Grid Parity Low LCOE Driving 34 Global Renewables Capacity by 2030

CleanTechnica has an article on the growth factors for renewable energy -Grid Parity, Low LCOE Driving 34% Global Renewables Capacity by 2030.

When it comes to global electricity generation, coal is still king – but not for long.

Fast-changing economics mean renewables worldwide will represent 34% of all installed capacity by 2030, according to “World Energy Perspective: Cost of Energy Technologies,” a report from the World Energy Council (WEC) and Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF).

The report finds many clean energy technologies are already cost competitive with fossil fuels and only getting cheaper, echoing another analysis that found US wind and solar costs fell 50% since 2008. As a result, fossil fuel’s slice of the world energy pie is projected to fall fast, from 67% in 2012 to 40%-45% in 2030.

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Global warming melts edge of Greenland ice sheet

The SMH has a look at monitoring of the melting of Greenlands glaciers - Global warming melts edge of Greenland icesheet.

The last edge of the Greenland ice sheet that had resisted global warming has now become unstable, adding billions of tonnes of meltwater to rising seas, scientists say. In a study published in the journal Nature Climate Change, they say a surge in temperature from 2003 has eased the brakes on a long "river" of ice that flows to the coast in northeastern Greenland.

Known as an ice stream, the "river" takes ice from a vast basin and slowly shifts it to the sea - in the same way the Amazon River drains water.

In the past, the flow from this ice stream was constrained by massive buildups of ice debris choking its mouth. But a three-year spell of exceptionally high temperatures removed this blockage - and like a cork removed from a bottle helped accelerate the flow, the study said.

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Bubbling Up Geothermal Sees Big Global Growth

While geothermal power remains a relatively niche source of renewable energy, it is still a piece of the puzzle. EarthTechling reports that global production is set to double over the next few years - Bubbling Up: Geothermal Sees Big Global Growth.

Global geothermal power capacity could be on its way toward doubling, according to a new industry report, as projects unfold around the world, with a number of countries closing in on putting their first geothermal power stations to work.

The Geothermal Energy Association, in its 2013 Geothermal Power: International Market Overview, said seventy countries are moving forward with nearly seven hundred projects. The group said that as of August this year, 11,765 megawatts of geothermal capacity were online – and 11,776 MW of new capacity were in the early stages of development or under construction.

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Global Investment in Renewable Energy Germany

Fifth on our list is a country well known for its technological ingenuity and becoming increasingly popular for its renewable energy initiatives, Germany

Renewable energy technologies have deployed rapidly in Germany since 1990 largely as a result of energy policies adopted by the German government and the European Union.  The growth of renewable energy in Germany has often been cited as a model success story.  The German government launched a comprehensive series of promotions for renewable energy in the early 1990s, which has since been augmented with additional legislation and policy actions to increase renewable energy use.

 

Policies

Here are some of Germany’s energy plans:

The Electricity Feed Act came into force on 1 January 1991. In April 2000, it was replaced by the Renewable Energy Sources Act, which was amended a first time in July 2004 and again in 2008. The Renewable Energy Act is based on the following principles:

Obligation of grid operators to purchase the electricity produced from renewable energy .

Fixed price (“tariff”) for every kilowatt-hour produced from renewable energy for 20 years.

Tariffs are differentiated by source and size of the plant.

Equalisation of additional costs between all grid operators and electricity suppliers.

Motives

The first issue is the phase out of nuclear power. An early energy policy action of the Red-Green government was an initiative for the complete phase out of nuclear power in Germany by 2020.

The second issue is greenhouse gas control. The future challenges incumbent in nuclear phase-out are compounded by the ambitious greenhouse gas emissions reductions targets adopted by the German government.

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Renewable Energy Availability

Germany’s onshore wind generation in totalled 25,509 gigawatt-hours in 2004. Together with hydro power (21,076 gigawatt-hours), it dominates the market.

Biomass electricity is also contributing significantly (9,326 gigawatt-hours), with strong growth in the solid biomass sector (average annual growth of 34% between 1997 and 2004).

Solar energy has increased on average by 53% per year.

Stay tuned for more countries coming up!

Thank you for taking the time to learn more about renewable energy - Knowledge Is Power! For more information go to www.endeavorscorp.com or write to us at info@endeavorscorp.com if you have questions or want to get involved. Have a green day!

Global Change, EREC, Global Change, Europa, Bloomberg New Energy Finance and United Nations Environment Programme (2011)

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2012 Global Fuel Supply Still Flat

Stuart at Early Warning has a look at global oil production trends - 2012 Global Fuel Supply Still Flat.

I seem to be the only person paying much attention to this, but I still think its significant. May figures for global liquid fuel supply are out from OPEC and the IEA and they continue to show that global supply has increased very little since January (in contrast to the very strong increases in the second half of 2011).

Other things being equal, we would expect this to lead to rising prices. Instead, prices have been weak/falling as a result of Eurozone fears. The fears about the eurozone are legitimate, but still, at present the global economy has got to be growing, if a little weaker than normal. Only Europe is actually contracting at present and that mildly. Thus, if the fears do not translate into much more pronounced global contraction in reality fairly soon, oil prices could jump up quite a bit. On the other hand, of course, if Europe does turn into a full-blown financial crisis then they could fall further.

There is a strong Schrodinger quality to the oil markets at present: prices are a superposition of the state in which Europe turns into a major global financial crisis, and the state in which it doesnt. I wonder how long before the measurement is made?

Stuart also has a look at oil production in Iraq and some of the dodgy reporting of production trends- Is "Soaring" the Right Word Here?.

Ten days or so ago, I posted the graph above under the headline "Sharp Uptick in Iraqi Production". I chose my words carefully - "uptick" to indicate that this was a movement upward of the same general order of magnitude as other recent movements in the time series, and "sharp" to emphasize that, as upticks in Iraqi production go, this was a somewhat larger and faster one than has been typical (but not, in my judgement, so great as to make the use of "uptick" misleading).

Yesterday, the New York Times decided to report on the same development under the headline "Oil Output Soars as Iraq Retools":

BAGHDAD — Despite sectarian bombings and political gridlock, Iraq’s crude oil production is soaring, providing a singular bright spot for the nation’s future and relief for global oil markets as the West tightens sanctions on Iranian exports. ...

I dont object to the graphic. Nor of course do I disagree that Iraqs production has increased and is likely to increase further (Ive been covering this for a long time).

But I do really question whether the sober grey-lady paper-of-record should refer to an increase of about 300kbd above the level of last fall as "soaring" in the present tense. I dont think so. I think "soaring" carries a strong connotation of already being way up in the air, or ascending very materially and rapidly. I dont think 300kbd merits that term. I think, if we wanted to use a flight metaphor, we might reasonably say "has begun to take off" or even "looks set to soar". But I think the use of "soaring" in the present tense is an exaggeration. I think this fits in a long-standing pattern at the New York Times of distorted coverage in which positive oil market developments are over-hyped while negative ones are minimized.

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The Local Global Flip

Jaron Lanier has an interesting column at Edge Magazine, looking at the phenomenon of companies “flipping” from local to global businesses - The Local / Global Flip.

The Apple idea is that instead of the personal computer model where people own their own information, and everybody can be a creator as well as a consumer, were moving towards this iPad, iPhone model where its not as adequate for media creation as the real media creation tools, and even though you can become a seller over the network, you have to pass through Apples gate to accept what you do, and your chances of doing well are very small, and its not a person to person thing, its a business through a hub, through Apple to others, and it doesnt create a middle class, it creates a new kind of upper class. ... Google has done something that might even be more destructive of the middle class, which is theyve said, "Well, since Moores law makes computation really cheap, lets just give away the computation, but keep the data." And thats a disaster.

... If we enter into the kind of world that Google likes, the world that Google wants, its a world where information is copied so much on the Internet that nobody knows where it came from anymore, so there cant be any rights of authorship. However, you need a big search engine to even figure out what it is or find it. They want a lot of chaos that they can have an ability to undo. ... when you have copying on a network, you throw out information because you lose the provenance, and then you need a search engine to figure it out again. Thats part of why Google can exist. Ah, the perversity of it all just gets to me.

... What Wal-Mart recognized is that information is power, and by using network information, you could consolidate extraordinary power, and so have information about what could be made where, when, what could be moved where, when, who would buy what, when for how much? By coalescing all of that, and reducing the unknowns, they were able to globalize their point of view so they were no longer a local player, but they essentially became their own market, and thats what information can do. The use of networks can turn you from a local player in a larger system into your own global system.

... The reason this breaks is that theres a local-global flip that happens. When you start to use an information network to concentrate information and therefore power, you benefit from a first arrival effect, and from some other common network effects that make it very hard for other people to come and grab your position. And this gets a little detailed, but it was very hard for somebody else to copy Wal-Mart once Wal-Mart had gathered all the information, because once they have the whole world aligned by the information in their server, they created essentially an expense or a risk for anybody to jump out of that system. That was very hard. ... In a similar way, once you are a customer of Googles ad network, the moment that you stop bidding for your keyword, youre guaranteeing that your closest competitor will get it. Its no longer just, "Well, I dont know if I want this slot in the abstract, and who knows if a competitor or some entirely unrelated party will get it." Instead, you have to hold on to your ground because suddenly every decision becomes strategic for you, and immediately. It creates a new kind of glue, or a new kind of stickiness.

... It can become such a bizarre system. What you have now is a system in which the Internet user becomes the product that is being sold to others, and what the product is, is the ability to be manipulated. Its an anti-liberty system, and I know that the rhetoric around it is very contrary to that.

... Essentially what happened with finance is a larger scale, albeit more abstract version of what happened with Wal-Mart, where a global system was optimized by being able to build data that could be concentrated locally using a computer network. It tremendously enriched the people who ran the network. It seemed to create savings for people initially who were the end users, the leafs of the network, very much as Google, or Groupon, seem to save them money initially. But then in the long-term it took away more from the income prospects of people than it could offer them in savings, very much as Wal-Mart did. ... This is the pattern that well see repeated again and again as new applications of computer networks come up, unless we decide to monetize what people do with their hearts and brains. What we have to do to create liberty in the future is to monetize more and more instead of monetize less and less, and in particular we have to monetize more and more of what ordinary people do, unless we want to make them into wards of the state. Thats the stark choice we have in the long-term.

...if youre adding to the network, do you expect anything back from it? And since weve been hypnotized in the last eleven or twelve years into thinking that we shouldnt expect anything for what we do with our hearts or our minds online, we think that our own contributions arent worth money, very much like we think we shouldnt be paid for parenting, or we shouldnt be paid for raking our own yard. In those cases you are paid in a sense because theres still something that becomes part of you in your life, for all that you did. ... But in this case we have this idea that we put all this stuff out there and what we get back are intangible or abstract benefits of reputation, or ego-boosting. Since were used to that bargain, were impoverished compared to the world that could have been and should have been when the Internet was initially conceived. The world that would create a strengthened middle class through what people do, by monetizing more and more instead of less and less. Its possible that that world could have never come about, but that was never tested. If we are absolutely convinced that this third way is impossible, and that we have to choose between "The Matrix" or Marx, if those are our only two choices, it makes the future dismal, and so I hope that a third way is possible, and Im certainly going to do everything possible to try to push it.

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