PEW releases 2011 report 'Who is winning the clean energy race?'.
This week the 2012 edition on the PEW Environment Group report on clean energy came out and it is an interesting read from the point of view of this blog. The report is global and compares the investment made in each of the g20 countries in clean energy from any source (public or private funding).
The link to the report is below, and stories were run by many media outlets which you can find through google. The report title is such that it is easy to pick up in the media, since it implies their is a competition to get the most renewable energy, a thought I like, but not one that is generally shared, I still don't think.
The media reports generally follow the path of finding the metric for which the country they are written in leads and highlighting that. Eg USA invested the most in 2011, Indonesia grew the most 2010-2011, Italy invested the largest amount per $ of GDP, and although I didn't see it reported (perhaps because it isn't calculated in the report), You can be sure that Australia is near the top per capita - Italy and Germany are beating us due to the massive growth of domestic solar power in those two countries.
So where are we racing to?
In this report the winner is whoever spends the most money in the year. That is a nice thing, but as a measure, it's a bit irrelevant, particularly when you might be paying too much for your chosen energy source and hence 'winning'each year. A better race is the global race to the use of 100% renewable or clean energy. Perhaps unrealistic, but I had a look around and found some data sources: the guys at climatebonds.net suggest that $10T is required at a rate of $1T per year, so with a global total of nearly $250B, we are a quarter of the way there! Another way to look at it is to compare total energy use with installed clean energy. Wikipedia estimates annual entry consumption of around 150,000TWh, or around 17,000GW. This compares with this reports 565GW total installed capacity - I will leave it to others to compare capacity against the power you can generate given the vagaries of wind and solar availability, however, given those numbers we are not even 3% of the way to the finish line, and the cost would look more like $100T given that this year we added just 43GW for nearly $250B. Presumably we'll get better at this as we go.
The chart above shows the growth in investment over the last 8 years, showing 2009 and the GFC as the only time of contraction in the increase of this spending. The report cites that collectively, we have just spent out first trillion dollars on clean energy.
Which by my reckoning means we are either 1/10 or 1/100th of the way to the end of the 'clean energy race'.
LINKS
http://www.pewenvironment.org/news-room/compilations/whos-winning-the-clean-energy-race-2011-edition-85899380963
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption
www.climatebonds.net
This week the 2012 edition on the PEW Environment Group report on clean energy came out and it is an interesting read from the point of view of this blog. The report is global and compares the investment made in each of the g20 countries in clean energy from any source (public or private funding).
The link to the report is below, and stories were run by many media outlets which you can find through google. The report title is such that it is easy to pick up in the media, since it implies their is a competition to get the most renewable energy, a thought I like, but not one that is generally shared, I still don't think.
The media reports generally follow the path of finding the metric for which the country they are written in leads and highlighting that. Eg USA invested the most in 2011, Indonesia grew the most 2010-2011, Italy invested the largest amount per $ of GDP, and although I didn't see it reported (perhaps because it isn't calculated in the report), You can be sure that Australia is near the top per capita - Italy and Germany are beating us due to the massive growth of domestic solar power in those two countries.
So where are we racing to?
In this report the winner is whoever spends the most money in the year. That is a nice thing, but as a measure, it's a bit irrelevant, particularly when you might be paying too much for your chosen energy source and hence 'winning'each year. A better race is the global race to the use of 100% renewable or clean energy. Perhaps unrealistic, but I had a look around and found some data sources: the guys at climatebonds.net suggest that $10T is required at a rate of $1T per year, so with a global total of nearly $250B, we are a quarter of the way there! Another way to look at it is to compare total energy use with installed clean energy. Wikipedia estimates annual entry consumption of around 150,000TWh, or around 17,000GW. This compares with this reports 565GW total installed capacity - I will leave it to others to compare capacity against the power you can generate given the vagaries of wind and solar availability, however, given those numbers we are not even 3% of the way to the finish line, and the cost would look more like $100T given that this year we added just 43GW for nearly $250B. Presumably we'll get better at this as we go.
Which by my reckoning means we are either 1/10 or 1/100th of the way to the end of the 'clean energy race'.
LINKS
http://www.pewenvironment.org/news-room/compilations/whos-winning-the-clean-energy-race-2011-edition-85899380963
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption
www.climatebonds.net
Thanks for sharing information on who is running in the clean energy race? , i have visited your blog great post..........
ReplyDeleteThanks for sharing information on clean energy index, i have visited your blog great post..........
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