4차 산업혁명에 대한 에너지 관점에서의 평가 및 전망

초록

Since the concept of the Fourth Industrial Revolution was declared in 2016 by Klaus Schwab, the executive chairman of the World Economic Forum, South Korea has rapidly accepted and established it as a challenging mission at the level of its government. However, academic societies have questioned the revolutionary characteristics as there were no great discontinuities of technological innovation and punctuated equilibrium in economic growth. Particularly, it is a critical evaluation that the Fourth Industrial Revolution does not illustrate any change in the energy sources. Therefore, this study aims to review the industrial revolutions from the perspective of energy transition. As a result of the analysis, the crucial change of energy sources in the era of the Second Industrial Revolution was from coal to oil, not electricity. Two pieces of evidence support this claim. First, electricity is just a secondary energy source, not a primary one. Second, electric cars were the losers of the severe competition with internal combustion vehicles in the early twentieth century, and gasoline cars have formed the infrastructure of cities around the world for the last 100 years. Moreover, renewable energy sources such as solar and wind power were not realized during the Third Industrial Revolution. Nevertheless, they still possess the potential for transition from fossil fuels to low-carbon energy sources in the age of the climate emergency. In conclusion, the Fourth Industrial Revolution could be reexamined and reconsidered as it provokes discontinuous innovations of technologies and energy sources, which are distinguishable from the features of the Third Industrial Revolution.

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