This is truly good news.
“Coal is dead,” Jim Barry, the global head of BlackRock’s infrastructure investment group, explained in a recent interview.
BlackRock, the world’s largest investment group, with $5 trillion in assets — more than the world’s largest banks — has begun to bet on clean energy. Why? “The thing that has changed fundamentally the whole picture is that renewables have gotten so cheap,” said Barry.
Meanwhile:
Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF) has a message for the new president: You are not going to bring coal back.
Snip,
In a new analysis, leading independent energy experts at BNEF dismantle these claims. “Whatever President Trump may say, U.S. coal’s main problem has been cheap natural gas and renewable power, not a politically driven ‘war on coal,’” explain BNEF chair Michael Liebreich and chief editor Angus McCrone. Therefore “it will continue being pushed out of the generating mix.”
According to the BNEF report:
The good news is that renewable energy has – at least on a levelized cost of electricity, or LCOE, basis – clearly achieved the long-awaited goal of grid competitiveness. More than that, in many countries it now undercuts every other source of new generating capacity, sometimes by very considerable margins. Last year saw unsubsidized price records of $30 per megawatt-hour for a wind farm in Morocco and $29.10 for a solar plant in Chile. These must be the lowest electricity prices, for any new project, of any technology, anywhere in the world, ever. And we are still going to see further falls in equipment prices.
As can be seen by the graph below this is causing a crash in coal consumption.
To put another nail in coal’s coffin Bloomberg is reporting Tesla’s Solar Roof Pricing Is Cheap Enough to Catch Fire. Tesla’s new technology is so popular its solar roof tiles are now sold out ‘well into 2018’.
For Trump and the fossil fuel industry there is nothing they can do to turn back the incoming rush of cheap, and getting cheaper, renewable energy. Renewable energy is now the cheapest option, on average, for new electricity capacity around the world.
Trump can try all he want’s but when a $5 trillion investment group and virtually the entire world is going forward with the Paris climate accord all he will succeed in doing is to prove himself to be what his detractors say he is, a fool.