Here’s something that Joel Fitzgibbon, the AWU, the mining division of the CFMEU, and maybe journalists whipping Fitzgibbon’s departure up as a leadership threat to Anthony Albanese, might do well to read — as would Scott Morrison, Angus Taylor and the other climate denialists of the Coalition.
The International Energy Agency — reflecting its history as an OECD think tank for oil — is the perennial laggard when it comes to energy forecasts, routinely overstating fossil fuel production forecasts and significantly underestimating renewables.
But its latest report predicts that renewables will soon become the largest source of electricity generation worldwide, supplying one third of the world’s electricity.
“Total installed wind and solar PV capacity is on course to surpass natural gas in 2023 and coal in 2024. Solar PV alone accounts for 60% of all renewable capacity additions through 2025, and wind provides another 30%,” it says.
Offshore wind — something widely popular in Europe — is also playing a big role. “Driven by further cost declines, annual offshore wind additions are set to surge, accounting for one fifth of the total wind annual market in 2025.”
“Driven by China and the United States, net installed renewable capacity will grow by nearly 4% globally in 2020, reaching almost 200 GW. Higher additions of wind and hydropower are taking global renewable capacity additions to a new record this year, accounting for almost 90% of the increase in total power capacity worldwide.”.
“India is expected to be the largest contributor to the renewables upswing in 2021, with the country’s annual additions almost doubling from 2020.”
At the same time the IEA says fossil fuel capacity will fall due to the economic slump triggered by the pandemic.
Electricity generated by renewables will increase by 7% globally this year, despite a 5% annual drop in global energy demand, the largest since World War II.
“Renewable power is defying the difficulties caused by the pandemic, showing robust growth while others fuels struggle,” said Dr Fatih Birol, the IEA’s executive director. Policymakers need to support the strong momentum behind renewables growth and if policy uncertainties are addressed, renewable energy capacity additions could reach 271 GW in 2022, the IEA said.
The report also shows investors have voted with their wallets. The IEA says that in the year to October, shares of solar companies worldwide had more than doubled in value from the end of 2019 — quite a contrast with the likes of coal giant Peabody, which is teetering on the edge of bankruptcy for the second time, while other mining multinationals rush to dump and close their thermal coal mines.
As far as investors are concerned, political ructions over climate increasingly look like a weird culture war unrelated to either physics or economics.
Will Australia follow? Of course we’ll follow, we won’t have a choice. But we should be leading!
What an uninformed article. The IEA has been saying this for several years now. Did either of you even bother to google news reports on what the IEA has been saying on this very topic for quite a few years now?
The first weasel word in both the IEA report and the above story is “capacity”. 1GW of coal capacity puts out close to 1GWh of energy every hour you request it. 1GW of solar capacity puts out about a seventh to a quarter of 24GW over the course of 24 hours. The second weasel word is “electricity”. We urgently need to decarbonise all energy usage because almost all of it comes from fossil fuels … we don’t just have to think about electricity.
The BP statistical report 2020 is the latest and it reports that in 2019 wind was about 2.2 % of global primary energy with solar somewhat less. A considerable amount of decarbonising in Europe has simply replaced clean nuclear power with renewables. What a waste of effort! Similar madness has been happening in the US. Until the madness of opposition to nuclear power stops, we’ll continue to see CO2 emissions fail to fall at the speed required. As one “Economist” writer said recently … “renewables are absolutely everywhere … except in the data”. Put simply, renewable additions in energy output (not “capacity”) aren’t even keeping up with annual energy demand increments, let along replacing the “capital”. 2020 is an exception, because of Covid. But will demand surge again as vaccines are rolled out? You’d have to bet on “yes”. The good news isn’t renewables, but the Chinese successful testing of their HTR-PM reactor. This is designed to be “plug-compatible” with their supercritical coal fleet … meaning you can replace the boiler with a reactor and keep the rest of the infrastructure. Decarbonising isn’t so much a matter of what happens quickest in the short term, but of long term structural planning.
Cheers, Geoff, but I’m afraid I’ll stick with the man from Stanford, Tony Seba.
Cos, as the crowd still yells; “SCOREBOARD!!”.
Look him up, cotton to how and what he thinks, and then come back with an argument about “structural planning”.
Oh, and bring some economics when you do;
When a system generates hyperabundant electricity at a marginal cost close to zero, the potential for new value creation is limitless.”
More precisely, the report says – “Hydropower …is by far the largest source of renewable electricity worldwide, followed by wind and solar PV.” Australian hydropower already has maxed out. By itself, wind-and-solar cannot become the largest source of electricity, because its backup has to be larger still. While there are still true believers needing these gadgets to appease the climate gods, the wind-and-solar salesman can still make a buck. However the rest of us had better prepare for nuclear.
Oct 28th, Renew Economy, piece headed;
“Super power: Here’s how to get to 100pct wind, solar and storage by 2030
“”A team led by renowned Stanford University futurist Tony Seba says most of the world can transition to 100 per cent wind, solar and storage electricity grids within the coming decade, in what they describe as the fastest, deepest and most profound disruptions ever seen in the energy industry.
The RethinkX team led by Seba, one of the few analysts to correctly forecast the plunging cost of solar over the last decade, predicts that the disruption caused by solar, wind and lithium-ion battery storage, or SWB, will be similar to the digital disruption of information technology.
“What happened in the world of bits is now poised to happen in the world of electrons,” they write.
“Just as computers and the Internet slashed the marginal cost of information and opened the door to hundreds of new business models that collectively have had a transformative impact upon the global economy, so too will SWB slash the marginal cost of electricity and create a plethora of opportunities for innovation and entrepreneurship.”
The key to this disruption, they say, is the near-zero marginal cost of wind and solar, and the falling costs of those technologies and of storage. They say there will inevitably be more wind and solar produced than needed, but that’s OK because this excess production, which they dub “super power”, can be used for long-term storage, electrification of housing and industrial processes and, of course, transport….
“Adoption of SWB is growing exponentially worldwide and disruption is now inevitable because by 2030 they will offer the cheapest electricity option for most regions. Coal, gas, and nuclear power assets will become stranded during the 2020s, and no new investment in these technologies is rational from this point forward.”…
“The implications of this clean electricity disruption are profound,” says Seba, a co-founder of RethinkX and a co-author of this new report.
“Not only can it solve some of society’s most critical challenges but it will usher in hundreds of new business models and create industries that collectively transform the global economy. When a system generates hyperabundant electricity at a marginal cost close to zero, the potential for new value creation is limitless. This isn’t a problem of overcapacity. This is a Super Power solution.”….”
Who needs expensive nuclear power when the sun rains massive amount of energy down on us for free. The nuclear fetish is rooted in an anachronistic perspective that someone else needs to create energy and pipe it to consumers, The Grid delusion. Fact is, every household can be self-sufficient in energy production. Not very household can yet afford that self sufficiency. But the government investment to universalise self production and self storage is trivial compared to the costs of central generation and distribution by grid (which wastes a major proportion of generation in losses to the atmosphere).
What an intelligent government would now be doing is facilitating community energy inter-connection and and sharing schemes and winding back wasteful expenditure on poles and wires.
Similarly, massive consumers of energy, like steel and aluminium production now have access to technology to economically produce energy on site. And that ignores the dimming revolution in green hydrogen. Imagine an Australia where the Pilbara coast was dotted with electric arc furnaces, or in the future hydrogen production on site and similar aluminium production facilities dotted the northern coast. We would be both producing the cheapest energy in the world and the cheapest steel and aluminium. This is not a fantasy. It can be a reality with a bit of vision and courage from the federal government. It is the absence of the intelligent vision that is the only impediment.
The nuclear fetish is rooted in an anachronistic perspective that someone else needs to create energy and pipe it to consumers, The Grid delusion. SO TRUE! And so yesteryear!
Oh Bless…. so sweet to see the dinosaurs still walking the earth
Fission reactors in Australia are unlikely and fusion reactors have not yet shown to be viable.
I’m afraid we are stuck with solar and wind power, which is cheaper than the nuclear options in any case.
My household climate gadgets of solar panels and battery, solar hot water and electric car, have reduced my energy costs and carbon footprint to approximately zero. These gadgets are getting more efficient and cheaper all the time. But have it your way, you go ahead and rely on nuclear power to do the same. Never mind a nuclear power plant in Australia would be many years away and has the status of a mirage rather than a gadget, And if you insist on this, where in your backyard will you set up your nuclear power plant?
Nooks too cheap to meter are the most expensive, complex and dangerous things ever devised to boil water.
But keep beating your dead one trick pony.