A close observer of renewable energy markets I am amazed at how fast they are growing around the world. Many countries are banking on them to get out of the current triple crisis.
Even if the efforts being done are lacking the necessary scale, results are very encouraging. Portugal is getting 70 percent of its electricity from hydro and wind, Spain over a half of electricity came from clean sources as well.
In Germany, solar can provide up to 22 GW, or 44 % of the total demand. In Australia, one in eleven houses have solar panels installed.
You got it : in a mere few years, renewables have been booming and this is due to be only the beginning as clean energy sources are getting cheaper and cheaper and are creating loads of jobs.
This is why as GreenTech Media notes, Conventional Wisdom About Clean Energy Is Still Way Out of Date :
“We’re fifteen to twenty years out of date in how we think about renewables,” said Dr. Eric Martinot to an audience at the first Pathways to 100% Renewables Conference held April 16 in San Francisco. “It’s not 1990 anymore.”
Dr. Martinot and his team recently compiled their 2013 Renewables Global Futures report from two years of research in which they conducted interviews with 170 experts and policymakers from fifteen countries, including local city officials and stakeholders from more than twenty cities.
They also reviewed more than 50 recently published scenarios by credible international organizations, energy companies, and research institutes, along with government policy targets for renewable energy, and various corporate reports and energy literature.
The report observes that “[t]he history of energy scenarios is full of similar projections for renewable energy that proved too low by a factor of 10, or were achieved a decade earlier than expected.”
For example, the International Energy Agency’s 2000 estimate for wind power in 2010 was 34 gigawatts, while the actual level was 200 gigawatts.
The World Bank’s 1996 estimate for China was 9 gigawatts of wind and 0.5 gigawatts for solar PV by 2020, but by 2011 the country had already achieved 62 gigawatts of wind and 3 gigawatts of PV.
Dr. Martinot’s conclusion from this exhaustive survey? “The conservative scenarios are simply no longer credible.”
Please have a look at the full article at it is full of hope for a quicker energy transition.
Will discuss more about it when I’ll get back from Oxford and London, so stay tuned !
from the moment i read your early articles, i knew that you would find the trends and encouraging patterns in energy fields. we need to be able to see the results of our conservation/insulation and innovation work to keep forging ahead in the saner use of our natural resources.
thank you for a clearer view of a healthier future.
Thank you for reading me and commenting Nadine.
It really means a lot to me to know that people are reading and appreciating my work 🙂