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Posted On: 11/24/2017 9:41:19 AM
Post# of 124718
Wind power costs could drop 50%. Solar PV could provide up to 50% of global power. Damn.
New reports suggest a renewables revolution is imminent.
https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/20...ions-again
Updated by David Roberts@drvoxdavid@vox.com Aug 31, 2017, 8:09am EDT
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Today’s status quo leads to revolution
It’s a little odd. Both of these reports offer forecasts that are wildly optimistic relative to the mainstream modeling community, but it’s not because they predict wind and solar are going to have some unprecedented explosion.
They simply predict that wind and solar are going to keep doing what they’re doing — keep scaling up, keep improving, keep getting cheaper — at roughly the same rate they have been. If that happens, solar PV could provide 30 to 50 percent of global power. If that happens, wind power could be 50 percent cheaper by 2030.
If those things happen, if the status quo continues, it will amount to a renewable energy revolution.
As I said, there are reasons to think wind and solar will start running into technical and financial challenges as their share of grid power rises. How much those challenges will slow them down is difficult to predict, but they’ll probably slow them down some. Getting to 50 percent wind and solar on a grid would be heroic; getting beyond that will require radical technological, political, and legal changes that go far beyond just wind and solar power plants themselves.
My own sense of things is somewhat gloomier than these reports suggest. But wind and solar have been defying gloomy predictions for well over a decade now, so maybe they’ll keep doing so.
As stockbrokers like to say, past performance is no guarantee of future results. There’s no guarantee wind and solar will stay on their current path. But at the very least, it seems like modelers should take continuation of status quo trends as their baseline, their reference case, instead of assuming, over and over, and that wind and solar growth will slow (and being proven wrong, over and over).
It may seem crazy to say in this day and age, but sometimes a little optimism is warranted.
New reports suggest a renewables revolution is imminent.
https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/20...ions-again
Updated by David Roberts@drvoxdavid@vox.com Aug 31, 2017, 8:09am EDT
Today’s status quo leads to revolution
It’s a little odd. Both of these reports offer forecasts that are wildly optimistic relative to the mainstream modeling community, but it’s not because they predict wind and solar are going to have some unprecedented explosion.
They simply predict that wind and solar are going to keep doing what they’re doing — keep scaling up, keep improving, keep getting cheaper — at roughly the same rate they have been. If that happens, solar PV could provide 30 to 50 percent of global power. If that happens, wind power could be 50 percent cheaper by 2030.
If those things happen, if the status quo continues, it will amount to a renewable energy revolution.
As I said, there are reasons to think wind and solar will start running into technical and financial challenges as their share of grid power rises. How much those challenges will slow them down is difficult to predict, but they’ll probably slow them down some. Getting to 50 percent wind and solar on a grid would be heroic; getting beyond that will require radical technological, political, and legal changes that go far beyond just wind and solar power plants themselves.
My own sense of things is somewhat gloomier than these reports suggest. But wind and solar have been defying gloomy predictions for well over a decade now, so maybe they’ll keep doing so.
As stockbrokers like to say, past performance is no guarantee of future results. There’s no guarantee wind and solar will stay on their current path. But at the very least, it seems like modelers should take continuation of status quo trends as their baseline, their reference case, instead of assuming, over and over, and that wind and solar growth will slow (and being proven wrong, over and over).
It may seem crazy to say in this day and age, but sometimes a little optimism is warranted.
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