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.

Comments

Renewables will never work

[AK Marc]

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?

Re: Renewables will never work

[Anonymous Coward]

"capacity"? You mean if the sun was shining on every single solar panel in the world then it hypothetically would generate as much electricity as coal actually produces. Seriously.

Re:Renewables will never work

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe when renewables actually PRODUCE as much power as coal, that might be a better day to beat your chest.

Re:Renewables will never work

[hawguy]

Plus, since hydroelectric is usually considered 'renewable', water keeps flowing (usually) through dams on cold winter nights.

Canada has quite a few cold winter nights, yet "Manitoba, British Columbia, Newfoundland and Labrador, Yukon and Quebec produce over 90% of their power from hydroelectricity. Quebec generates half of Canada's hydroelectric power."

Re:Renewables will never work

[I'm New Around Here]

Actually, in many places it does. The sun heating certain areas in the morning creates wind. Those areas cooling in the evening causes wind. At mid-day and mid-night, there is no heat gradient to cause strong wind.

Alternately, storms blow for days at a time, with strong winds for the whole period. And windmills are shut down so they don't break from turning past their rated rpm.

And nice way to completely leave off solar, as the article/submission mentioned how many millions of solar panels were installed last year. They sure don't produce much energy in a Northern winter.

Re:Renewables will never work

[Mashiki]

What you mean like here in Ontario? Where the windmills don't turn because the government pays them not to produce electricity? Where it accounts for under 2% of the total generation but responsible for 80% of the price increase in the last decade? From at peak of 0.07kWh to 0.18kWh. Where you can have 45+ days in a row without direct sunlight for solar. Yeah, they're doing a world of good for us. 70k people have had their electricity cut in the last 2 years, 700k customers are 4 months or more in arrears right now. The largest hydro company(Ontario Hydro) has 1.3m customers for example. FYI: Electricity is called hydro here, because our primary generation source used to be hydro-electric.

Re:Renewables will never work

[x0ra]

and certainly not when covered with snow, as we get plenty of here in Canada...

Re:Renewables will never work

[arglebargle_xiv]

The headline is wrong, as usual. In fact even reading the summary shows you it can't be right:

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

So renewables are around half of what coal is. If you look at the original article, even just the sub-header, you'll see that:

153 GigaWatts of renewables make up over half the new capacity added globally.

That's "new capacity added so far this year", not "total capacity" as the headline here claims.

Re:Renewables will never work

[ShanghaiBill]

Windmills are there to cover peaks.

No, this is nonsense. Windmills are there to produce power when the wind is blowing. Wind is not "peaking power", that can fill in the gaps from other sources, because it is not dependable. The opposite is true: variable winds create peaks and troughs that need to be filled by on-demand sources such as gas turbines or ... hydro.

Re: Renewables will never work

[AK Marc]

The world would have to stop spinning (so the solar panels were always lot and at a perfect angle with zero clouds) with all the panels moved to the equator, while the wind would have to be a constant gale at all wind locations..

Nope. The capacity of an installed solar panel is the sum or average of expected generation over a day/month/year, so it takes generation time and location into account.

And the wind around here is a yearly average as the given power level, and at least here, wind generates more than all the petrochemicals in the same grid. But then, I'm not in the US.

The proof renewables work is all the lies told by those who hate them. If they didn't work, then they wouldn't need to lie so much to make them look bad.

Re:Renewables will never work

[Mashiki]

so build some solar and wind much more south? Alabama AND Arizona for example. electricity is the cheapest form of energy to transport

Mighta missed it, but between Ontario and say Arizona there's at least 1800 miles. And between Ontario and Alabama it's around 1k miles. While the NA grid is somewhat interconnected, there are still separate network grids in case of catastrophic failure. On top of that, there isn't a big nationwide high voltage DC grid for the delivery of power from plants. And HVDC is the only way you're going to be transporting power that far while reducing the loss. AC it actually becomes very cost prohibitive very quickly over very long distances and more electricity is lost due to resistance and heat.

Ontario's best solution for electricity has always been nuclear, followed by hydro-electric to round it out. Followed by coal and natural gas for peak demands. The current government(Liberal) decided that "coal is nasty, evil and dirty" and shut them down, instead of say retrofitting them. And there were even a few leaked documents that they wanted to do the same with natural gas power plants and wanted to ban natural gas for home use, forcing everyone onto electric. The price started climbing quickly once these cheap sources were removed from the grid.

If you want to see this insanity in action, go look at the current NDP government in Alberta. Where they're pushing the same policy. The problem in Alberta is, whole lotta area and people are very spread out. Coal is plentiful, and in turn small out of the nowhere places where it's cost prohibitive to build NG, impossible to build nuclear, and where solar or wind is also prohibitive. They're now scrambling to build thousands of KM of power lines. Small towns and cities like Grande Prairie and Grande Cache rely on small scale coal plants to keep people from freezing to death in the winter when there are grid failures for example. The winter I spent in Grande Cache, the nighttime lows hit -48C with a windchill of -55C. The daytime highs were between -25C and -38C not counting windchills. We had 3 days with no power due to high winds, the mall, fire dept, and all government buildings had power though. So people who didn't have wood as a backup, could safely stay somewhere.

Re:Renewables will never work

[GNious]

So'eh, progress is not something to be proud of ... gotcha

Hydroelectric

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Power != energy

[PopeRatzo]

That this still needs to be pointed out shows just how dangerous and naive the green left still is.

That you think the Financial Times is part of the "green left" shows that you've got no business pointing out anything to anybody.

Re:Let me know when ...

[Ungrounded Lightning]

The power can be stored,

The issue is not that the power can be stored.

The issue is that power capacity comparisons overstate the total amount of energy you get out of the renewable generation equipment over the long haul because coal generation can run near capacity all the time and renewables (excluding water power) only a small part of the time.

I'm quite supportive of renewable energy. (I'm a major participant on one of the renewable energy tech discussion boards, too.) But while it's very GOOD that renewable power has passed coal in power capacity, even with near-ideal load-levelling storage, it will take about another factor of three before it surpasses coal in providing usable energy to the loads.

Re:Let me know when ...

[Ungrounded Lightning]

Moving the goal posts.

Nope. The article's author apparently thought the offence's 35 yard line was the goal post. I was just pointing out where they ACTUALLY are. B-)

We need about another seven first-downs to get there. But we ARE on our way.

Re:Subsidies

[hyades1]

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.

Coal's not cheap

[rsilvergun]

when you can't externalize the environmental costs.

Re:Subsidies

[Maxo-Texas]

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.

... Title is wrong

[Karmashock]

Its not saying renewables produce more power but that more renewable capacity was added this year than non-renewable capacity. But the bulk of capacity remains non-renewable.

It said right here:
""
But the agency expects renewablesâ(TM) share of power generation to rise to 28 per cent by 2021, when it predicts they will supply the equivalent of all the electricity generated today in the US and EU combined.
""
So by 2021, they hope it will be up to 28 percent of total capacity. Thus... no, renewables are not the majority of power generation and the title is wrong.

Re:Subsidies

[ShanghaiBill]

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.

Re:Subsidies

[gweihir]

Yep. Except for the Oil-Execs, that benefited hugely from all this (and the destruction of the planet they are driving forward).

Re:Subsidies

[guises]

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.

Did renewables replace any carbon based plants?

[zerofoo]

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.