The speed of global transition to wind and solar energy
Technology transitions always happen faster than the conventional market predicts PV MAGAZINE 14. NOVEMBER 2011 BY: RAY WILLS “…..What are the implications of rapidly shifting technologies for renewable energy sources, such as photovoltaics? Renewable generation of all forms continue to get cheaper while the price of fossil fuel rises, and governments may finally move to also eliminate global fossil fuel subsidies.
Continuing bad (and sad) news from Fukushima will continue to keep nuclear off most agendas. Meanwhile, solar will be at retail grid parity in most of the world by 2015 at the same time that electric vehicles will be produced in numbers (one Chinese manufacturer BYD is planning to build one million electric vehicles by 2015) in the market place, thus creating low cost storage options that deal with intermittency, storage for peak, and minimizing (not yet eliminating) overnight load supplied from fossil fuel generation by 2025……
A new Chinese Wind Energy Roadmap, just published by the Chinese Energy Research Institute (ERI), shows a plan to reach an incredible 1,000 GW of wind energy, increasing its share of electricity production to 17 percent in China by 2050. This development is in line with the Chinese government’s low carbon development strategy to add some 20 GW of new wind capacity annually up to 2030, thus bringing total operational capacity to 400 GW by 2030.
My view is that within five years, these plans will be overtaken by the build in solar – at this point China plans to have ten GW of solar by 2015 – which the Chinese Government is supporting with a mandated 15 cent per kilowatt hour commercial feed-in tariff. Chinese targets generally get met early (it’s politically not a good thing to underperform), so data published just this month shows the photovoltaic project pipeline in China grew to 16 GW, will clearly overwhelm the ten GW by 2015…..
Solar will hit retail grid parity pretty much around the world by 2015, probably faster now that China has announced these plans, and especially since prices for polysilicon have dropped 56 percent this year. 2010 photovoltaic module production capacity increased by 160 percent over 2009, to 21.6 GW, forecast to be 30 GW annual production by 2015.
At the same time as retail grid parity’s arrival, electric vehicles will be being produced in numbers, as aforementioned, thus creating low-cost storage options that deal with intermittency, storage for peak, and minimizing (not yet eliminating) overnight load supplied from fossil fuel generation by 2025……
Australian Senator Barnaby Joyce has been critical of carbon-tax legislation, passed last-week by the Australian Federal Parliament, saying that it will bankrupt the country. If Senator Joyce time shifted to 100 years ago and was put in charge of defending the buggy whip manufacturers – an essential item for the horse drawn carriage line – he would have been saying the reckless shift to the horseless carriage will cost us our jobs and send us broke. The data is showing us otherwise and that technological change, in the right conditions, can move faster than many naysayers think.
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