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Frontier Technologies to Protect the Environment and Tackle Climate Change
more affordable than electricity generated from fossil fuel sources. Clean battery technology is being
employed in electric vehicles as well as in grid-scale electricity storage projects. 187
The global rise in renewable energy supply over the last few decades can be seen in Figure 18.
Figure 18: Total primary global renewable energy supply
(thousand tons of oil equivalent) [KTOE] [xviii]
Box 13: Facts and figures related to energy consumption 188
Energy consumption: Facts and figures
• 13% of the global population – just under 1 billion people – still lack access to
modern electricity.
• 16 out of 20 countries with the largest deficits in electricity access are in Africa.
• 3 billion people rely on wood, coal, charcoal or animal waste for cooking and heating.
• Energy is the dominant contributor to climate change, accounting for around 60% of
total global greenhouse gas emissions.
• The health and well-being of some 3 billion people are being impacted adversely by
the lack of clean cooking fuels; the fuel being used, such as wood, charcoal, dung and
coal, cause indoor air pollution.
• Indoor air pollution from using combustible fuels for household energy caused 4.3
million deaths in 2012, with women and girls accounting for 6 out of every 10 of these.
• The share of renewable energy in final energy consumption reached 17.5% in 2015.
• The world needs to triple its investment in sustainable energy infrastructure per year,
from around USD 400 billion to USD 1.25 trillion by 2030.
Even so, global reliance on traditional fossil fuels (such as coal, petroleum, natural gas, oil shale,
bitumen, tar sand, and heavy oil) remains pervasive to the point that it still exceeds the volume of
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