Climate Crisis Outrunning New Energy’s 10-YR Triumph

Renewable Power Will Soon Come Out on Top; A new report on global energy developments shows how far wind and solar have come—and hints at how far they’ll go.

Nathaniel Bullard, June 11, 2020 (Bloomberg News)

More than $2.7 trillion has been invested in building up renewable energy capacity over the past decade. In those same 10 years, renewables more than doubled their share of the global power mix, from 5.9% in 2009 to 13.4% last year…[But, according to Global Trends in Renewable Energy Investment, more] investment is needed to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement, and governments and industry groups are touting clean-energy investment as an essential part of recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic…

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An extraordinary amount of capital for clean energy has been deployed to the developing world—the vast majority to China, with a lesser chunk going to India. At the peak year, in 2017, developing economies as a group saw almost $200 billion in new investment in renewable energy capacity. While investment in China and India has tapered off since then, investment in the rest of the developing world has been growing, and hit a record of almost $60 billion last year…

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…Developing economies have received more than half of all dollars invested in clean energy for five years in a row…From 2010 to 2019, the world’s electricity system added more solar power generation capacity than anything else. Coal is next, but after that comes wind, which exceeded gas…We can—and should—expect a massive transformation in the energy sector over the years to come. But it’s also important to note how much of that is already underway. That goes for capital allocation, the building of energy assets, and increasingly for the energy mix itself…” click here for more

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