Global electricity demand is soaring, Williamson on podcast, & Painted Buntings

Jul 23, 2021

Global electricity demand is soaring, Kevin D. Williamson on the podcast, and a "Passerin Nonpareil"

It’s impolite to brag, particularly when other parts of the U.S. are being hammered by drought and wildfires, but the weather in Austin this summer has been glorious. I hope that doesn’t mean more Californians move here. But it’s true. Instead of the usual hot, dry, July weather, it has been relatively cool and rainy. The result: vivid green lawns, plants volunteering all over the yard, lots of birds, and an extended wildflower season. Four items this week:

My piece in The Hill on soaring global electricity demand
Kevin D. Williamson on the podcast
Media hits
Painted Buntings are nonpareil

Photo above is of a male Painted Bunting in Quintana, Texas. Credit: Dan Pancamo

As I noted in last week’s “news” letter, I have been studying the latest edition of the BP Statistical Review of World Energy, which came out on July 8. That report, along with the latest Electricity Market Report from the International Energy Agency, showed once again, that electricity is the world’s most important and fastest-growing form of energy. Yesterday, I published a piece in The Hill about the soaring use of electricity, and coal, after Covid. I wrote:

Electricity use and economic growth go hand in hand. And as global electricity demand continues to rebound in the wake of the COVID-19 lockdowns, so, too, will the use of coal in developing countries. Indeed, global coal demand is expected to set a record in 2022, which likely will hamper efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Those are the key takeaways from the latest edition of the BP Statistical Review of World Energy, which was released on July 8, and the International Energy Agency’s (IEA) July 15 report on global electricity demand. According to BP, even as the global economy collapsed last year during the pandemic, electricity demand barely wavered. While global gross domestic product (GDP) fell by about 3.5 percent in 2020, electricity use fell by less than 1 percent — 0.9 percent, to be exact. By contrast, global gasoline use fell by about 13 percent, overall oil use plummeted last year by 9 percent, (the biggest decline in history), coal use dropped by about 4 percent, and natural gas use fell by about 2 percent. As noted by BP chief economist Spencer Dale, the decline in electricity use was “the smallest fall across the main components of final energy demand.”

That slight decline shows, once again, that electricity is the world’s most important form of energy. And a look at the countries where electricity demand is growing the fastest — and the fuels those countries are using to generate the power they need — shows why making drastic cuts in global greenhouse gas emissions will be a difficult, or perhaps impossible, task over the timelines that are commonly being used by climate activists and policymakers.

I concluded the piece by making a few obvious points, including that renewables cannot cover demand growth, much less supplant our needs for conventional generation:

The IEA, meanwhile, expects global electricity demand “to grow by close to 5 percent in 2021 and by 4 percent in 2022. The majority of these increases will take place in the Asia Pacific region.” It expects more than half of that growth will happen in China and about 9 percent will be related to growth in India. The agency predicts that renewables will continue to “grow strongly” but notes that they “cannot keep up with increasing demand.” The IEA expects that “fossil fuel-based electricity is set to cover 45 percent of additional demand in 2021 and 40 percent in 2022.” It says coal-fired electricity production likely will “ increase by almost 5 percent in 2021 and a further 3 percent in 2022,” and that “coal-fired electricity generation is set to exceed pre-pandemic levels in 2021 and reach an all-time high in 2022.”

To be sure, these facts will not please those who insist that coal-fired generation must cease to avoid catastrophic climate change. But the data from BP and projections from the IEA show that countries around the world are doing what they need to do to generate the electricity their people demand at prices they can afford. Call it an inconvenient truth, but the global economy is fueled by electricity, much of it produced from coal, and that will not change anytime soon.

Kevin D. Williamson on the podcast talking about the underclass, China, and "depravity as a luxury good"

Kevin D. Williamson is one of my favorite journalists. He is prolific and writes with great verve. He also covers a wide variety of topics, from US relations with China to inflation, crime, and our imperial presidency. Williamson is a roving correspondent for National Review magazine and the author, most recently, of Big White Ghetto: Dead Broke, Stone-Cold Stupid, and High on Rage in the Dank Woolly Wilds of the 'Real America,'

In this week’s episode of the Power Hungry Podcast, I talked to Williamson (who lives in Dallas) about a wide variety of topics, including the growing underclass in America, why there’s no such thing as “energy independence or clean energy,” China, why “depravity is a luxury good,” and his growing concerns about the cultural and geographic divides in America at the same time we have a “non-functioning central government.” Listen in particular to his recounting of the time when he was a theater critic in New York and while attending a show, was unable to convince a nearby woman to put down her phone. Frustrated, Williamson tossed said phone into the aisle. It was another great conversation.

Please give it a listen and recommend it to your friends.

Three media hits this week

I was on the Financial Sense podcast with Jim Puplava. We talked about EVs, electricity, renewables, and the future of hydrocarbons. You can listen to that interview here.

I was also on the Schweitzer Drive Podcast with David Whitehead, the CEO of Schweitzer Engineering Laboratories, a Pullman, Washington-based company that builds and sells digital equipment that helps improve the safety and reliability of power grids. You can listen to our discussion about renewable-energy mandates and other topics by clicking here.

I was also on Fox 26 TV in Houston yesterday talking about the Texas grid and the reforms needed to assure that customers who rely on the ERCOT grid will have reliable electricity. You can watch that segment here.

Azulillos Sietecolores in Blanco County

The Painted Bunting (Passerina ciris) is one of those birds that makes you understand why birdwatchers are the way they are. (You know, a little kooky about birds and birdwatching). But once you see the Painted Bunting, you'll understand. The bird''s small size and brilliant colors are breathtaking. According to Allaboutbirds.org, the French name for the bird is Passerin Nonpareil, which is cool, because it includes the genus name, and the word nonpareil, which means without equal, or unparalleled. In Spanish, they are called Azulillo Sietecolors, which roughly translates as “little blue thing with seven colors.”

I remember the first time I saw a Painted Bunting. It was roughly three decades ago at McKinney Falls State Park. The bird was far away but I was still stunned at how brightly colored it was. The first written note I have of seeing a Painted Bunting is in my tattered copy of A Field Guide To The Birds of Texas by Roger Tory Peterson. According to the notes in that book (see the photo above), I saw one at Lost Maples State Park. And judging from the other notations on that page, I likely saw it June 1991, which is almost exactly 30 years ago.

Last weekend, Lorin and I visited a beautiful ranch in Blanco County. We were hoping to see Painted Buntings, and we did. In fact, there were several of them hanging around the garden near the main ranch house. It made for my favorite kind of birding: an occasion in which you don’t have to hike very far to see amazing birds. In this case, we didn’t even have to leave the porch (or the beer.)

Painted Buntings are in the Cardinal family. Here’s a description from Allaboutbirds.org: “With their vivid fusion of blue, green, yellow, and red, male Painted Buntings seem to have flown straight out of a child’s coloring book. Females and immatures are a distinctive bright green with a pale eyering. These fairly common songbirds breed in the coastal Southeast and in the south-central U.S., where they often come to feeders. They are often caught and sold illegally as cage birds, particularly in Mexico and the Caribbean, a practice that puts pressure on their breeding populations.”

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I have been pleased with the response to my recent report about land-use conflicts and renewables. "Not In Our Backyard," was published on April 21 by the Center of the American Experiment. The center is also the home of the Renewable Energy Rejection Database, which includes details on the more than 300 local or regional governments that have rejected or restricted wind-energy projects since 2015. The only way to bring sanity to the decisions being made by policymakers is to relentlessly pound the facts. Here's a link to the full report. Please share it.

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