Renewable Energy and Barriers to Its Growth

Many countries around the world have embarked on long-term plans to actively replace fossil fuels—gas, oil, and coal—with renewable energy sources (RES), mainly using solar and wind power. However, the slow pace of such substitution, which has been observed in the global energy sector over the past 30 years, casts doubt on the reality of these plans. This chapter discusses the main factors that may hinder the development of renewable energy sources, primarily solar, wind, and even batteries for electric vehicles. Along with the growing geopolitical friction, an additional factor restraining RES is the transition from a linear to a circular economy model, where the role of materials, and not just the critical ones, is dramatically increasing. The uneven economic development between countries with high technology and those with major reserves of strategically important materials necessary to reduce energy intensity can create great uncertainties in the world markets for goods and services. Taken together, these factors can become real barriers to changing the structure of energy consumption in favor of renewable energy sources.