Energy stagnates stealthily in world trade

Meeting the growing energy needs of the planet requires images of oil pipelines, electrical cables and coal loadings. But scientists at Michigan State University show that a lot of energy moves almost incognito, embedded in the products of a growing society.

And this energy leaves its environmental footprint at home.

In this month's newspaper Applied EnergyMSU researchers are examining the flow of virtual energy in China – the energy used to produce goods and products at a place that are shipped. What they discovered, is that virtual energy has flowed from less populated and energy poor areas in the western regions of China to the burgeoning cities of the East, where the energy is abundant.

In fact, the virtual energy transferred from west to east was far superior to the physical energy that was going through the mbadive investment in China 's infrastructure, transportation project. electricity from west to east. China is a powerful model of energy use, having surpbaded the United States. In 2013, almost 22% of global energy consumption was in China.

Conserving energy and managing the accompanying environmental impacts is a growing concern around the world and it is crucial to take a holistic look at all the ways in which energy is used and displaced. " said Jianguo "Jack" Liu, Rachel Carson Chair in Sustainability of the MSU Center for Systems Integration and Sustainability (CSIS). "We will only be able to make effective policy decisions if we fully understand who produces the products. energy and consumes all the energy. "

Virtual energy is considered essential to avoid regional energy crises, as products traded from one place to another include virtual energy. This means that the import area can avoid spending energy to produce the imported products. The document entitled "Change in a National Virtual Energy Network" examines how the energy of a region to meet energy and energy needs by recognizing that energy is closely linked to growth and economic demand.

Researchers are the first to be interested in energy consumption after the global financial crisis of 2008 and to understand how economic despair can have a considerable, but not always obvious, impact on energy , as well as pollution and environmental degradation that may accompany its use.

"China, like many places in the world, has an uneven distribution of energy resources, and China is also growing rapidly," said the first author of the article, Zhenci Xu, a PhD student in China. MSU-CSIS. student. "We wanted to understand the true ways of using energy when economic growth picks up pace after a financial crisis." All the costs of using energy, including the environmental damage and pollution, must be taken into account, and the current policies focus mainly on physical protection, energy, not virtual energy ".

The researchers found that the persistent flow of total virtual energy between high-energy provinces and energy-rich provinces rose from 43.2% in 2007 to 47.5% in 2012. In the context of metacoupling (socio-economic-environmental interactions in adjacent and remote locations), they also discovered after the financial crisis, that trade was taking place between distant provinces – exchanges related to the environmental footprint of energy.

The authors note that these types of badyzes are needed around the world to guide policies that hold areas that change their energy consumption to contribute appropriately to reducing the real costs of energy.

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More information:
Zhenci Xu et al, Change in a national virtual energy network, Applied Energy (2019). DOI: 10.1016 / j.apenergy.2019.03.099