So there was big news today … the Wall Street Journal reported that the International Energy Agency presented a paper to the G-20 meeting in Melbourne on global energy demand. The paper predicted that global energy demand will grow 50% in the next 25 years.
50% sounds like a huge number, but over a 25 year period it means it is only growing 1.63%/year. that number doesn’t sound like it would be insurmountable to deal with. it is much less than the global economy is predicted to grow. couldn’t a potential plan of conversation and new energy sources deal with this increase in demand???
Your comment reminded me of Prof. Fine’s concept of Clockspeed – that every industry has a half-life and should be evaluated in that context.
The proverbial fruit fly example lives only 24-hours, so six hours is a large chunk, but a human lives ~100 years so 6-hours a small amount of time (relatively).
Energy and transportation projects take many years to develop and have a useful-life of decades. So looking at it on an annual basis isn’t appropriate, because we can’t build a power plant within a year. There’s similar rumblings for the San Diego Airport, where you have to look at the growth over decades when planning infrastructure projects.
But you bring an important point that conservation has a different clockspeed and action can be more immediate. I wonder if there’s a way to translate clockspeeds where supply solutions and demand solutions have different time-constants to standardize this.