As declining costs make it more competitive with fossil fuels, renewable energy may reap as much as two-thirds of the US$7.7 trillion in investment forecast for building new power plants by 2030.
According to the forecasts in a report released by Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF) today about half of the investment will be in Asia, the region where power capacity will grow the most.
That will help global carbon dioxide emissions peak by the end of the next decade the London-based research group said.
BNEF said a glut of solar and wind manufacturing capacity had brought down prices of cells and turbines.
That is making clean energy plants in more locations profitable even though governments from Germany to the United States are scaling back incentives.
Annual investment in technologies such as solar, wind and hydropower surpassed fossil fuels for the first time in 2011.
“What we are seeing is global CO2 emissions on track to stop growing by the end of next decade, with the peak only pushed back because of fast-growing developing countries, which continue adding fossil fuel capacity as well as renewable energy,” Michael Liebreich, chairman of BNEF’s advisory board said.
Fossil fuel’s share of power generation will shrink to 46 per cent from 64 per cent now, BNEF said.
It estimates 5000 gigawatts (GW) of power generation capacity will be added globally.
Coal, gas and oil-fired plants will only account for about 1073GW, with much of that put in developing countries where power demand is growing most.
Solar power will top clean energy installations in every region over the next decade and a half, the report said.
Capacity will expand the most in Asia, where new solar sites will exceed gas and coal combined.
“The period to 2030 is going to see spectacular growth in solar in this region, with nearly 800GW of rooftop and utility-scale PV added,” Milo Sjardin, BNEF’s head of Asia Pacific, said in the report.
“This will be driven by economics, not subsidies, as our analysis suggests that solar will be fully competitive with other power sources by 2020.”
BNEF said that overall, solar and wind power would increase their combined share of global generation to 16 per cent in 2030 compared with three per cent last year.
Large-scale hydropower has the biggest share of power generation among non-polluting sources.
Gas-fired generation will survive the renewable energy boom, with installations growing because the fuel produces less pollution than coal and because supplies are abundant given shale gas discoveries in the past few years.
Coal plants will fare much worse, with capacity shrinking in Europe and the Americas as tighter emissions rules start to bite.
Coal capacity will only grow in Asia to support the region’s quicker economic growth, the research said.
In all, about $5.1 trillion of the total investment will be spent on renewable energy including hydropower.
Asia will account for $2.5 trillion of that, the Americas $816 billion and Europe $967 billion, BNEF said.
The Middle East and Africa will invest another $818 billion it added.
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Well, you can forget coal and oil for being self-sufficient usenls you also happen to own a coal mine or an oil well. Next, you can forget nuclear power, because you’d have to obtain enriched uranium or another nuclear fuel, whose handling is inherently dangerous. I am pretty sure that everywhere on this planet, including the US and Canada, it is illegal for private persons to handle substantial amounts of radioactive matter. The danger to the public is just too damn high.That leaves you with wind and solar. Depending on where you live, it is indeed possible to generate all electricity you need on your own, but you’d also need a good way to store electricity for cloudy days without wind. A possibility is to use surplus electricity to pump water up either a water tower or a dam, and then use that water to power turbines if sun and wind are not there.Water again depends on where you live, because you a) have to get it from somewhere and b) have to get rid of sewage somehow. There are laws and regulations in effect with the purpose of preventing pollution, so you cannot just dump it in whatever way you see fit, but if you’d install some sewage treatment I could imagine that you’d be allowed to do that So it seems that it might be possible to become self sufficient, but to me, it looks like all the initial investments you’d have to make are so huge that whatever you save by being self sufficient will never offset those costs.