Guest essay by Eric Worrall
A recently released UN report, GLOBAL TRENDS IN RENEWABLE ENERGY INVESTMENT 2020, berates the world for not doing enough to transition to renewables.
GLOBAL TRENDS IN RENEWABLE ENERGY INVESTMENT 2020
It is nothing new to say that clean energy is better for the planet, and humanity, than energy derived from fossil fuels. Its benefits in avoiding greenhouse gas emissions, delivering cleaner air and bringing energy to marginalized communities are essential to a better future for all. What is new is that the world has a unique opportunity to accelerate clean development by putting renewable energy at the heart of Covid-19 economic recovery plans.
Governments will inject huge amounts of money into their economies as they look to bounce back from Covid-19 lockdowns, which have saved lives but stopped growth and cost jobs. This new report, Global Trends in Renewable Energy Investment 2020, shows that putting these dollars into renewables will buy more generation capacity than ever before, and help governments deliver stronger climate action under the Paris Agreement.
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This is great progress, but there is room to do much more. Nations and corporations have made clean energy commitments over the next decade. Analyzing them in its focus chapter, the report finds commitments for 826GW of new non-hydro renewable power capacity by 2030, at a likely cost of around $1 trillion. However, these commitments fall far short of what is needed to limit the rise in global temperatures to less than 2 degrees Celsius under the Paris Agreement. It also falls short of last decade’s achievements, which brought around 1,200GW of new capacity for $2.7 trillion.
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The U.S. edged ahead of Europe in terms of renewables investment last year. The U.S. invested $55.5 billion, up 28%, helped by a record rush of onshore wind financings to take advantage of tax credits before their expected expiry, while Europe committed $54.6 billion, down 7%.
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As part of the Paris Agreement in 2015 countries agreed to a common goal of limiting the rise in global temperatures this century to “well below” 2 degrees Celsius, with an aim of keeping the increase at 1.5 degrees. Even limiting the increase to 2 degrees would require the gross addition of some 2,836GW of new non-hydro renewable energy capacity by 2030, according to the base-case scenario in BloombergNEF’s New Energy Outlook 2019. The latter’s projection of the technology mix, based on the evolution of relative costs, is for this to consist of 1,646GW of solar, 1,156GW of wind, and 34GW of other non-hydro renewables, at an estimated cost of $3.1 trillion over the decade.
This section supports the message of the latest UNEP Emission Gap Report that there is a big gulf between countries’ current ambitions, even those as expressed in their Nationally Determined Contributions for the Paris Agreement, and what the science tells us needs to be done about global emissions by 2030.
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Read more: https://www.fs-unep-centre.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/GTR_2020.pdf
The report is hopeful costs will continue to fall.
I found the section on trends interesting; European investment in renewables fell 7% over the last year, while US investment was up 28%. For all their big talk of imposing border carbon taxes on US imports into Europe, European leaders are in no position to criticise other people’s climate efforts.
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No point in going on about global warming, climate change, renewables, etc. The cat is out of the bag in capital letters, the emperor is naked, the sky is NOT falling, and the boy cried wolf again…and again.
This never was about weather or climate.
Engaging these people on climate is playing to their smokescreen! Cut right through the BS we all see and call their bluff now!
Something is next. What’s next?
To heck with wind and solar. I say we transition to horses.
Horses are renewable. They recycle their food into great fertilizer. You can ride ’em to work.
And they are cute.
What a bunch of horse manure.
Sorry, the money was spent dealing with the Wuhan virus. Get it from China.
All you need to know about horses, is that one end bites, and the other, kicks.
Tony
Get the $$$$$$ from Al Gore…problem solved.
The late senator Everett Dirkson once said ” A billion $ here, a billion $ there and pretty soon your talking about real money”. Now we need to update his saying from Billion to Trillion.
At the rate the US is printing money it will be clown currency soon enough.
Soon enough? — I thought it already WAS clown currency. All that’s needed is a design to reflect the reality — something like this:
Just create tonnes of debt and pass it on to the next generation. After all, it their lives we are saving, right?
3, 10, 20, 40+ temperature swings. This is, today, yesterday, always and forevermore, [catastrophic] [anthropogenic] climate cooling… warming… change. Our future is not viable. We’re all going to be planned (i.e. aborted, dodo dynasties) if this progresses (i.e. monotonic change). Buy carbon credit indulgences to be socially just. Bray to whatever mortal god or goddess offers you secular lucre.
The reality is that the climate change we have been experiencing is caused by the sun and the oceans over which mankind has no control. So spending huge sums of money trying to control the climate will have no effect. We are far better off trying to improve the global economy so that we can better deal with the effects of extreme weather events. The best way to reduce our burning of fossil fuels is to replace ageing fossil fuel plants with nuclear power plants.
William, I couldn’t agree more …
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/341622566_IPCC_three_pillars_of_man-made_global_warming_collapsed
“This is great progress, but there is room to do much more. Nations and corporations have made clean energy commitments over the next decade. Analyzing them in its focus chapter, the report finds commitments for 826GW of new non-hydro renewable power capacity by 2030, at a likely cost of around $1 trillion”
So these UN bureaucrats admit in broad delight that it is about the money after all?
https://tambonthongchai.com/2020/04/29/numnut-un-bureaucrat/
If you are going to flush $3.1 trillion down the toilet, why not try to develop fusion reactors or thorium reactors.
Who knows, someone might actually succeed.
“thorium reactor” is just another name for a *Weapons Grade Uranium/Plutonium Breeder Reactor” because the system has to convert the thorium into uranium before it can be put into the power cycle.
You’ve got some reading to do. We already have 5 ‘working’ thorium systems.
Molten Salt reactors destroy their own parts within a year of installation.
Your comment seems a bit puzzling, since the ability of the Molten Salt type of reactor to ‘breed’ more fissile material from thorium is something I’ve seen touted as a benefit of that kind of technology, see for instance, https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/254692-new-molten-salt-thorium-reactor-first-time-decades
Also, I had thought the potential to produce plutonium, as such, is something that is most often associated with breeder reactor designs based on using naturally occurring uranium, U-238, as the base fuel? With thorium, it isn’t plutonium that is produced, generally, rather it is supposed to be a fissile isotope of uranium, U-233, that is made as the ‘good’ reaction sustaining material? Unless of course, you are worried that people will purify it to make bombs, *then* the U-233 could be the ‘bad’ reaction sustaining material, much like plutonium, I suppose.
The following article makes a comparison between uranium based fuel cycles and thorium ones that seems to favour thorium: https://www.scienceabc.com/innovation/why-is-thorium-a-potentially-safer-alternative-to-uranium-not-used-in-nuclear-reactors.html
The article states that,
“The thorium fuel cycle also produces plutonium, but the non-weaponizable isotope (plutonium-238). U233 can also be used in nuclear weapons, but the presence of U232 in the mixture negates its capabilities.”
That’s a lot of Swiss chalets, diplomatic parties, and frequent flyer miles.
Gods what bullshit.
Energy storage? The problem with energy storage is that the motive force of the storage system falls as energy is used, e.g water pressure falls as a reservoir empties or voltage falls as a battery discharges. Something has to be put in place to keep the voltage constant. Secondly, the electric power in the grid is AC & batteries only store DC, so again something else has to be put in place to convert the battery’s DC output to AC, all more expense & complexity.