The Green Energy Gap
While the consumption of renewable energy is growing, the world still has a long way to go if it wants to phase out fossil fuels.
Germany made headlines when solar panels generated enough power to meet half of the country’s electricity demand one sunny afternoon in June. It was seen as a milestone in the country’s push to source 18 percent of its total energy consumption from renewable sources by 2020. But while Germany is often lauded for its green energy use, the world as a whole still has a long way to go if it is going to replace all fossil fuels with renewables. In the graphic below, we investigate that distance using statistics from the latest Statistical Review of World Energy from BP.
