Climate Progress is the title of my blog posts' main home, as much as the "progress" part strains credulity at times. I only see two major quantitative areas of sustained progress: clean energy deployment (especially in Europe) and private sector clean-tech funding.
Those folk at Clean Edge, who wrote the best 2007 book on clean tech, The Clean Tech Revolution, have quantified these gains -- and made predictions about the future -- in a new report you can read here. Some interesting factoids:
- Clean-energy markets -- revenue for solar photovoltaics (PV), wind, biofuels, and fuel cells -- grew by 40 percent from $55 billion in 2006 to $77.3 billion in 2007. They project revenues will reach $254.5 billion by 2017. [Yes, lame -- if not counterproductive -- biofuels are about a third of those numbers, and I personally wouldn't count them as "clean tech." Then again, Clean Edge isn't counting energy efficiency.]
- New Energy Finance does a slightly different calculation, showing "New global investments in energy technologies -- including venture capital, project finance, public markets, and research and development -- have expanded by 60 percent from $92.6 billion in 2006 to $148.4 billion in 2007."
- "U.S.-based venture capital investments in energy technologies more than quadrupled from $599 million in 2000 to $2.7 billion in 2007 ... As a percent of total VC investments, energy tech increased from 0.6 percent in 2000 to 9.1 percent in 2007. Between 2006 and 2007, venture investments in the U.S. clean-energy sector increased by more than 70 percent."
- "Last year's global wind power installations reached a record 20,000 mW, equivalent to 20 large-size 1 gW conventional power plants."
- "Annual installations [of PV] were just shy of 3 gW worldwide, up nearly 500 percent from just four years earlier."
In Europe, renewables have become the dominant form of new power generation -- which just shows you what happens when governments become (relatively) serious about global warming:
Europe provides a great example of this transition. Since the beginning of the decade the EU has added 47,000 mW of new wind energy compared to just 9,600 mW of coal and only 1,200 mW of nuclear, according to Platts Power Vision and the European Wind Energy Association. Perhaps even more telling, 2007 saw net capacity additions of 8,505 megawatts of wind, whereas both coal and nuclear saw net capacity reductions of 750 megawatts and 1,023 megawatts, respectively.
Climate progress, albeit in fits and starts, can be found if you look hard enough.
This post was created for ClimateProgress.org, a project of the Center for American Progress Action Fund.
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Comments
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Delay And Deny Posted 5:13 am
27 Mar 2008
Not to be skeptical (who me?)...but, I've always heard that France, one of the largest countries in Europe, produces 80% of all it's electricity from nuclear. Not only that, but it's the 4th largest export for them, with Italy being their largest customer.
As far as adding capacity with wind, et. al., my question is: European populations are shrinking as replacement rate falls below 2.0 -- why do they need this new capacity? Grist has already pointed out that their may be way lots of excess capacity in the US...
"In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual." -- Galileo
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scatter Posted 6:37 am
27 Mar 2008
Unfortunately, the UK government in all its infinite wisdom appears to want to go nuclear in a major way. It's depressing in the extreme:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2008/mar/26/economy.gr ...
Now replace the word nuclear in that article with the word renewables and we're talking about an economy for the 21st century.
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Capster Posted 6:44 am
27 Mar 2008
The same is generally true for other countries - they have limited natural resources, so they want power diversification so they are not (as) beholden to other countries as they could be. You are right, France is 80% nuclear. They are very low carbon producers. Radioactive waste is another issue.
In the end, societies have always increased energy consumption to increase GDP, even accounting for productivity increases. I'm not sure if this is a rule or just a history, but it would posit that growth in power consumption will happen as economies grow, regardless of population (well, to a point, I suppose).
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PJD Posted 12:42 pm
28 Mar 2008
I'd say it's far from a rule of economics that there is some immutable constant that links the increase in economic output to the use of energy. There are of course efficiency gains that could make a substantial difference, though eventually one hits some upper limit on the efficiencies of large segments of our industrial needs... presumably. But the more fundamental delinkage between growth and energy is that economic growth can be centered around services rather than goods.
Granted this would apply much more to countries like the U.S. than one's still addressing basic needs. Here in the U.S. our economy has for decades been driven by two trends... growth in population and a huge increase in consumption beyond basic needs. The latter has included some service consumption, but an awful lot of material consumption/collection. Bigger houses, bigger cars, more cars, more furniture, more toys, more gadgets, more TVs, more stuff.
One could envision an economy that still grew in dollar value but that centered more on services. Instead of buying "stuff" to gratify ourselves and show our generosity to others we would spend money more for nights out at restaurants, live theater, taking extension classes at the local university or culinary school, downloaded music... anything where more of the value we are paying for is the contribution of another person rather than the raw materials and embodied energy of an object. It's not even a black or white thing, but rather an issue of dramatically shifting the balance. For instance giving someone a $300 oil painting produced by a local artist is still giving an object, but far less of the $300 is represented by embodied energy than if it had been a $300 DVD player or kitchen appliance. So the question is after our basic needs are met, what are we going to seek from our fellow human beings to enhance our enjoyment of life.
There probably is also an argument to be made that such a shift would help promote the progressive agenda of diminishing income imbalances... though that does fly in the face of the common wisdom that manufacturing jobs are higher wage than service jobs. I believe the latter merely reflects the current emphasis by most people on quantity of objects as their measure of life satisfaction.
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PJD Posted 1:09 pm
28 Mar 2008
Spending money on goods produced overseas is less stimulative than spending money where more of the added value is domestic, plus it helps the environment.
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