News
Renewables could be the biggest growth sector for next 25 years - International Energy Agency…
9th November 2011
The International Energy Agency's annual World Energy Outlook, published in London today, has forecast that continuing government supports for the renewable energy industry will quadruple from $64 billion last year to $250 billion by 2035. However, they have warned that should these supports be withdrawn in countries facing severe economic austerity plans, the industry may be impacted to such a high degree that it may not recover.
IEA Executive Director Maria van der Hoeven and Chief Economist Fatih Birol presented the report, stating that: “Governments are giving a second look at renewable energy subsidies. If these are cut once, it might be very difficult for the renewable energy industry to come back to life later.” Having said that, they added that some subsidies “cannot be taken for granted in this age of fiscal austerity”. Assuming all the current supports for renewables around the world remain, the IEA predicts that renewables and natural gas will be the biggest growth sectors between now and 2035. Renewable energy technologies, predominantly wind power and hydropower, will account for half of the new capacity installed by then. “The age of fossil fuels is far from over... (but) their dominance will decline”.
Tailwinds growing stronger for continued growth in wind energy…
12th May 2010
The recent announcement by the Australian government of a $652.5 million “Renewable Energy Future Fund” is good news for renewables and energy efficiency measures ‘down under’. This makes investment again look bright, following the climb down by the Rudd government on the Emissions Trading Scheme, legislation for which will now be deferred until at least the end of 2012.
However, the Clean Energy Council has called for reform of the Renewable Energy Target, in order to underpin the investment in these innovative – and necessarily risky – ventures. A price on carbon is also critical to making the new and clean technologies competitive with the old and the dirty ones, whose ‘externalities’ are still paid for by the taxpayer.
In Germany on Sunday, the Chancellor Angela Merkel’s CDU party was voted out of power in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW). This means she also loses her majority (held with the junior partner party FDP) in the Bundesrat, the German upper house. Having a physics graduate as the head of government, of one of the most progressive countries when it came to new energy matters, was probably a good thing. However, nuclear energy is making a comeback (‘the technology is better than before’, ‘its zero carbon’, ‘you only need a few big plant’ etc) and the CDU are inextricably tied historically with nuclear. Then along comes the other result from Sunday’s election – the Greens doubled their vote in NRW, which bodes well for continuing support for renewable energy in the state (being the one with the highest population) and therefore in Germany as a whole.
As far as Greens in parliament go, the UK’s election last week resulted in the first ever Green MP for Britain – Caroline Lucas, the leader of the Green party. Although a great honour for Ms Lucas, its a dubious one for Britain, given that they are the last country in the European Union to elect a Green party candidate. Particularly as Britain and Northern Ireland have a long way to go to meet EU renewable energy targets, despite the massive increase in the construction of both onshore and offshore wind farms in the past few years. Nevertheless, its obviously good news for renewables.
Global Wind 2009 Report recently published at EWEC in Warsaw
23rd April 2010
A year ago, amid depressed markets and tight credit for many infrastructural projects in many countries (the big exception of course being China), most banks and consultants were predicting a dramatic drop in wind power installations.
The Global Wind Energy Council (GWEC) at the time was predicting 12% growth for 2009, a prediction at best disbelieved, and at worst derided. Typically with the wind industry, their predictions were too low, the result by the end of the year being a 41% market growth. Wind capacity additions are now leading all other technologies in the US and Europe, and in China the market grew by over 100% (again). These figures were presented in GWEC’s “Global Wind 2009 Report”.
However, GWEC cautions that financial headwinds are still present, and that investment banks and stimulus packages (although not permanent solutions) have gone a long way toward helping finance wind projects. All in all, further challenges are forecast for 2010, including “increasing geopolitical uncertainty, weaker power demand in the OECD and tight financing”. Therefore, as always with the EWEA and GWEC, a cautious forecast is made for 2010, with the total installed capacity of wind power reaching 200GW by year’s end (from 158.5GW at the end of 2009), and doubling to 400GW by 2014.
