At a time of great urgency to address the climate crisis, the energy transition is hitting walls on multiple fronts: grid congestion, labor shortages, inflation, limited supply of precious metals, limited availability of land, public opposition to renewables.
There is one thing that could help enormously: Sufficiency.
Sufficiency is about reducing demand for energy, materials, land and water while providing human well-being for all within planetary boundaries. It is about designing infrastructure and society so that low-energy, low-impact lifestyles are the norm, not the exception.
Sufficiency is currently neglected in the energy debate. This is a huge missed opportunity: Recent research suggests that an increased focus on sufficiency could reduce energy demand in 2050 by 25-40% compared to the scenarios of the Dutch Nationaal Plan Energiesysteem, TNO, and Netbeheer Nederland.
As a result, the energy transition would require far fewer resources than is currently assumed. This means fewer wind turbines, solar fields, batteries and power lines, less labor to install these facilities, fewer materials such as steel or precious metals, lower investment costs and a much smaller impact on our environment and land use. This allows us to meet our climate goals faster and with less environmental impact.
Sufficiency can not only ease the energy transition on multiple fronts, but also seed the societal changes needed to achieve true sustainability. It helps us move from a growth-dependent society, with its 'hustle culture' and energy-hungry lifestyles and industries, to a sharing and caring economy, where we rebuild our relationship with nature and focus on what truly matters. Let us embrace it.
Together with Michiel den Haan (https://powor.nl/) and John Grin, I argue for a stronger focus on sufficiency in de Volkskrant today: https://lnkd.in/dA9PK6Jy [unpaywalled: https://archive.is/pkyib]