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There are still an estimated three billion people around the world who cook and heat their homes using simple stoves or open fires that burn wood, animal dung or coal. “There is going to be a lot of rising demand from regions like Asia, Latin America and parts of Africa.” “There are still a lot of people around the world – 1.2 billion or so – who do not have access to modern energy services,” explains Jim Watson, director of the UK Energy Research Centre.

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Perhaps the greatest issue raised by the scientists, policy experts and companies we spoke to is how to cope with the immediate hike in energy demands expected in the coming decades. BBC Future Now spoke to a panel of experts about what hurdles we must now overcome and where technology may provide an answer. There can be no doubt that implementing a shift in where we get our energy from is one of the grand challenges facing our planet today. There are political, economic and social issues at stake, but it may also require each of us to make some fundamental shifts in our behaviour too. Yet the implications of the changes underway go far deeper. “The energy industry is facing decades of transformation,” according to a recent report by the World Energy Council. The world’s scientists agree that we are on a path towards disaster that can only be stopped by weaning ourselves off our fossil fuel habit.

Burning of coal, oil and gas has been inextricably linked to the rising levels of greenhouse gases in Earth’s atmosphere and is a leading contributor of climate change. That figure increases every day.īut our gas guzzling over the past two centuries has taken a potentially devasting toll on the planet. It is estimated that since commercial oil drilling began in the 1850s, we have sucked up more than 135 billion tonnes of crude oil to drive our cars, fuel our power stations and heat our homes. More than half of our energy comes from fossil fuels extracted from deep within the Earth’s crust. With the global population swelling and industrialisation on the rise in developing nations, humanity’s hunger for energy has reached unprecedented levels.

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Or 3,000 times the daily output of Palo Verde nuclear power station in Arizona – one of the world’s largest – running at full capacity. That’s roughly equivalent to what we would use if all 7.5 billion of us boiled 70 kettles of water an hour around the clock. Every day, our species chews its way through more than a million terajoules of energy.