Slashdot Mirror
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.
“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
http://m.earth.org.uk/
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)
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.
moox. for a new generation.
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.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Cheap oil does not impact AE. Cheap coal, Nat gas, nukes, etc, do.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
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.
... 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.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact