Solar power was the fastest-growing source of new energy globally last year, outstripping the growth in all other forms of power generation for the very first time and leading specialists to hail a”new era”.
Renewable energy accounted for two-thirds of new energy added to the world’s grids in 2016, the International Energy Agency stated, but the team found solar was the tech that shone brightest.
New solar capacity even overtook the net growth in coal, formerly the largest new source of electricity generation. The shift was driven by falling prices and government policies, especially in China, which accounted for almost half the solar panels installed.
The Paris-based IEA predicted that solar would dominate future expansion, with global capacity in five years’ time anticipated to be greater than the current combined total power capacity of India and Japan.
Dr Fatih Birol, the executive director of the IEA, said:”What we are witnessing is the arrival of a new era in solar photovoltaics [PV]. We expect that solar PV capacity growth will be greater than every other renewable technology up to 2022.”
The power, which is financed by 28 member authorities, confessed it had previously underestimated the speed at which green energy was growing.
The amount of renewable energy capacity forecast worldwide in 2022 has been revised upward on last year’s forecast, driven by the IEA expecting a third more solar in China and India.
Wind turbines and solar panels in Yancheng, Jiangsu province of China
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Wind turbines and solar panels in Yancheng, Jiangsu province of China. Photograph: VCG via Getty Images
While China dominates the expansion of renewables, the US is still the second fastest-growing economy despite Donald Trump’s assurance to revive coal and the uncertainties he’s brought at a federal level.
Paolo Frankl, head of the renewable energy division at the IEA, said that solar and end subsidies and other fundamentals meant the president effect would probably be limited.
But, that may change if there were reforms which retrospectively struck the subsidies or if the US International Trade Commission imposes tariffs on imports of solar panels. “There’s a threat, but now our forecast remains strong,” said Frankl.
India is place for a solar boom during the next five decades, as bottlenecks like integrating solar farms with the grid are conquer.
The IEA has revised down its forecast for the amount of green energy to be built in the united kingdom between 2017 and 2022, together with offshore windfarms expected to account for most of the growth.
Regardless of the recent introduction of the UK’s very first subsidy-free solar farm, the prospects for British solar are fairly dismal: the quantity of solar forecast to be installed by 2022 is a fifth of the amount installed over the last five decades.
The report found that renewables are becoming more and more similar to fossil fuels on cost, with wind and solar projects setting record low costs in government auctions.
“Renewables may well become even cheaper than fossil fuel options [within the next five years]. However, be careful because this does not necessarily mean they are aggressive and investment will flow. This is based upon the risk of investment and whether remuneration flows make a project bankable or not,” said Frankl.
The expansion in renewable power will be twice as large as gas and coal united over the next five decades, the IEA said. While this will require renewables’ share of power generation from 24% last year to 30% in 2022, coal will still be the largest source of electricity.
The increasing scale of wind and solar power, and their intermittent nature at a local level, means that incorporating them with electricity grids has become critical, the IEA said. Nations need to bring forward policies that make grids more elastic, like batteries and managing demand at peak times, it suggested.
One energy specialist said that the IEA report was, if anything, underestimating the speed of renewables’ growth and the effect of them getting so affordable.
Tim Buckley, director of energy finance studies at Australia-based analysts IEEFA, said:”2016 was another record high year of renewable installs and suddenly large renewable energy cost deflation, again emphasizing the IEA’s continuing underestimation of these two trends driving the increasingly international market transformation”
