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Renewables Overtake Coal As World's Largest Source of Power Capacity (ft.com)
The world's largest source of power capacity is now renewables, as roughly half a million solar panels were installed every single day last year. In addition, two wind turbines were erected every hour in countries such as China, according to the International Energy Agency. Financial Times reports (Editor's note: may be paywalled; alternate source): Although coal and other fossil fuels remain the largest source of electricity generation, many conventional power utilities and energy groups have been confounded by the speed at which renewables have grown and the rapid drop in costs for the technologies. Average global generation costs for new onshore wind farms fell by an estimated 30 percent between 2010 and 2015 while those for big solar panel plants fell by an even steeper two-thirds, an IEA report published on Tuesday showed. The Paris-based agency thinks costs are likely to fall even further over the next five years, by 15 percent on average for wind and by a quarter for solar power. It said an unprecedented 153 gigawatts of green electricity was installed last year, mostly wind and solar projects, which has more than the total power capacity in Canada. It was also more than the amount of conventional fossil fuel or nuclear power added in 2015, leading renewables to surpass coal's cumulative share of global power capacity -- though not electricity generation. A power plant's capacity is the maximum amount of electricity it can potentially produce. The amount of energy a plant actually generates varies according to how long it produces power over a period of time. Coal power plants supplied close to 39 percent of the world's power in 2015, while renewables, including old hydropower dams, accounted for 23 percent, IEA data show. But the agency expects renewables' share of power generation to rise to 28 percent by 2021, when it predicts they will supply the equivalent of all the electricity generated today in the U.S. and E.U. combined.
So, is it time to go back to all the nay sayers who have over the past 10 years asserted this point was impossible, and say "I told you so"? Or will they just continue to assert that the numbers are all lies, and only coal can make electricity?
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... they overtake coal for amount generated per unit time.
Renewables may have higher total peak, but coal plants have level output and can run 24/7, while sun is only about a third of the day and wind varies with the weather - at a power output proportional to the CUBE of the windspeed.
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Do we know how much of the produced renewable energy is from hydroelectric stations (water dams)? I would suspect that it's still more than 70%.
The article mentions mostly wind and solar power, perhaps they're the main growth factory.
By the way, do they count burning wood as renewable energy? Renewable and green should not be confused.
Yes, they've been doing exactly that with oil for generations. The petrochemical corporations have even persuaded governments to fight wars on their behalf.
The effect on the competition has been devastating.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
when you can't externalize the environmental costs.
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Exactly.. We spent $2 trillion dollars and over 4,000 lives to protect Oil Company interests in the middle east.
That's a huge subsidy that doesn't get counted as a subsidy.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
That's a huge subsidy that doesn't get counted as a subsidy.
Nor should it, because it was NOT a subsidy. The price of oil skyrocketed when war broke out in 2003, and remained high for more than a decade. Subsidies encourage over production. The Iraq war did the exact opposite. It depressed output, and pushed up prices.
You obviously think the Iraq war was dumb, but it is also obvious that it was even dumber than you think. We paid more in excess oil prices than we spent on the war itself.
The whole point of the Iraq war and the wars against Syria and Libya, saber rattling against Russia and Iran. And the economic attacks on Venezuela. Is not to control the price of oil or the profit, but to control the 'flow' of oil. Which is the US deep state uses oil and capital to hold the rest of the free world hostage. Need oil? Yes you do. And you need to buy it in US dollars. Using heavy equipment and facilities underwritten in US dollars.
Yep. Except for the Oil-Execs, that benefited hugely from all this (and the destruction of the planet they are driving forward).
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Subsidies don't always encourage overproduction, that's too simplistic. Subsidies are about promoting something, certainly, but how the subsidy is crafted depends on what it's trying to encourage. There are farm subsidies for leaving your field fallow, for example. That's the opposite of overproduction.
Also, when you say, "It depressed output, and pushed up prices." in the same sentence like that you're implying a causal relationship. You're implying that prices went up due to a supply and demand dynamic. This was not the case, prices went up by a great deal more than could be explained that way, generating huge profits for the oil companies.
How many carbon based power plants were taken off-line and replaced by renewable generation capacity last year?
After much research, I haven't found a single instance of that happening - ever.
Have renewables caused a moratorium on all new carbon based power plants? I don't think so. Asia (as of last year) was opening more than one coal power plant PER DAY:
http://climatechangedispatch.c...
Renewables have two mathematically inescapable problems:
1. Renewable's land requirements per kWh are far too high.
2. Renewable's storage requirements to meet base load demand simply do not exist - presumably because storage costs are also very high.
I ran the numbers on a very small 2kW self-installed system - it would take me over 10 years in a best case scenario to recoup the costs at current utility rates.
Until renewables become far cheaper, generate more kWh per square-foot, and solve the storage problem - they will never reduce or replace carbon based generation.