The world cannot meet the commitments of the Paris Agreement on climate change with renewables alone, according to new analysis from Imperial College London. Nearly 200 nations adopted the Paris Agreement in December, setting a goal of limiting global temperature rise to “well below” 2 degrees Celsius. “[R]esearchers from Imperial College London have shown that the combination of renewables and unabated fossil fuel power plants will not result in a sufficiently low carbon electricity system to meet current global climate targets. They found that fossil fuel power plants will continue to be needed but that the utilisation of CCS systems is both necessary and inevitable,” Imperial College said in a press release.
The research, published in the journal Energy & Environmental Science, shows that the most efficient means of decarbonizing the world’s energy system is through a combination of renewable energy and CCS.
“Due to immense capital investments in fossil fuels, the energy sector continues to be slow to change with only 2.2% of the global energy consumption covered by renewable sources,” Niall Mac Dowell, co-author of the paper, said in the release. “In our current position where the use of fossil fuel energy is unavoidable, the case is undoubtedly not ‘renewables or CCS’ but rather ‘renewables and CCS.’”
