The US Government Keeps Spectacularly Underestimating Solar Energy Installation (qz.com)

Michael J. Coren reports via Quartz: Every two years, the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), America's official source for energy statistics, issues 10-year projections about how much solar, wind and conventional energy the future holds for the U.S. Every two years, since the mid-1990s, the EIA's projections turn out to be wrong. Last year, they proved spectacularly wrong. The Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental advocacy group, and Statista recently teamed up to analyze the EIA's predictions for energy usage and production. They found that the EIA's 10-year estimates between 2006 to 2016 systematically understated the share of wind, solar and gas. Solar capacity, in particular, was a whopping 4,813% more in 2016 than the EIA had predicted in 2006 it would be. To be fair, there is a caveat here: The prediction in 2006 was that 10 years hence the U.S. would be generating just 0.8 gigawatts (GW) of solar energy. With such a low baseline figure, any increase will look huge in percentage terms. Nonetheless, there is an unmistakable trend in the data: The EIA regularly underestimates the growth in renewables but overestimates U.S. fossil-fuel consumption, which some critics see as an attempt to boost the oil and gas industry.

Comments

Re: The EIA is NOT the US government!

[WindBourne]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik...

Well duh

[Solandri]

Federal tax subsidies for renewables exploded starting in 2006. Of course any projections made in 2006 based on extrapolating 2000-2005 subsidy levels would be inaccurate.

For solar in particular, it got just $174 million in subsidies in 2007. By 2010 it got $1.1 billion. And in 2013 it received $5.3 billion. Or to put it as TFA does, it received 3046% more in subsidies in 2013 than it did in 2007.

You increase subsidies by 30x over 7 years, the story would've been if growth hadn't increase by more than 40x over 10 years.

Re:Well duh

[Uberbah]

That's still competing against the infinitely larger subsidies to the fossil fuel industry - whether direct tax subsidies or indirect like letting them drill public land and not clean up the environmental damage they produce. Then there's the massive inflation of demand by spending many billions per year on highways to move and more cars around.

Re: Trump is fixing this

[mixed_signal]

Debt actually increased more under Reagan and Bush... but in the 2009 recession some deficit spending was in order. Debt growth under Obama was 68 percent, by the way.

Re:That title (of original article) is not accurat

[MrL0G1C]

", it's getting to the point that in some places they are already cheaper without subsidies than old energy with subsidies."

It won't be long before both wind and solar energy costs half of what fossil fuel energy costs. Is that so difficult to understand? I'm talking renewables without subsidies here.