By Frank Andorka, Senior Correspondent
It took forty years for clean energy – solar and wind specifically – installations to reach 1 TW of installed capacity. BNEF says we’re only five years away from reaching the next TW.
Talk about an accelerated adoption speed.
BNEF says the global solar and wind industries reached 1 TW of installed capacity sometime in the middle of the year, which if it all was in the United States could power the entire U.S. electric fleet.
Albert Cheung, BloombergNEF’s head of analysis in London, offered this exciting insight:
Hitting one terrawatt is a tremendous achievement for the wind and solar industries, but as far as we’re concerned, it’s just the start. Wind and solar are winning the battle for cost-supremacy, so this milestone will be just the first of many.
According to Cheung and the rest of the BNEF team:
The findings illustrate the scale of the green energy boom, which has drawn $2.3 trillion of investment to deploy wind and solar farms at the scale operating today.BloombergNEF estimates that the falling costs of those technologies mean the next terrawatt of capacity will cost about half as much – $1.23 trillion – and arrive sometime in 2023.
The majority of the new capacity has been in Asia, with 44% of new wind and 58% of solar being built there. One-third of those installations are in China. Which is somewhat depressing, frankly, given how much capacity could be added to the U.S. grid.
54% of the first terrawatt was wind, but by 2020, solar is expected to catch wind, BNEF reports. But here’s one of the most interesting tidbits from the article:
More than 90 percent of all that capacity was installed in the past 10 years, reflecting incentives that Germany pioneered in the early 2000s that made payouts for green power transparent for investors and bankers alike.
Here’s to an industry that is on the rise, and I can’t wait to see what the next five years brings.
More:
Green Energy Producers Just Installed Their First Trillion Watts