The IEA creates a new success?

The IEA has for a long time been known to produce excellent statistics over energy in all parts of the world and occasionally also interesting insights on energy policy and technology. The latter however with a much more uneven quality. One of the useful statistic products is a pocket guide that can be downloaded as pdf and gives very useful data not only for the IEA member countries but for a wide range of other countries, 136 to be more precise!

A product that is close to the statistics is the analysis with indicators on the period of 30 years that the IEA has existed and that has produced the nowadays well-known graph showing the importance of the "Negawatthours" produced. Absent efficiency improvements we would have to use almost 50% more energy to maintain the standard of living we are enjoying today. This book is also available for free download now.

And only recently the IEA has released a new product aimed at being a periodical just as their well-known World Energy Outlook, WEO. The new one is called ETP, Energy Technology Perspectives and uses scenario-technique to investigate the possibilities and robustness of energy policies suggested and applied. The book deserves to be a bestseller, which however hardly is likely with the pricing the IEA has. On the other hand the price is a bit above the price of a barrel of oil and could save many such if carefully studied and applied in practice.

The message of their publication is basically optimistic and shows that there are several technology portfolios that can be effective for reducing the climate impact but also the energy efficiency is the key-element that should be used in all the portfolios the guarantee a favourable result. Or to quote directly from the general director of the IEA, Mr Claude Mandil:

Energy efficiency is essential to mitigate growth in energy demand and CO2 emissions Improved energy efficiency is an indispensable component of any policy mix, said Mr. Mandil, and it is available immediately. - Accelerating energy efficiency improvements alone can reduce the world’s energy demand in 2050 by an amount equivalent to almost half of today’s global energy consumption. Governments, in both OECD and non-OECD countries, must be willing to implement measures that encourage the investment in energy-efficient technologies, Mr. Mandil added.