Renewables starting to snowball
The Paris-based International Energy Agency (IEA) provides yearly updates as to the state of our energy markets which show our progress in decarbonising our power supply. Removing fossil fuels from our lives as soon as possible is, of course, a vital goal, and a good report from the IEA can go a long way to dispel the general doom and gloom which often surrounds climate change news.
Thankfully, the latest IEA report on the year 2016 contains a pretty much unbroken litany of good news. The banner headline statistic is that renewable energy accounted for two thirds of all new energy added to the global grid over 2016. The total of 165GW of renewable energy installed is a huge achievement.
Out of that two thirds, not only was solar power the biggest grower, the amount of new solar power laid down also exceeded the output of new coal plants for the first time ever. Not only was solar power the overall winner in 2016, the total of 74GW laid down was also 50% higher than the total amount in 2015.
At this rate it is predicted that a further 920GW of renewable energy will be installed by 2020, of which approximately 740GW will be brand new solar power. For context, that is more than the total power use of India and Japan today, so these numbers are not trivial.
These forecasts have been driven upwards by the improved renewable energy policies which are being pursued by China and India. Both countries are investing very heavily into renewable energy technology in recognition of the environmental damage that fossil fuel power causes. For instance, in one month in the summer of 2017 China laid down more solar panels than had existed in the world in 2001.
A perhaps unsurprising consequence of this is that price of renewable energy has hit an all-time low of around US$30 per megawatt hour, which makes it probably the cheapest source of energy available in most places in the world. A great example from earlier this year is that wind power in the UK is now significantly cheaper than nuclear energy, which is a little awkward considering that the UK is currently spending billions of pounds on the Hinkley Point C plant and de-incentivising wind power.
However, trends like that in countries like the UK are not the global norm. With the growth in renewable power set to grow twice as fast as that of renewable energy over the next five years, renewable energy will provide 30% of total global demand by 2022 according to the IEA. This may sound underwhelming, but it is a huge improvement.
In addition to that, these things tend to snowball; one of the defining aspects of our species is that we can accelerate the pace of our own progress. It would not be at all surprising that these ambitious growth targets are seen as cautious by the time we get to 2022. Once everyone sees the benefits – both to the planet and economic – the whole world will pile in.
