The Economic Competitiveness of Renewable Energy: Pathways to 100% Global Coverage

Foreword

by Hans-Josef Fell

The time has come for an immediate change to 100% renewable energy sources on a global scale.

Even though renewable energy is currently on everyone’s mind, this was not always the case. Or was it? In earlier times renewable energy was also explored. Examples of this are the 1939 Spanish solar stocks and Rudolf Diesel’s first diesel engine that ran on cold-squeezed vegetable oil. Also, as early as the 19^th century there were tens of thousands of wind energy systems watering agricultural fields. Even Werner von Siemens was convinced that photovoltaics would conquer the world.

However, cheap oil, together with coal and later gas and uranium, increasingly replaced the utilization of renewable energy sources with the following disastrous consequences:

• Huge areas of Japan, White Russia, and Russia are permanently destroyed by radioactivity.
• The global mean temperature has been increasing in – as seen from a history of the earth point of view – a breath taking velocity above 0.8°C compared to the preindustrial level. The consequences are already disastrous: droughts and crop failures, flash floods and rising sea levels, hurricanes, typhoons, and tornados. All in all these have already left a deadly path on a large scale. Global warming has already destroyed lives and resulted in the flow of refugees. The global loss of species has reached an unacceptable level. A further warming up to 2°C – only an additional 1.2°C to the above mentioned value – cannot be ...