A unit of energy defined as the amount of energy released by burning one tonne of crude oil. It is approximately 42 gigajoules or 11,630 kilowatt hours, although as different crude oils have different calorific values, the exact value is defined by convention; several slightly different definitions exist. The toe is sometimes used for large amounts of energy. Multiples of the toe are used, in particular the megatoe (Mtoe, one million toe) and the gigatoe (Gtoe, one billion toe).
Published in Chapter:
Renewable Energy and Economic Growth: An Overview of the Literature
Patrizio Morganti (University of Tuscia, Viterbo, Italy) and Giuseppe Garofalo (University of Tuscia, Viterbo, Italy)
Copyright: © 2020
|Pages: 16
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-7998-1419-1.ch004
Abstract
The global commitment to drastically curb greenhouse gas emissions towards a sustainable development is strongly connected to the development and usage of renewable energy (RE), such as solar and wind. Between 2006 and 2016, world's total RE consumption, excluding hydro-electricity, increased by almost 350%, and RE investment grew from US $47 billion in 2004 to 279.8 billion in 2017. The importance of RE has attracted a lot of attention from the economic literature as well, since a growing body of empirical research is investigating the relationships between RE and economic growth. The general outcome is the existence of a positive bi-directional (direct and reverse) link between RE consumption and real GDP, though it also emerges evidence showing no statistically significant relationship. This Chapter provides i) an overview of the recent world's trends of RE production and investment, ii) an extensive and detailed review of the recent advances in the RE-growth empirical literature, highlighting the main methodologies adopted and the main findings emerged.