Executive Summary

Wind energy offers significant potential for near-term (2020) and long-term (2050) greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reductions. A number of different wind energy technologies are available across a range of applications, but the primary use of wind energy of relevance to climate change mitigation is to generate electricity from larger, grid-connected wind turbines, deployed either on- or offshore. Focusing on these technologies, the wind power capacity installed by the end of 2009 was capable of meeting roughly 1.8% of worldwide electricity demand, and that contribution could grow to in excess of 20% by 2050 if ambitious efforts are made to reduce GHG emissions and to address the other impediments to increased wind energy deployment. Onshore wind energy is already being deployed at a rapid pace in many countries, and no insurmountable technical barriers exist that preclude increased levels of wind energy penetration into electricity supply systems. Moreover, though average wind speeds vary considerably by location, ample technical potential exists in most regions of the world to enable significant wind energy deployment. In some areas with good wind resources, the cost of wind energy is already competitive with current energy market prices, even without considering relative environmental impacts. Nonetheless, in most regions of the world, policy measures are still required to ensure rapid deployment. Continued advances in on- and offshore wind energy technology are expected, however, further reducing the cost of wind energy and improving wind energy's GHG emissions reduction potential.

Introduction

Parties need to agree upon common data, standards, supporting theories and methodologies. This annex summarizes a set of agreed upon conventions and methodologies. These include the establishment of metrics, determination of a base year, definitions of methodologies and consistency of protocols that permit a legitimate comparison between alternative types of energy in the context of climate change phenomena. This section defines or describes these fundamental definitions and concepts as used throughout this report, recognizing that the literature often uses inconsistent definitions and assumptions.

This report communicates uncertainty where relevant, for example, by showing the results of sensitivity analyses and by quantitatively presenting ranges in cost numbers as well as ranges in the scenario results. This report does not apply formal IPCC uncertainty terminology because at the time of approval of this report, IPCC uncertainty guidance was in the process of being revised.

Metrics for analysis in this report

A number of metrics can simply be stated or are relatively easy to define. Annex II provides the set of agreed upon metrics. Those which require further description are found below. The units used and basic parameters pertinent to the analysis of each RE type in this report include:

• International System of Units (SI) for standards and units

• Metric tonnes (t) CO2, CO2eq

• Primary energy values in exajoules (EJ)

• IEA energy conversion factors between physical and energy units

• Capacity: GW thermal (GWt), GW electricity (GWe)

• Capacity factor

• […]

Executive Summary

Historically, economic development has been strongly correlated with increasing energy use and growth of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Renewable energy (RE) can help decouple that correlation, contributing to sustainable development (SD). In addition, RE offers the opportunity to improve access to modern energy services for the poorest members of society, which is crucial for the achievement of any single of the eight Millennium Development Goals.

Theoretical concepts of SD can provide useful frameworks to assess the interactions between SD and RE. SD addresses concerns about relationships between human society and nature. Traditionally, SD has been framed in the three-pillar model—Economy, Ecology, and Society—allowing a schematic categorization of development goals, with the three pillars being interdependent and mutually reinforcing. Within another conceptual framework, SD can be oriented along a continuum between the two paradigms of weak sustainability and strong sustainability. The two paradigms differ in assumptions about the substitutability of natural and human-made capital. RE can contribute to the development goals of the three-pillar model and can be assessed in terms of both weak and strong SD, since RE utilization is defined as sustaining natural capital as long as its resource use does not reduce the potential for future harvest.

Allegory flourished in premodern Islamic literatures. Remarkably, however, neither premodern nor modern literary historians devote independent discussions to the genre per se, or even include the term in their indices. Allegorical praxis is simply treated under other generic categories, such as the mystical tale, the philosophical visionary recital, the poetic romance, or scriptural and textual commentary. Discussion here therefore requires drawing together variegated strands of literary practice to portray the history and development of allegory in Arabic, Persian, and Ottoman Turkish literatures, which are the major literary traditions of Islamic culture. Other Islamic literatures exist, in Urdu, Malay, and Swahili, for example, yet neither space nor scope of personal expertise allows their treatment here. Allegory in Islamic literatures as a developed literary practice begins at the turn of the eleventh century, four centuries after the death of the Prophet Muhammad. Yet allegory draws on earlier periods for crucial constituent narrative forms, topics, themes, source materials, and interpretational frameworks. An initial overview of relevant influences will clarify later developments.

The Qur’an influences allegorical practice in Islamic literatures in three significant ways. First, it dramatically emphasizes the existential and experiential duality that informs all allegorical writing. The Qur’an finds humans immersed in the immediate pleasures of corporeal sensation and worldly ambition. It calls on them to transcend these alluring earthly attachments and return to the “rightly guided path.” Humans, it states, must reorder their lives. Through divine mercy, God sends both prophets and revelation to guide this change in human orientation, with Muhammad being the last of such prophets and the Qur’an the final revelation.

The Arabic tradition of popular literature produced a significant number of sīras other than the well-known Sīrat ‘Antar and Sīrat Banī Hilāl (both of which are discussed in separate contributions to this volume, Chapters 13 and 14). Similar to these two works, the other sīras are works of heroic adventure and romance primarily concerned with depicting the personal prowess, military exploits, innate virtue and incomparable nobility of their heroes. These narratives are pseudo-historical in tone and setting. They base many of their central and secondary characters on actual historical figures, and frame their events within the general context of the historical periods that they presume to represent. Nonetheless, details of history are regularly enhanced by the imaginative improvements of fiction, with the result that history is usually reflected only along general levels of character identity, setting, atmosphere and tone. The importance of this pseudo-historical frame for both composers and audience remains a significant aspect of these works, since it plays an essential role in both their aesthetic and their didactic dimensions. However, at heart these are works of entertainment whose intent is to delight and morally instruct their audiences by presenting larger-than-life deeds and emotions as played out through idealized codes of action.

The written versions of popular sīras tend to be composed in either straight forward prose or, more usually, a style that relies substantially on rhymed prose (saj‘) interspersed with poetry. In general these narratives are exceedingly long, often taking a year or more to narrate fully in oral form. In their longest manuscript and printed versions they run to between two and six thousand pages, depending upon page and script size.

In an essay in the Berliner Monatsschrift (May 1796, pp. 395–96), among other examples of the fanaticism that may be induced by attempts to philosophize about mathematical objects, I also attributed to the Pythagorean number-mystic the question: “Why is it that the ratio of the three sides of a right-angled triangle can only be that of the numbers 3, 4, and 5?” I had thus taken this proposition to be true; but Professor Reimarus refutes it, and shows (Berliner Monatsschrift, August, no. 6) that many numbers, other than those mentioned, can stand in the ratio in question.

So nothing seems clearer than that we find ourselves embroiled in a truly mathematical dispute (of a kind that is, in general, almost unheard of). But this quarrel amounts only to a misunderstanding. Each party takes the expression in a different sense; so soon as a mutual understanding is reached, the dispute vanishes, and both sides are correct. Now proposition and counter-proposition are related as follows:

R. says (or at least thinks his proposition thus): “In the infinite multitude of all possible numbers (considered at large) there exist, in regard to the sides of the right-angled triangle, more ratios than that of the numbers 3, 4, and 5.”

The Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Naturwissenschaft (hereinafter: Metaphysical Foundations) first appeared in 1786 (with second and third printings in 1787 and 1800 respectively). This work thus belongs to the most creative decade of Kant's so-called critical period: the decade of the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason (1781), the Prolegomena (1783), the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785), the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason (1787), the Critique of Practical Reason (1788), and finally the Critique of Judgement (1790). Until very recently, however, the Metaphysical Foundations has had by far the least impact of any of these works, and has accordingly attracted the least amount of scholarly attention. Both the content and the form of the work have contributed to this situation. For, on the one hand, the Metaphysical Foundations is concerned with relatively specialized questions belonging to natural philosophy and even to physics: questions about the character and behavior of attractive and repulsive forces, for example, or about impact and the communication of motion. And, on the other hand, it is written in an inhospitable and forbidding style – organized in quasi-mathematical fashion into definitions (“explications”), propositions, proofs, remarks, and so on. In both of these respects the Metaphysical Foundations is more akin to some of Kant's precritical writings on natural philosophy – especially the Physical Monadology (1756) – than to the great works of the critical period.

The Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics is the preeminent synopsis in the history of philosophy. Kant completed it about fifteen months after the Critique of Pure Reason was published. He wanted to present his critical philosophy concisely and accessibly, for “future teachers” of metaphysics. He also wanted to convince his fellow metaphysicians “that it is unavoidably necessary to suspend their work for the present,” until they have determined “whether such a thing as metaphysics is even possible at all” (4:255). Although the Critique “always remains the foundation to which the Prolegomena refer only as preparatory exercises” (4:261), Kant nonetheless hoped that the shorter work would be used to assess the critical philosophy “piece by piece from its foundation,” serving “as a general synopsis, with which the work itself could then be compared on occasion” (4:380).

In the Prolegomena, Kant distilled his critical inquiry into the General Question, “Is metaphysics possible at all?” (4:271), which he in turn interpreted as a question about the possibility of synthetic a priori cognition (4:275–6), or cognition through pure reason (that is, independent of sensory experience). To answer the General Question, Kant first asked how synthetic a priori cognition is possible in two areas where he considered it actual: pure mathematics and pure natural science. He found that this possibility (and actuality) could be explained only by positing cognitive structures that the subject brings to cognition, as forms of sensory intuition and categories of the understanding.