International Day of Clean Energy

  The typical efficiency of United States cars in the early 1970s had been the same as in the 1930s—13 miles per gallon (mpg), which meant 85 per cent of the gasoline was wasted. The Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards , which were introduced in 1975, doubled the average efficiency of United States passenger cars to 27.7 mpg by 1985, but no further improvements were made until CAFE standards were revised in 2007. In fact, the popularity of sport utility vehicles (SUV), vans and pickup trucks depressed United States vehicle fleet efficiency , which reached only 22 mpg by 2006. The 2007 revision of CAFE no longer exempts light trucks classified as SUVs or passenger vans (unless they exceed a 4.5 t gross vehicle weight rating), and the aim is to increase fleet efficiency to 35 mpg by 2020. For comparison, the 1913 Model T Ford, which was the world’s first mass-produced automobile, averaged 25 mpg. All new cars in New Zealand currently rate between 34 and 62 mpg. The EU c...

  In response to the second oil crisis, the United States embarked on a large-scale programme to produce synthetic fuels from coal . In 1980, it had established the Synthetic Fuels Corporation which was to improve technologies and produce 2 million barrels of liquid fuel  per day by 1992, at a cost of $60 per barrel, in order to replace about 25 per cent of United States oil imports. Against the backdrop of the collapse of oil prices, the programme was cancelled after five years, with production having reached only 10,000 barrels per day and incurred costs having amounted to $5 billion. Despite its failure to reach its envisaged goals, the programme did develop coal-gasificationtechnologies that paved the way for highly efficient integrated gasification combined cycle (IGCC) coal power plants which were deployed around the world from the 1990s.

  Experience with nuclear power offers a prime example of an ambitious “big push” experiment which Governments have carried out in order to accelerate development, deployment and diffusion of a new energy technology. As noted earlier, more than half of all cumulative energy-related public RD&D support in IEA countries since 1974 has been for nuclear power technologies. Exuberant expectations by early promoters of nuclear power from the 1950s are reflected in the statement by Lewis Strauss in 1954 that nuclear power would become “too cheap to meter”. In the beginning of the 1970s, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) had expected global installed nuclear power to reach at least 2.5 terawatts (TW) by 2000, as compared with what was in fact the actual total of 351 gigawatts (GW). The first nuclear power plant started operating in the United Kingdom in 1956. In the United States, as many as 65 plants were ordered between 1965 and 1969, and by the end of 1970, the countr...

In contrast with the large diffusion investments in ethanol and synthetic fuels , support for hydrogen production and handling (that is, materials science) has been small-scale and limited to R&D . However, hydrogen has found a performance niche in certain industrial processes. Annual production in the United States from 1971 to 2003 increased more than 10-fold and production costs were reduced by a factor of 5, without any subsidies and despite the material challenges associated with handling hydrogen . A  hydrogen pipeline is being operated between Louisiana and Texas; and some are considering the old idea of mixing hydrogen into the national natural gas pipeline system .

  In response to the oil crisis and the erosion of trade preferences for sugar exports, Brazil’s military Government launched the world’s first large-scale ethanol programme in 1975, with producer subsidies and user incentives aimed at a rapid shift towards dedicated engines running on ethanol . In response to low gasoline prices in the mid-1980s, a national research programme was started which achieved a reduction in production costs from $35/ GJ (in 2004 United States dollars) to less than $10/GJ in 2009, mainly through higher yields. In Brazil, ethanol derived from sugar cane has a high energy return of 8.3 times the energy input (ranging from 3.7 to 10) and high yields of about 5,500 litres per hectare. In addition, the introduction of flexible fuel engines (developed with foreign automobile companies) allowed users to choose the desired mix of ethanol and gasoline, thus creating fuel competition and a hedge against lower future oil prices from 2003. The cumulative subsidy aim...