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- Written by: Glenn and Rick
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China is set to add at least 570 gigawatts (GW) of wind and solar power in the 14th five-year plan (FYP) period (2021–25), more than doubling its installed capacity in just five years, if targets announced by the central and provincial governments are realised. Our compilation and analysis of targets and projects announced by the central and provincial governments shows wind and solar capacity would reach more than 1,100GW by 2025, tripling the 360GW total installed in 2015 and doubling the 536GW at the end of 2020. The wind and solar plans emerging from recent policymaking are far ahead of the pace implied by China’s headline climate commitments. As a part of the country’s goal to peak its carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions before 2030 and achieve carbon neutrality before 2060, President Xi Jinping announced that China would increase its total installed capacity of wind and solar power to “over” 1,200GW by 2030 This target would have required maintaining the pace of 70GW per year of new capacity already achieved in the previous FYP period (2016-20). Installing the 570GW of wind and solar we identified would put China on track to meet the 1,200GW target in 2026, four years earlier than planned, our analysis shows. The acceleration is driven in large part by the so-called “clean energy bases” – unprecedentedly large-scale concentrations of wind and solar power. The National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), China’s state economic planner, has published two lists of gigantic wind and solar clean energy bases – one last November and one in March this year. These bases will host about half of the wind and solar capacity to be connected to the grid by 2025, primarily located in China’s deserts and other barren land.
Along with other plans for clean energy expansion, the new wind and solar power could be enough to peak China’s fossil fuel consumption – and CO2 emissions – before 2025. https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-what-do-chinas-gigantic-wind-and-solar-bases-mean-for-its-climate-goals
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- Written by: Glenn and Rick
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Windfarm installations are expected to double to record global levels this year, after a short-lived Covid-19 slowdown, according to the Global Wind Energy Council (GWEC). The group’s annual report found that the world’s offshore windfarm capacity grew by 6.1GW last year, down slightly from a record 6.24GW in 2019, but would rebound to more than 12GW in 2021 powered by an offshore wind boom in China. China led the world in new installations for the third year in a row with more than 3GW of offshore wind grid connected in 2020, and remains on track to surpass the UK as the world’s biggest offshore wind market by the end of the decade. The world’s second-largest economy connected more than 3GW of offshore wind to its electricity grid last year, almost half the global total, while installations in smaller Asian countries such as Taiwan and Vietnam stalled due to Covid-19 delays. GWEC has forecast a fresh record year for offshore wind growth in 2021 as China’s wind industry rushes to install 7.5GW before the expiry of government subsidies at the end of this year. The future of the industry’s growth is also expected to be powered by a record year for offshore wind financing, according to the report, after the $8bn investment in the world’s biggest offshore wind farm off the UK’s Yorkshire coast https://www.theguardian.com/
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- Written by: Glenn and Rick
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Renewables 2021 is the IEA’s primary analysis on the sector, based on current policies and market developments. It forecasts the deployment of renewable energy technologies in electricity, transport and heat to 2026 while also exploring key challenges to the industry and identifying barriers to faster growth. Renewables are the backbone of any energy transition to achieve net zero. As the world increasingly shifts away from carbon emitting fossil fuels, understanding the current role renewables play in the decarbonisation of multiple sectors is key to ensuring a smooth pathway to net zero. While renewables continued to be deployed at a strong pace during the Covid-19 crisis, they face new opportunities and challenges. This year’s report frames current policy and market dynamics while placing the recent rise in energy and commodities prices in context. In addition to providing detailed market analysis and forecasts, Renewables 2021 also explores trends to watch including storage
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- Written by: Glenn and Rick
- Category: Renewables
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I know it’s small scale, but it’s something that an individual person can actually DO. I love my solar panels, and I would like to see them on every flat surface that gets sunlight — schools, stores, churches, storage units, etc. Is it politics, economics, supply issues? It just seems so obvious to me! Answer.......t might feel like solar panels have been around long enough that they should be plastering the built environment. After all, Jimmy Carter first put panels on the White House roof more than 40 years ago. But your vision of solar utopia may be a little ahead of the times. “Solar has only really been this economic for about five years,” Jenny Chase, the head of solar analysis at the energy research firm BloombergNEF, told me. Major home renovations don’t happen overnight. Chase said that since 2004, when rooftop solar first started to take off in Germany, the cost of a solar module on the world market has declined from $4 per watt down to just $0.24 today. And considering how recently the cost came down, rooftop solar is bigger than you might think. Installations around the world have increased by an average of 25 percent per year. The U.S. has about 2.8 million installations, with more than a million in California, where rooftop solar supplies about 10 percent of the state’s electricity. And these numbers are growing fast. Even though the clean energy industry ground to a halt at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, 2020 saw a record high in new rooftop solar capacity. One reason policy experts tend to downplay rooftop solar is that it typically costs a lot more to install a handful of panels on a million roofs than to plant a vast crop of them across a field or a vacant lot. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory estimates that installing rooftop solar can cost nearly three times as much, per watt, as a big utility-scale project. But deploying lots of rooftop solar, about 13 times as much as the U.S. has today, by 2050, combined with more battery storage systems, could save Americans hundreds of billions of dollars on electricity in the long run because of the services these distributed sources of energy provide to the grid.
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