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From Rio to Paris via Kyoto: How the Efforts to Protect the Global Climate Affect the World Energy Development

  • GENERAL SUBJECTS OF POWER INDUSTRY
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Abstract

The aims of this work are to analyze the changes in the world power industry during the time after the adoption of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change of 1992 and to assess the extent to which the commitments of the Kyoto Protocol of 1997 have been met and evaluate the prospects of implementing the tasks of the Paris Agreement of 2015. Based on data on the production and consumption of various kinds of energy and the emissions of greenhouse gases, primarily carbon dioxide, in 1990–2017, changes in the structure of the global energy consumption, trends in electric power generation, and the influence of different factors on the carbon dioxide emissions in power-generating enterprises are investigated. It is shown that the power industry, which is the main source of anthropogenic greenhouse gases (GHGs), is the most inertial branch of the economy in terms of its contribution to the reduction in GHG emissions. Thus, in the first 2008–2012 commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol, GHG emissions in the state parties to the protocol decreased by 7.6% compared the base year, while other GHG sources reduced the emission by 18%. The corresponding figures for the following 2013–2017 commitment period were 10.6 and 17.1%, respectively. The maximum reduction in the carbon dioxide emissions in the power industry resulted from an increase in the global average efficiency of the thermal power stations from 32% in 1990 to 36% in 2017; as a consequence, the cumulative decrease in the CO2 emissions in the world during the 1990–2017 period was approximately 22 billion t. The increase in the electric power generation at HPPs and NPPs resulted in a reduction in GHG emissions by 16.7 and 10.7 billion t, respectively. The substitution of coal and fuel oil by gas at thermal power stations facilitated reducing the emissions by 5.2 billion t, while the use of renewable energy sources for generation of electric energy resulted in a reduction of 1.1 billion t. The contribution of the carbon capture and storage technologies amounting to only 0.2 billion t is not noticeable so far.

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Notes

  1. Other greenhouse gases are converted to the СО2-equivalent according to the IPCC method [4] using a coefficient called the global warming potential (GWP). It equals 34 for methane, 298 for nitrous oxide, and approximately 103 for fluorine-containing substances.

  2. Renewable energy sources are used not only for generation of electric power but also to generate heat—using solar collectors and firing biofuel—and as the motor fuel. However, the total contribution of the latter two applications in the total use of RESs—in terms of substitute fossil fuel—was approximately 25% in 2017, and their growth rates are considerably behind than that of RES-based power generation [8, 17].

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Funding

The part of this work in which the greenhouse gas emissions are assessed was supported by the Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation, project no. 13.1137.2017; the part that deals with the study of the development of the hydropower generation was supported by the Russian Science Foundation, project no. 18-19-00662; and the study of the development of the thermal power generation was supported by the Russian Foundation for Basic Research, project no. 18-08-00026.

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Correspondence to V. V. Klimenko.

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Translated by O. Lotova

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Klimenko, V.V., Klimenko, A.V. & Tereshin, A.G. From Rio to Paris via Kyoto: How the Efforts to Protect the Global Climate Affect the World Energy Development. Therm. Eng. 66, 769–778 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1134/S0040601519110028

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