Sunday, December 11, 2016

How much renewables do we have now?

I'm a data junkie.  I want to know the facts.  Whereas with economic data I have excellent resources, with data about renewables, the facts I can find are often contradictory.  So in an earlier post this week, according to the Danish Energy Dept, renewables (including biomass) contributed 56% to Denmark's electricity generation.  According to the chart below (from the Finkel Review into Oz's electricity market) Denmark is at 51% VRE (wind + solar), but you have to add biomass (about 11%) to that.  The IEA's estimates for the current situation can probably be trusted, though their forecasts have been serially (and seriously) wrong for several years now.  They have consistently underestimated the decline in the costs of wind and solar and therefore they have also completely missed the rise in deployment of wind and solar.  My guess is that the forecasts for renewables for 2021 are again too low, though they are (now!) forecasting a doubling of the renewables percentage in the USA and China over the next 5 years.  They are assuredly too low if we want to slow global warming.

(Source)

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