The IEA’s World Energy Outlook 2012 was released 12 November. Though oil prices are at historic highs, the future for energy is promising, provided the right policies are in place. 

Thomas Edison’s assertion that “genius is 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration” is particularly pertinent to the solar energy sector. This remarkable technology could hold answers to so many of the world’s energy challenges, but only at the cost of hard effort and investment. Solar Energy Perspectives, the first in-depth study dedicated to solar technology from the International Energy Agency (IEA), a sister organisation of the OECD, gives a comprehensive analysis of solar energy’s potential as well as the policies required to increase its capacity in the coming decades. 

For many years Brazil was the world’s largest biofuel producer, until it was overtaken by the US in 2006. Brazil’s biofuel production reached 28.5 billion litres in 2010, which according to International Energy Agency (IEA) estimates is 27% of world biofuel production, most of which is ethanol, only a small portion (2.4 billion litres) of that being biodiesel. For 2011, however, IEA estimates show a drop of more than 4 billion litres in Brazilian biofuel production compared with the previous year. But there is good reason to believe that this drop will prove temporary. 

The Fukushima tragedy in Japan in March 2011 has unsettled the nuclear energy outlook. Nuclear power started out almost 60 years ago with the Obninsk plant near Moscow in 1954, but after strong growth in the 1960s and 1970s, the industry declined sharply in the 1980s due to costs, delays and safety concerns after the Three Mile Island accident in the US in 1979, and the Chernobyl accident in Ukraine in 1986.

How willing are you to pay more for renewable energy? Judging by a survey we previewed in 2010 (see here for instance) and whose results have now been published, the answer is: not that much. Greening Household Behaviour shows that while people may change their habits if given the right incentives and information, they are not quite as ready to dip deeply into their pockets.

The Cree Indians around Lake Athabasca used the gobs of tar they found there to waterproof their canoes. The potential of this mundane stuff to yield oil was gleaned early in the 20^th century, and Athabasca in Alberta, Canada sits on the world’s richest petroleum resource: more than 2 trillion barrels, as much as all the remaining recoverable conventional oil in the world.

How much more would you be willing to pay for renewable energy? Are environmental concerns a factor in how much you use your car? And are you really thinking about the environment when you buy organic food? All these questions, and more, are at the heart of the 2008 survey which forms the basis of Greening Household Behaviour. A part of the OECD’s Green Growth Strategy, this survey covered 10,000 households across ten OECD countries to determine how our day-to-day relationship with the environment may affect reforms, and is due for another round in 2011.