Here's a chart to keep handy when someone tells you clean energy is not all that clean.
It comes from the International Energy Agency's Energy Technology Perspectives Flagship Report 2023:
(Click to enlarge.)
A few notes:
- SMR is Steam Methane Reforming.
- There is some debate in the Twitter thread where I saw this as to whether the nuclear and hydropower materials and manufacturing included all of the concrete that went into the dams and plants. It seems extremely unlikely to me that the creation of either nuclear or hydro has such a low footprint compared to the others, given the carbon output of concrete, and as some point out in the comments, how is the storage of spent nuclear waste being accounted for?
- Of course, these various types of technologies are each on their own scales, and so should only be compared within subhead and not across categories.
- EVs (electric vehicles) are obviously intended here to refer to cars and light-duty trucks, not e-bikes. EVs, so defined, have half the footprint of internal combustion vehicles, which is good. But remember that e-bikes and their various cousins of similar scale can cut that a lot farther down and stretch the same amount of rare earth metals over a lot more vehicles, too.
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