THAT WAS EASY:

The 1973 oil price crisis that driven by political embargoes sent shockwaves through the global economy. By the embargo's end in 1974, the global oil price had risen by nearly 300%. This "first oil shock" was early demonstration of the power of political uncertainty over fuel security in a fossil-fuel dependent world. 

That crisis also spurred the earliest academic interest in the idea of an energy system based solely on renewables. In a hauntingly prescient Science article in 1975, Danish Physicist Bent Sørensen decried society's failure to harness the planet's ample renewable resources in favour of hungrily consuming finite geological fuels.

Sørensen outlined a plan in which solar and wind power could supply Denmark's needs in totality by 2050 - a date that then, unlike now, must have seemed comfortingly distant. [...]

It took a while for other academics to follow Sørensen. None followed for 20 years and only 12 in the next 30 years, according to the authors of a new report from LUT University.

Now, however, hundreds of scientific studies have demonstrated pathways to a 100% renewables-based energy system, on the local, national, and global scale.

What was once a pipe dream is finally seen as an attainable reality, and a shared expectation. More than 61 countries across the world have set 100 per cent renewable targets, for at least the power sector.

In Australia, the market operator has mapped a number of different scenarios to 100 per cent renewables, or close to it, on the main grid, and the federal government expects 82 per cent renewables by 2030, mostly through wind and solar. 

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