Huge European investments in renewables

According to Greentech Media, European utilities are “major movers in the renewable energy space“. They also are becoming global leaders compared to their US competitors.

So far, more than 86 Gigawatts of renewable electricity capacity have been installed and an additional 100 GW are to be implemented by the eight “green giants”.

This concerns companies from Germany, Spain, the United Kingdom and France and I can but rejoice from that movement toward sustainability.

As Greentech Media states it :

With 86.6 MW of installed renewable capacity and an additional 102.1 GW in the development pipeline, the eight leading Eurotilities and their subsidiaries and partners are having a much greater impact on creating markets for greentech than their American counterparts.

These companies are also arguably more responsible for driving innovation in the greentech space than a good number of the startups we cover in these pages.

We’ve created an infographic to show how much impact the Eurotilities are having in the power generation market, the diversification of their renewable energy holdings, and the investment levels and pipelines of these companies.

To access at the full article, please click here.

As you can see with this graph, among the companies we find several large ones like Suez, EDF, Enel, E.on, Iberdrola, RWE or Endesa.

Edit : The 86 GW might seem a little huge, but in fact, the vast majority of existing capacity is hydro-based. An an example taken from the graph above, EDF have 40 GW of installed capacity and Suez 20 GW.

These are good news, and I would be really happy if I hadn’t reported last week than in the meantime, more than 50 coal-fired plants will be built in Europe within the next few years.

I understand that it is difficult to work on energy efficiency and so on, but the current situation should push our governments to act in a responsible way.

Indeed, oil prices are increasing each day more (albeit they decreased a little bit in the past few days) Some predict that oil prices might reach $200 by the end of this year.

In France, the decisions taken during the Grenelle de l’Environnement (see also this article) are now discussed at the assemblies in order to enact them as laws.

This is good news and be sure that I will get back to that as soon as I got more information. I hope that what was decided will be implemented. It would be a great sign for us as French but also to the entire world.

And you, what do you think about this topic ?