Decades of underinvestment in basic energy infrastructure has set the globe on a 'doomed' path that only £10.4 trillion of new investment can solve, energy experts claimed this week.
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Frequent blackouts and huge spikes in energy prices will result from a dirty, insecure and expensive global energy market, the International Energy Agency (IEA) warned at the launch of its World Energy Outlook 2006 in London this week.
'This energy future is not only unsustainable, it is doomed to failure because of underinvestment in basic energy infrastructure,' said IEA chief executive Claude Mandil.
'We are on course for an energy system that will evolve from crisis to crisis. This can mean spikes in prices, frequent blackouts, abject energy poverty or all of these,' he said.
The World Energy Outlook is published annually by the IEA and makes predictions and recommendations on energy issues up to 2030.
The IEA found that enacting all 1,400 existing government policies would secure energy supplies at a cost of £10.4 trillion. Alternatively, for the same cost, emissions could be cut by 40% by introducing a set of policies described as 'the clean dozen'.
