For the First Time In 3 Years, Investments In Renewable Energy Increased

Lucas123 writes: Driven largely by oil price weakness, 2015 could be the best year to date for investments in renewable energy technology, according to several new reports. According to Bloomberg Energy Finance, new funding for wind, solar, biofuels and other low-carbon energy technologies grew 16% to $310 billion last year. It was the first growth since 2011 (PDF), erasing the impact of lower solar-panel prices and falling subsides in the U.S. and Europe that hurt the industry in previous years. Demand for solar power grew 16% year-over-year in 2014, representing 44 gigawatts of capacity purchased during the year. Worldwide solar demand in 2015 is projected to be 51.4GW, compared with 39GW in 2014. Government policies will continue to improve for renewables — solar, in particular — given that anti-dumping duties imposed on Chinese modules by the U.S. last year are expected to be removed this year, Deutsche Bank said.

Comments

Huh?

[Guspaz]

I don't get it, wouldn't lower oil prices reduce demand for renewable energy, thus reducing investment?

Re:Huh?

[DamonHD]

“Healthy investment in clean energy may surprise some commentators, who have been predicting trouble for renewables as a result of the oil price collapse,” said Michael Liebreich, chairman of the advisory board of the London-based researcher. “Our answer is that 2014 was too early to see any noticeable effect on investment. The impact of cheaper crude will be felt much more in road transport than in electricity generation.”

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/...

Rgds

Damon

Re:Huh?

[burni2]

perhaps some managers took engineering classes and started to re-project peak oil and realized:

That peak oil will still be there, just a bit later. And that when you have cheap oil at hand and you make yourself highly depended on such a resource, where we have seen everything from extreme low to painfully high within a very short time.

That not looking on efficiency and substitution you wouldn't be prepared for the future, when such choices would be made by many companies+people that would increase the demand on renewables to a stretch where markets simply cannot deliver any more. When markets cannot deliver anymore prices go skyrocketing making that late choice for renewables really painfull.

(we saw this in 2007/2008 when market demand for renewables was so high, that the demand could not be satisfied any more)

Re:Huh?

[Hadlock]

Solar is already on par with electricity prices (which are mainly driven by the pool-table flat price of coal) and solar is expected to be half the price of electricity in 15 years. And that's in the first year. That means you get back 100% return on your investment in the first year. The next 25 years are just gravy (assuming no hail storms and your batteries never wear out). If you live in a hot state nearly free electricity during the hottest part of the day means you'll have a very predictable and very low electric cost for 10 months out of the year (12 if you have gas heat).
 
What I'm saying is, solar is already cost-effective, but in 10 years even with dirt-cheap oil, solar will still be cheaper, and there's no global fluctuation in locally produced and consumed solar energy.
 
Energy independence = less need for global intervention in war-torn oil producing states.

Re:Huh?

[drinkypoo]

There is no current safe, small scale, cheap, energy dense solution

It's called buried evacuated flywheels. HTH, HAND!

Re:Huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

Just looking at the trends in oil and gas prices over the last century there is a steady upward trend in prices.

Looking at the demand curves for China, India and other countries that are catching up to the Western World, their demand for oil and gas is going up - along with their demand for autos.

See, this relatively cheap gas and oil prices will not last because it never has in the past. This is just a small dip in a long term trend. Why some oil speculators are renting out oil tankers and just parking them off-shore waiting for the inevitable increase in prices.

Anyone who thinks this oil and gas boom is permanent and low oil and gas prices is will stay is a short sighted fool.

See, all these people are going to panic when oil prices shoot up again. .

Re: Huh?

[WindBourne]

Cheap oil does not impact AE. Cheap coal, Nat gas, nukes, etc, do.

Re:Huh?

[thegarbz]

That's a statement born out of looking at existing reserves and then drawing a trend line. There is no such thing as peak oil. What we do have is a supply and demand function where the supply is actually dependent on the price point caused by demand.

As supply decreases the price of goods increase. These increased prices make it economic to extract other goods which were previously unavailable. When the price got high enough we started drilling deeper and started sucking it out of tar sands. If the price gets high enough again you're starting to look at drilling into the Arctic. Heck if the price every gets truly ridiculous then you start looking off-world.

While this all may sound sci-fi about 50 years ago if you would have told someone that the future of oil is drilling 10km into the ground they would have laughed at you. That is the nature of peak oil. We've hit "peak oil" in the 1800s and again pretty much every day since as we started drilling for it.

Re:Huh?

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

... or even build pipelines to ship it to you. Energy independence? Only if it fits an environmentalist agenda for some people.

Canada does not need Keystone XL to ship oil to the USA. Already enough pipelines exist to ship crude to US refineries. It needs Keystone XL to access the ports in Gulf of Mexico to export it to other countries. Keystone XL will create about 2000 temporary jobs to build and about 100 permanent jobs to maintain it. But if we force Canada to ship crude to USA, and we do the refining and then export value added products to rest of the world, there would be 10000 permanent jobs in the USA. What Canada really wants is a cheap way to gets its crude to places where there is no pollution control, no labor safety and low wages to do the refining.

10000 jobs works out to about 1 billion in wages. Cost of pollution abatement and labor safety would add another four of five billion a year. To save that money and funnel it to the top executives as bonuses and pay rises, they are engaging in scorched earth politics and divisive rhetoric.

Why export crude? Build the damned refineries in the tar sands. Capture the pollutants and bury it back where you dug the crude out. You have permanent jobs and all the profits that could be made in refining the oil too.

Oh, I get it. Your crude is too expensive to be refined safely paying decent wages to the workers and without causing too much of pollution. All that talk about USA's energy independence and enviro - nazis, all that rhetoric is to basically mask these facts: Canadian tar sands crude is extremely dirty. It has no market value unless you cut pollution abatements, labor safety and wages.

Re:Huh?

[DamonHD]

I think that the current low price is all about the Saudis making life hard for Russia and Iran. Everything else is insignificant.

Rgds

Damon

Re:Huh?

[burni2]

Heck if the price every gets truly ridiculous then you start looking off-world.

Unlikely to happen, the abiotic theory in the creation of oil by Gold is mostly viewed as disproven, because it lead to deep drilling efforts, these got not much oil out of it but showed that even there bacteria (extremophiles) were present so deep inside the earth.

If you would now jump off your seat and say again that this is proof that we just must dig deeper. This can be disproven to be sustainable by logic, meaning yes there is little oil, but again "little" not the amounts needed.

The steps to disprove:
a.) The creation of oil needs at least plant life (the biomass of plant life is enormous), while it may not need the life itself(chemical proccession is possible) but life (our known carbon based life) accumulates water and carbon,
and these things can recombine to hydrocarbons (under the influence of heat and pressure)

This means to create oil reservoirs you need and accumulation of the right components and life has the ability to accumulate.

hydrocarbons == oil

If those elements would have been scattered there would be no such oil "stashes" found in the earths crust.

b.) the past view of the O2 content over the last billion of years
- some 650 million years ago the O2 concentration began to rise,

deduction: that this must be initial starting point in develloping of plant life. This is our ground zero for oil creation inside the earth

If you accept the assumption that 99% of the oil resources are based on reprocessed biological matter. The next deduction is, that: There is only a limited amount of oil because of the limited time span of life on earth.

Evidence can be seen, when you look at all discoveries of oil reservoirs, they have two huge peaks(40s and 50s), and many small peaks, but the trend is going downwards, even with the invention of new techniques.

Also discovery doesn't mean production, so basically the reservoirs that are in production now(yes fracked and tar sands) were found some 40-20 years ago, (tar sands are known even longer before) and fracking is also sucking the last drops from known deposits.

Deduction: Digging deeper means just going longer back into the earths biological history And this also means that you are just going back to that point when the "tank" (meaning all that biological matter that was conserved and did not decompose) was started to be filled.

Meaning: The deeper you dig the less you will find.

The other evidence proving the reality of peak oil is that this oil is used for rougly 130yrs. at industrial scale.

These resources were never drained before. So even that right now hydrocarbons are formed in the earth crust. The rate of oil creation by this process can deduced to be very slow.

Taking into account the long time for creation, the total consumed amount and the growing hardships that prospectors face since the 60s it can be logically deduced that there is a limited amount of oil, and if you start to drain it, the creation rate of new oil due to biological processes does virtually not even cover for about 0-point-0-somehting percent of the whole oil production. This means it is logical and safe to assume that peak oil (production) is very real.

And if you look into the future consumption of China and India which I did not, it looks just more severe.

Re: Huh?

[turkeyfish]

It won't be that simple, since those who do shut down will be out of business more or less permanently, having given up their market share. Also the investment profit cycle of shale oils are quite different from those of fracking and they must continue to produce regardless just to pay back billions in loans already spent on infrastructure. This is a particular problem for the Canadians, who the Saudis see as their first target. The battle is over market share and who will be the top dog, the current price is incidental, since the winner will be able to set whatever price they want. The Saudis with their ability to make a profit even at $10 per barrel are likely to win out, but the Koch brothers and others will fight tooth and nail before letting that happen and one reason their recent Fox News propaganda is increasingly pushing policies that will further destabilize the Middle East and Saudi influence there.

The reason alternative energy will continue to gain ground is that ever increasing efficiencies and long term costs are becoming increasingly competitive with fossil fuels. Recent breakthroughs in solar, which will increase current efficiency by about 40%, haven't even come to market yet. Likewise, there is considerable profit to be gained in alternative energies by increasing scale and mass production that are only now being realized. Fossil fuels on the other hand face increasing costs going forward, higher costs to drill with less return on investment, greater costs associated with cleanup and pollution controls that alternative energy simply don't have. Further, there is increased realization that fossil fuel burning will cause humans to go extinct unless curtailed. This means the fossil fuels industry will have to dramatically increase their spending on propaganda just to maintain the current drill, baby, drill mindset.

The worse news for fossil fuels is that the smart money on Wall Street and other global markets increasingly see the that it is in smaller alternative energy companies and technologies that new fortunes will be made, while fortunes will be lost trying to sustain antiquated fossil fuel technologies on an ever warming planet, with increasingly higher extraction and maintenance costs. This is the primary reason why China is currently outspending the US on annual solar investments of $93B to $51 per annum and their 5-year plan indicates they are just ramping up. They intend to be the world leaders, while the US falls all over itself trying to prop up the fossil fuels industry. The transition from fossil fuels isn't over by any means, but it is well on its way and there is nothing the fossil fuels industry can do about it other than drill, baby, drill while they can still do it. Unfortunately for them, but fortunately for the rest of humanity that window is starting to close.

In the US

[tsa]

Please add 'in the US' to the title. Here in Europe investments in clean energy increase yearly in some countries.

Re:In the US

[DamonHD]

Actually this is a world-wide issue, not just US, though note that /. disclaims in advance that many of its stories are US-centric as /. is.

So, no, the title is fine.

Rgds

Damon

us should stop subsidizing solar

[WindBourne]

Seriously, we are making a big mistake in subsidizing it at this point. It is still expensive enough that this can be used to help. In america, over 20% of energy is used on buildings HVAC and lights. In residential, HVAC is around 50% of its usage.
so the smart thing is drop the subsidies, but require that all new buildings below 6 stories to have enough on-site AE to at least equal the buildings HVAC energy usage.
With this approach, builders can choose where to focus at: better insulation, better HVAC, or loads of AE to make up the difference. This will not just bring down the price of AE, but also bring better down price of better insulation as well as geothermal HVAC.
In addition, we should require that all utilities must buy back excess electricity . they need to buy it back at whatever rate they currently pay other wholesalers at that time.

Re:us should stop subsidizing solar

[dbIII]

Seriously, we are making a big mistake in subsidizing it at this point

The right time would have been early on before we let the Chinese take the US developed technology and make a killing with it. Now it's got the critical mass to sell on it's own and the money is going to China for the panels and Germany for the electronics. A series of successive Governments demonising solar as part of getting into bed with the Saudis backfired.

wrong.

[WindBourne]

If Saudi were to stop exporting, international oil would rise over 100 quickly. However, within several years, prices would drop again.

wrong

[WindBourne]

Flow batteries are just coming on-line. Look up eos energy.

Re:That's due to a delayed reaction

[Anonymous Coward]

A Saudi official described it as a: “Cowardly terrorist act which Islam as well as other religions reject.

“[Saudi Arabia] offers its condolences to the families of the victims as well as the government and people of the French republic and wishes a speedy recovery for the wounded,” the official said.

Not that I expect that will sway you from your religion of hate. I really pity the ordinary Muslim. Not only are they far more likely to be killed by Jihadi terrorists than any other group of people, but every time the terrorists kill someone who isn't Muslim, people like you crawl out of the woodwork.