, hydro, and nuclear carry the lowest hazard rates among energy sources in production. That finding points toward a future where both the energy mix and the efficiency of its use shift together, rather than treating them as separate problems.

• 6. Storing and Moving Energy

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  A hydroelectric dam stores energy in a reservoir as gravitational potential energy. A battery stores chemical energy. A wind-up clock stores mechanical energy in spring tension. Ice storage tanks hold thermal energy at night to meet peak cooling demand the following day. Energy storage, in its many forms, is what allows supply and demand to be decoupled in time.

  Long-term storage options include power-to-gas systems using hydrogen or methane, and the storage of heat or cold between opposing seasons in deep aquifers or bedrock. The Drake Landing Solar Community in Alberta, Canada, uses borehole thermal energy storage to draw 97% of its year-round heat from solar collectors on garage roofs, most of it collected during summer.

  On the transmission side, electricity grids are the networks that carry power from generation source to end user, sometimes across hundreds of kilometres. Grids can suffer blackouts and brownouts, often from weather damage. During extreme space weather events, solar wind can interfere with transmissions. When demand exceeds available supply, rationing becomes necessary. Industrialised countries such as Canada, the United States, and Australia rank among the highest per-capita electricity consumers in the world, made possible by widespread distribution infrastructure.

  Coal, petroleum, and their derivatives move by boat, rail, or road. Petroleum and natural gas also travel by pipeline. Wireless power transfer exists but is currently limited to short distances and low power levels. One proposed long-range application involves orbiting solar power collectors that would beam microwave-frequency radio waves to collector antenna sites on Earth, a concept under research since the early 1970s.

• 7. The Long View

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  Between 1950 and 1984, as the Green Revolution transformed global agriculture, world grain production increased by 250%. The energy behind that transformation came from fossil fuels: natural gas in the form of fertilizers, oil in the form of pesticides, and hydrocarbon-fueled irrigation. That dependence on fossil energy to grow food is one of the deeper links between energy development and human survival.

  In 1956, geophysicist M. King Hubbert calculated that US oil production would peak between 1965 and 1970, and that global production would peak within half a century of his 1956 data. Mark Z. Jacobson has argued that producing all new energy from wind, solar, and hydropower by 2030 is feasible and that existing energy arrangements could be fully replaced by 2050. He identifies the barriers as primarily social and political rather than technological or economic.

  Critics including Vaclav Smil and James E. Hansen have raised concerns about the variable output of solar and wind power. Google spent $30 million on its Renewable Energy Cheaper than Coal project before cancelling it after concluding that a best-case scenario of rapid renewable advances would still leave emissions 55% below fossil fuel projections for 2050, rather than eliminating them.

  The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has stated that there are few fundamental technological limits to integrating a portfolio of renewable technologies to meet most of total global energy demand. Researchers have also contemplated space-based solar power collection, which would benefit from higher light intensity and uninterrupted collection free of weather. Stephen W. Pacala and Robert H. Socolow developed a framework of stabilization wedges showing that maintaining quality of life while avoiding catastrophic climate change is achievable, with renewable energy sources in aggregate representing the largest cluster of those wedges.