Why clean energy is now expanding even when fossil fuels are cheap
By Chris Mooney January 14 at 10:59 AM
...In a new analysis, Bloomberg New Energy Finance finds that 2015 was a record year for global investment in the clean energy space, with $329 billion invested in wind, solar panels, biomass plants and more around the world. (The number does not include investments in large hydroelectric facilities).
That’s 3 percent higher than the prior 2011 global investment record of $ 318 billion — and most striking is that it happened in a year in which key fossil fuels — oil, coal and natural gas — were quite cheap.
...As BNEF notes, the price of oil — which is burned to generate a fair amount of electricity around the world, though this is rare in the U.S. — tanked in 2015. Coal prices and U.S. natural gas prices also got considerably cheaper over the second half of 2014 and the 12 months of 2015. Nonetheless, China and the UK invested in massive multibillion-dollar offshore wind farms, even as other nations, from the U.S. to Brazil, saw near billion-dollar expenditures on new solar farms and biomass plants.
...Measured in terms of electricity generating capacity, the world saw an additional 64 gigawatts of wind capacity added and 57 gigawatts of solar capacity, BNEF estimates. The most striking figure here is that while 2015 only saw about 4 percent more clean energy investment than 2014 (when $ 316 billion was invested), the growth in renewable energy generating capacity was much higher at 30 percent. This, again, signals declining cost, says Zindler.
“The technologies have reached an important tipping point in a number of markets in the world,” ...
Bloomberg Press Release:
CLEAN ENERGY DEFIES FOSSIL FUEL PRICE CRASH TO ATTRACT RECORD $329BN GLOBAL INVESTMENT IN 2015
2015 was also the highest ever for installation of renewable power capacity, with 64GW of wind and 57GW of solar PV commissioned during the year, an increase of nearly 30% over 2014.
London and New York, 14 January 2016 – Clean energy investment surged in China, Africa, the US, Latin America and India in 2015, driving the world total to its highest ever figure, of $328.9bn, up 4% from 2014’s revised $315.9bn and beating the previous record, set in 2011 by 3%.
The latest figures from Bloomberg New Energy Finance show dollar investment globally growing in 2015 to nearly six times its 2004 total and a new record of one third of a trillion dollars (see chart on page 3), despite four influences that might have been expected to restrain it.
These were: further declines in the cost of solar photovoltaics, meaning that more capacity could be installed for the same price; the strength of the US currency, reducing the dollar value of non-dollar investment; the continued weakness of the European economy, formerly the powerhouse of renewable energy investment; and perhaps most significantly, the plunge in fossil fuel commodity prices.
Over the 18 months to the end of 2015, the price of Brent crude plunged 67% from $112.36 to $37.28 per barrel, international steam coal delivered to the north west Europe hub dropped 35% from $73.70 to $47.60 per tonne. Natural gas in the US fell 48% on the Henry Hub index from $4.42 to $2.31 per million British Thermal Units.
Michael Liebreich, chairman of the advisory board at Bloomberg New Energy Finance, said: “These figures are a stunning riposte to all those who expected clean energy investment to stall on falling oil and gas prices....
More at http://about.bnef.com/press-releases/clean-energy-defies-fossil-fuel-price-crash-to-attract-record-329bn-global-investment-in-2015/
Direct link to Bloomberg slide show on their data: https://www.bnef.com/dataview/clean-energy-investment/index.html
= new reply since forum marked as read
I guess someone else stole your login and posted this just to embarrass you?
To put that in perspective, if China's factories manufacture 35GWp of solar panels each year those panels will produce the equivalent electricity of about 7 or 8 large nuclear power plants. So in 12 years, the amount of now existing factory capacity (in China alone) will manufacture enough panels to equal the output of between 84 - 96 nuclear power plants. And the buildup of manufacturing is just getting started. Within ten years it is hoped/expected/thought that global solar manufacturing capacity will hit 1000GWp/year
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=115&topic_id=293819&mesg_id=294014
You liked the statement so much that you posted it several times
I think I last reminded you of it a in 2013 and never got a reply. Ironically posting: "Or do you weasel out again - vanish from the thread - and pretend it never happened the next time it comes up?"
I'm pretty sure that qualifies as "several".
I got tangled in the definition of GWp and in that one instance used it as "production" instead of "peak"
Nope. It was repeated over and over (and defended a couple years later). About a month and a half after the original post (or at least the oldest that I can now find), you said "If we can get 1000GWp of solar manufacturing capacity built by 2020, we have climate change licked."
(http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.phpaz=show_mesg&forum=115&topic_id=296715&mesg_id=296889)
For the record, the 1000GWp was a benchmark that many thought we'd need to hit...
You were asked multiple times for a single source claiming that. If you've ever found one... by all means provide it.
The bold text should have read: ...panels will produce the equivalent electricity of about 7 or 8 large nuclear power plants.
Try comparing their actual production over the last five years to this claim. As predicted at the time... it was nonsense (even when adjusting for "unit" rather than "plant"
.
Within ten years it is hoped/expected/thought that cumulative global solar installed capacity will hit 1000GWp.
Even the corrected claim is nonsense. Note that we're roughly five years into this ten year period... and hoped to hit 1/5th of this total by the end of last year. There's precisely zero chance of five consecutive years of installs that each top all solar installs worldwide to date.
Why didn't you point out the error at the time? The innocence of the mistake - along with the mistake itself - was pretty obvious.
It was indeed obvious (to one of us)... and I did point it out multiple times. The only one I can find today was "And for the record... I think that the 1,000 GW figure is not an annual manufacturing goal, but a total INSTALLED label capacity goal... and for much longer than 10 years from now." and "And the notion that you even think it's possible to get to 1,000 GWp annually in ten years just shows how disconnected you've become from reality."
The real question is why you weren't listening and instead repeated the claim over and over again.
Really, what specifically is your purpose in going back 4 years to highlight this mistake?
I would think that's obvious. It was an example of your ongoing overexuberance in renewables projections and/or analysis. Other examples include the factory in Europe that produced parts of wind turbines yet you took their projected peak capacity (along with attractive capacity factors) and compared how much wind power would be produced due to that single factory to a number of reactors. Or the claim that multiple utility-scale wave power plants would be in existence by about now because the technology was all "off the shelf" technology. Or the claim that "rock batteries" were just around the corner for the same reason.
For the record... solar manufacturers still suffer under too much overcapacity (and China still hasn't produced 35GW of solar units in a year) and new manufacturing capacity is shifting to other countries (including, surprisingly, the US) and China's factories would be in truly desperate circumstances were it not for the government soaking up incredible levels of output (on edit - I think they're running ~60% of capacity with the government buying up roughly half of that amount to keep the companies solvent). The wind turbine factory never reached production and closed down a couple years ago. We've made very little progress on wave generation (specifically because the technology was far from off-the-shelf), and the designer of the rock batteries has substantially changed their design (though I like what I'm seeing).
All I had to do was Google the phrase ""If we can get 1000GWp of solar manufacturing capacity built by 2020, we have climate change licked."
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=115x296754
However since the Republicans have successfully obstructed every policy that would have helped the industry grow here, global solar manufacturing capacity is now the number to look at. Global mfg capacity will reach about 45GWp this year with China's manufacturing capacity alone expected to hit 35GWp, even though they didn't start building solar panel factories until 2007.
To put that in perspective, if China's factories manufacture 35GWp of solar panels each year those panels will produce the equivalent electricity of about 7 or 8 large nuclear power plants. So in 12 years, the amount of now existing factory capacity (in China alone) will manufacture enough panels to equal the output of between 84 - 96 nuclear power plants. And the buildup of manufacturing is just getting started. Within ten years it is hoped/expected/thought that global solar manufacturing capacity will hit 1000GWp/year
You also go on to say:
Year 2012 they will manufacture enough panels to equal the output of 7-8 nuclear plants.
Year 2013 they will manufacture enough panels to equal the output of another 7-8 nuclear plants.
Year 2014 they will manufacture enough panels to equal the output of yet another 7-8 nuclear plants.
Year 2015 they will manufacture enough panels to equal the output of 7-8 more nuclear plants.
Etc, etc etc... until the factories close.
In the 12 years it takes to build a nuclear plant they will produce and install enough panels to equal the output of between 84 - 96 nuclear plants.
Now consider a more realistic scenario where the manufacturing base keeps growing until we hit the 350GWp.
That would equal 70-80 nuclear plants worth of new electricity generation being brought online every year; and that is fully accounting for capacity factors of both technologies.
Remember too, that doesn't count wind, geothermal, biomass, biofuels, and wave/current/tidal.
If we can get 1000GWp of solar manufacturing capacity built by 2020, we have climate change licked.
...doesn't give a shit about the lives of Chinese people could be applauding cadmium mines and lanthanide mines in China to produce so called "renewable" garbage, which is neither "renewable" nor "sustainable" since it has a low energy to mass density and relies on materials with a huge mining impact.
Among the many thousands of papers written on the topic that can easily read by anyone who gives a shit, which is to say anyone who's not an airhead cheering for batteries and other soon to be electronic waste for their stupid electric car fantasies, is this one:
Occurrence and Partitioning of Cadmium, Arsenic and Lead in Mine Impacted Paddy Rice: Hunan, China (Environ. Sci. Technol., 2009, 43 (3), pp 637–642)
Of course, most of the shit for brains cheerleaders for mining toxic metals and materials in China don't give a shit.
My experience of the people who applaud what is happening in China in the so called "renewable energy" field is that they don't give a rat's ass about China's environment, about China's people or for that matter, about the planetary environment and the rest of the human race, mostly because most of them are clearly illiterate about environmental issues.
And one reason that they don't give a shit about Chinese is that it's not like the average Chinese, where the per capita income is still less than $10,000 is going to run out and buy a stupid Tesla electric car for billionaires and millionaires.
Here is the result, graphically, of the grand, expensive and wasteful experience of the "explosion" of "renewable energy" that intellectual Lilliputians have been cheering about for the last half a century:
2015 comes in as the worst year ever observed at the Mauna Loa CO2 observatory.
The ethically challenged uneducated primitives, the mindless anti-nukes who have caused this tragedy, deserve the excoriation history will give them, should history exist in the case humanity survives the effects of their ignorance.
Have a nice day tomorrow.
In an era of email, text messages, Facebook and Twitter, we’re all required to do several things at once. But this constant multitasking is taking its toll. Here neuroscientist Daniel J Levitin explains how our addiction to technology is making us less efficient
Daniel J Levitin
Sunday 18 January 2015
Daniel J Levitan: ‘When trying to concentrate on a task, an unread email in your inbox can reduce your effective IQ by 10 points.
Our brains are busier than ever before. We’re assaulted with facts, pseudo facts, jibber-jabber, and rumour, all posing as information. Trying to figure out what you need to know and what you can ignore is exhausting. At the same time, we are all doing more. Thirty years ago, travel agents made our airline and rail reservations, salespeople helped us find what we were looking for in shops, and professional typists or secretaries helped busy people with their correspondence. Now we do most of those things ourselves. We are doing the jobs of 10 different people while still trying to keep up with our lives, our children and parents, our friends, our careers, our hobbies, and our favourite TV shows.
Our smartphones have become Swiss army knife–like appliances that include a dictionary, calculator, web browser, email, Game Boy, appointment calendar, voice recorder, guitar tuner, weather forecaster, GPS, texter, tweeter, Facebook updater, and flashlight. They’re more powerful and do more things than the most advanced computer at IBM corporate headquarters 30 years ago. And we use them all the time, part of a 21st-century mania for cramming everything we do into every single spare moment of downtime. We text while we’re walking across the street, catch up on email while standing in a queue – and while having lunch with friends, we surreptitiously check to see what our other friends are doing. At the kitchen counter, cosy and secure in our domicile, we write our shopping lists on smartphones while we are listening to that wonderfully informative podcast on urban beekeeping.
But there’s a fly in the ointment. Although we think we’re doing several things at once, multitasking, this is a powerful and diabolical illusion. Earl Miller, a neuroscientist at MIT and one of the world experts on divided attention, says that our brains are “not wired to multitask well… When people think they’re multitasking, they’re actually just switching from one task to another very rapidly. And every time they do, there’s a cognitive cost in doing so.” So we’re not actually keeping a lot of balls in the air like an expert juggler; we’re more like a bad amateur plate spinner, frantically switching from one task to another, ignoring the one that is not right in front of us but worried it will come crashing down any minute. Even though we think we’re getting a lot done, ironically, multitasking makes us demonstrably less efficient.
Multitasking has been found to increase the production of the stress hormone cortisol as well as the fight-or-flight hormone adrenaline, which can overstimulate your brain and cause mental fog or scrambled thinking. Multitasking creates a dopamine-addiction feedback loop, effectively rewarding the brain for losing focus and for constantly searching for external stimulation. To make matters worse, the prefrontal cortex has a novelty bias, meaning that its attention can be easily hijacked by something new – the proverbial shiny objects we use to entice infants, puppies, and kittens. The irony here for those of us who are trying to focus amid competing activities is clear: the very brain region we need to rely on for staying on task is easily distracted. We answer the phone, look up something on the internet, check our email, send an SMS, and each of these things tweaks the novelty- seeking, reward-seeking centres of the brain, causing a burst of endogenous opioids (no wonder it feels so good!), all to the detriment of our staying on task. It is the ultimate empty-caloried brain candy. Instead of reaping the big rewards that come from sustained, focused effort, we instead reap empty rewards from completing a thousand little sugar-coated tasks.
In the old days, if the phone rang and we were busy, we either didn’t answer or we turned the ringer off....
