In his annual State of the Union address, President Obama declared: "I will not walk away from clean energy."
His words were a sharp rebuttal to critics harping on the Solyndra bankruptcy and others making dire predictions about the downfall of the renewable energy industry.
So, who is right? Will 2012 be a breakthrough year for renewable, or will it collapse?
Despite conventional wisdom, there is a growing body of evidence showing that renewables are no longer decades away from being a viable and affordable alternative to fossil fuels. Instead, onshore wind and solar photovoltaics are close to a tipping point to compete head-to-head with coal and natural gas in many countries.
In fact, it's likely that 2012 could be the year when investment in renewable energy (not counting hydropower) will surpass fossil fuels, signaling a profound shift toward a global clean energy economy.
Investors are leading the charge toward a clean energy future, betting heavily on renewable energy. Global investment in clean energy generation capacity reached a record high of $260 billion in 2011, Bloomberg New Energy Finance announced last month. That was up 5 percent above 2010 levels and almost five times the 2004 total. The United States, surprisingly, led the world in renewable energy investment at nearly $56 billion, and China was second with more than $47 billion.
Wind farms in China and solar panels on rooftops in Europe are the biggest signs of growth. But the renewables boom is a global phenomenon. In South and Central America, investments rose 39 percent to $13 billion. In India, they rose by 25 percent to almost $4 billion; and in the Middle East and Africa, by 104 percent to $5 billion.
So what is getting investors -- from asset financiers to venture capitalists -- so excited?
The answer is simple: wind and solar energy is becoming increasingly cost competitive with coal and natural gas. In the past few years, the costs of PV modules and wind turbines have tumbled, driven mainly by technology innovations and a maturing supply chain. The results are evident in falling clean energy prices around the world.
Take just a few examples:
But before rushing to invest your entire pension in clean energy, there are some important caveats. Renewable power is not yet a mainstream global industry. It made up only a little over 3 percent of total world electricity generation, as of 2009.
While its future seems bright, the outcome may hang on how two key issues play out:
First is the unpredictable effect of the shale gas boom. In countries like the United States, where low electricity prices already make it tough for renewables to become cost competitive, abundant and cheap shale gas may drive energy prices down even further and divert investment from wind and solar power. Low-priced natural gas is good for consumers, but it could slow the growth of renewable. This could have additional negative environmental consequences, including on greenhouse gas emissions.
The second key issue is whether governments will keep up their investor-friendly commitments to clean energy policy and incentives. The BNEF report, Global Trends in Renewable Energy Investment 2011, showed significant progress on that front. By early 2011, some 119 countries had policies or targets in place to support renewables, more than half of them in the developing world.
But given the turbulent global economy, it is likely that fiscal and political constraints will continue to bite across much of the globe in 2012. Governments may see support for wind and solar as tempting for budget cuts.
In the United States, for example, wind power developers are nervous about the potential expiration of the Production Tax Credit in December 2012. If Congress fails to renew or replace it, the industry's robust growth will likely falter. President Obama acknowledged as much during State of the Union, when he called on Congress to extend support for wind power and solar power. So the outlook for the year is still sunny, but not cloudless for renewables.
Given the significant strides the industry has made, it would be unfortunate if governments and investors turned their backs now. If they forge ahead, 2012 could indeed see global investment surpass that for fossil fuels, crossing an important threshold toward a clean energy future.
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The primary source of GHG is fossil fuel burning electrical generating facilities. http://dingo.care2.com/pictures/causes/uploads/2012/01/GHG-emitters-2010.jpg
7 Billion humans generate vast quantities of excrement. I believe this excrement is capable of providing all human electrical demands. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiolysis
Right now hydrogen is perceived as a negative by product, of Nuclear Energy, when it should be the product, as the Pentagon has considered. reference info Request for Information (RFI) on Deployable Reactor Technologies ... DARPA-SN-10-37@darpa.mil
https://www.fbo.gov/index?s=opportunity&mode=form&id=d0792af88a6a4484b3aa9d0dfeaaf553&...
Large scale conversions sites are intended to replace fossil fuel powered electrical facilities the Primary Source of Carbon Emissions.
http://www.populist.com/99.12.krebs.blob.html
In what officials now say was a mistaken strategy to reduce the waste's volume, organic chemicals were added years ago which were being bombarded by radiation fields, resulting in unwanted hydrogen. The hydrogen was then emitted in huge releases that official studies call burps, causing "waste-bergs," chunks of waste floating on the surface, to roll over.
Dennis Baker
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Solar wind and waste bio char get 1% of that total.
Rooftop Solar is cheaper than nuke. Wind and waste bio char bio fuels are half that again, and efficiency is half that to profitable.
End the nuke and fossil breaks. Plow those resources into green energy.
Make frackers tag their wells, and pay for the contamination of the water. Won't last long if we do.
Vote for the Founder type Locke liberals like Kucinich, Warren, Grayson and the CPC-progressives, then vote for the dems, even nuke and fossil loving "all of the above" Obama, cause the GOP would outlaw green if they could.
Green is cheaper.
It's been studied to death.
http://www.iset.uni-kassel.de/abt/w3-w/projekte/LowCostEuropElSup_revised_for_AKE_2006.pdf
Low Cost but Totally Renewable Electricity Supply for a Huge Supply Area
Supplying Baseload Power and Reducing Transmission Requirements by
Interconnecting Wind Farms
http://www.stanford.edu/group/efmh/winds/aj07_jamc.pdf
We will never know all the answer before it is long past time to decide, such is life.
For now, we should shift all breaks to green and away from fossils and nukes.
Entombing, bulldozing, chain sawing and deforesting ecosystems kill ecosystems, kill all the ways Earth functions and cycles to create and support man's very existence. Killing ecosystems for dead fields of solar and wind, kill the Earth and all life, as assuredly if they dropped a bomb or plopped a huge oil spill on Earth.
We must be intelligent and incorporate these planet butchers into existing buildings, rooftops, homes, shopping centers, cities and parking lots as once the soil is disturbed and the plants/trees slaughtered in a wild ecosystem, the climate heats up and dries out and immense concentrations of heat trapping gases are released back into the atmosphere.
"A thing is right when it preserves the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community; it is wrong otherwise". Regardless!
It is currently far cheaper to install a small, custom rooftop solar system anywhere in Germany than it is to install a giant, wilderness-killing Big Solar plant anywhere in the US, on a per-watt basis. That is 100% due to Germany's SMART policies and our DUMB ones. Germans get paid to produce clean energy right where and when it's needed. We pay, then pay, then pay again, so that Big Energy and Big Banks (woops, and Big Government) can all pillage our healthy ecosystems, our tax receipts and our electric bills for their own profits.
The only "investors" we should be worried about are WE the PEOPLE getting paid for producing clean power on our rooftops using the feed-in-tariff mechanism that has proven to be hugely fast and affordable. Then, yes, you can invest your nest egg in solar because unlike parasitical stock investments, you can receive an actual guaranteed return on investment just like utilities do.
Her soap box is saying, oxygen releasing, the integrity of the atmosphere and the climate, the natural sequestration of the heat trapping gases that will be released once the ecosystem's soil is disturbed and the plant biodiversity sliced dead, the nitrogen cycle, the entirety of Earth's biogeochemistry, the provision of hydrological storage and flux, and a long list of every reason mankind breathes!
Killing ecosystems, kills every and all reasons man lives, whether it is for dead fields of dead solar or windmills, that parcel of the planet will now be as brown and dead as the surface of Mars. All ecosystems are all integrated, and they all have loops and feedbacks to the very atmosphere and very climate, and they all, altogether, create the very life zone of the Earth, her biosphere/ecosphere.