The MSM won’t tell you, but last year the world reached one terawatt of renewable energy capacity. I only just now found out while searching for something else. I checked, and it hasn’t been in any Daily Kos Diary either.
We need something like 16 TW worldwide. More for EVs and economic growth in the poorest countries, less with improved efficiency and conservation, and so on.
As the hook to 3 Ways to Invest in a Renewable Energy Future (out of date on details), The Motley Fool investment site stated:
According to Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF), global capacity for solar and wind power generation has exceeded 1 terawatt. And it won't be long before we celebrate the next terawatt. BNEF estimates that the second terawatt of generating capacity will be installed in 2023 at a cost 46% lower than the first.
They didn’t give the links, but they were not hard to find.
Bloomberg New Energy Finance, August 2018: World Reaches 1,000GW of Wind and Solar, Keeps Going
It is hard to be precise, but BNEF thinks that it may have happened in June 2018, or very likely a bit sooner.
As to the second trillion,
Bloomberg: World to Install Over One Trillion Watts of Clean Energy by 2023
That’s five years, at half the cost of the first trillion. And it doesn’t take a professional analyst to see that the one after that will be faster and cheaper yet, and so on.
Bloomberg also notes
The world started commissioning more gigawatts of clean energy than fossil fuels from 2015
Goldman-Sachs told us that the world reached Peak Coal in 2013.
Now, to be fair, various financial, economic, science, and tech sites have taken notice.
CleanTechnica: BNEF Heralds 1 Terawatt Of Wind & Solar Generation Capacity Worldwide
Bloomberg also explained that it estimates a total of $2.3 trillion was required to see capacity hit the 1 TW mark, but that the second terawatt will cost “significantly less” due to industry-wide technology innovation resulting in significant price declines. Bloomberg New Energy Finance’s New Energy Outlook 2018 report estimated that capital expenditures on wind and solar generation will total $1.23 trillion in the next five years alone.
Robeco: Thanks a trillion! World reaches renewable energy milestone
Two-thirds of global power should be renewable by 2050
I would say some time in the 2030s. Almost everybody has underestimated how bad Global Warming would get, and almost everybody has underestimated our response.
Employment in the renewable energy industry has topped 10 million people for the first time, a 5.3% rise since 2017, according to the International Renewable Energy Agency. Almost half of this tally is in China, while 14 times as many people in the US work in the renewables sector than in the coal industry.
Somebody needs to say that on TV over and over every day. How about some of our Presidential candidates, and the people behind the Green New Deal in the House? The MSM won’t do it on its own.
Texas even accounts for about one quarter of total wind power capacity in the US.
You see what I mean?
GreenTechMedia: One Trillion Watts of Wind and Solar
well surpassing analyst expectations.
Up to about 50% is exponential, with a constant doubling time. Then the very last doubling takes a bit longer.
Stone the crows!
Yes, back when I was an analyst, I found that hardly anybody in our community could really wrap their minds around exponential growth. I suppose I had an advantage, having previously been a mathematician.
GreenBiz: Global solar capacity set to pass one terawatt mark by 2023
Here we are talking about reaching a terawatt of solar and at some point a terawatt of wind, both.
ZME Science:
A report by Frankfurt School UNEP Centre and Bloomberg New Energy Finance says carbon-free renewable power plants in 2014 surpassed 100,000 megawatts of capacity for the first time.
So we went up by a factor of 10 in four years? Exponential, I’m telling you. Wait, that would mean that we could get to 10 terawatts in 2023, not just the two that BNEF predicts. I’m confused. Well, OK, somebody is confused. Let’s try this again. If costs for wind and solar continue to fall (inverse exponentially), and we continue to invest the same amount of money, and coal falls out of the picture completely…
Bingo!
Hold on now. The chart up top here says that the world passed 0.1 terawatt in 2007. The chart also clearly shows exponential growth. So, (mumble, mumble, waves hands, mumbles some more) three terawatts in the next five years? And another 10 in the twelve years after that? Hey, that’s starting to approach the 16 TW or so we are looking for to save the world. Along with fixing agriculture, industrial chemistry, and a few other things.
We don’t actually know with any precision. But I’ll take it, whichever it is.
The International Energy Agency says renewable energy could make up over a quarter of global electricity generation by 2020.
Hmm. An election year.
Science Daily: Pathway for generating up to 10 terawatts of power from sunlight by 2030
Scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), their counterparts from similar institutes in Japan and Germany, along with researchers at universities and industry, assessed the recent trajectory of photovoltaics and outlined a potential worldwide pathway to produce a significant portion of the world's electricity from solar power in the new Science paper, Terawatt-Scale Photovoltaics: Trajectories and Challenges. [paywalled]
Fifty-seven experts met in Germany in March 2016 for a gathering of the Global Alliance of Solar Energy Research Institutes (GA-SERI), where they discussed what policy initiatives and technology advances are needed to support significant expansion of solar power over the next couple of decades.
The article summary says
What technical, infrastructure, economic, and policy barriers need to be overcome for PVs to grow to the multiple terawatt (TW) scale? We assess realistic future scenarios and make suggestions for a global agenda to move toward PVs at a multi-TW scale.
See, that’s what I’m talking about!
With a comparable amount of wind and the appropriate mix with storage, we’re done with this part of the puzzle in only 11 years more! That might even be soon enough to keep any countries from going entirely under water. At least, if we can get serious about removing CO2 from the atmosphere and oceans. We do have some ideas on that.
Now, can anybody here read the Science article, and give us the gist of what we need to do that isn’t already happening?
