Are we wildly underestimating solar and wind power?

Right now, renewable energy sources like solar and wind still provide just a small fraction of the world’s electricity. But they’re growing fast. Very fast. Three new pieces of evidence suggest that many policymakers may be drastically underestimating just how quickly wind and solar are expanding.

1) Solar is growing exponentially. Let’s start with this chart from Gregor MacDonald, using data from BP’s 2012 Statistical Review of World Energy, showing that global use of solar power has grown exponentially in the past few years. Watch that graph go parabolic:

Across the globe, 55 terawatt-hours of solar power had been installed by the end of 2011. That may not seem like much in itself — the United States by itself, after all, needed about one hundred times that much power in 2011. But solar has been growing at a stunning rate, as panels keep getting dramatically cheaper. If these exponential growth rates, MacDonald notes, solar could provide nearly 10 percent of the world’s electricity by 2018.

2) Official agencies keep underestimating the growth rate of renewables. Perhaps MacDonald’s predictions sound like a wild fantasy. After all, the International Energy Agency is forecasting that solar will catch on much more slowly — providing a mere 4.5 percent of the world’s electricity by 2035. But here’s the hitch: The IEA has almost always underestimated how quickly wind and solar can grow.

Want proof? Check out this new report from the Renewable Energy Policy Network for the 21st Century. Sure, that’s not an unbiased source. But all the report does is compare past predictions about renewables by official government forecasters with reality. And the forecasters have consistently been too pessimistic. For instance, back in 2000, the IEA’s World Energy Outlook predicted that non-hydro sources of renewable energy would make up 3 percent of global energy by the year 2020. The world reached that point in 2008, well ahead of schedule.

Obviously, trends could change. In the last decade, wind and solar have benefited a great deal from subsidies and other forms of government support from countries like Germany, China, and the United States. Thanks to the financial crisis and budget crunches around the world, those supports are now in danger of dwindling. But in the past, the solar and wind pessimists have very often proved wrong.

3) Using only current technology, renewables could technically provide the vast bulk of U.S. electricity by mid-century. Ah, critics will counter. Perhaps wind and solar are getting cheaper. But they’re so intermittent! The wind isn’t always blowing. The sun isn’t always shining. How could we possibly depend on undependable sources like those for our electricity?

That’s where a new report from the U.S. National Renewable Energy Laboratory comes in. The scientists at NREL took a look at what happened if the United States used only existing technology and tried to generate 80 percent of its electricity from renewables by mid-century. Technically, NREL found, it’s feasible. The wind’s usually blowing somewhere, and the sun provides a lot of energy during the daytime. Other sources can pick up the slack elsewhere, though power grid operators would need to do some serious juggling.

NREL even provides a neat animated map of where different power plants — from hydropower to photovoltaic solar panels to wind turbines to concentrated solar plants — would need to be built to make this a reality. Here’s what things look like in 2050:

This map shows what, in theory, the U.S. electricity supply could look like in 2050. Blue dots are coal, gas, and nuclear plants — there are still plenty of them, particularly in the Northeast. But there’s been a huge expansion of solar power (orange and yellow), wind (peach), hydropower (gray), geothermal (purple) and biomass (green). (There’s more detail in the report on how the electric grid could possibly cope with these different sources.)

Now, this isn’t a firm prediction of how the U.S. energy system will evolve — that will depend on all sorts of variables, including prices and energy policies. If shale gas remains dirt-cheap and keeps undercutting solar and wind, for instance, then it’s quite possible that the above will never come to pass. But if the United States absolutely had to get most of its energy from renewable sources by 2050, this is how you could technically do it.

8 Comments on "Are we wildly underestimating solar and wind power?"

Arthur on Mon, 24th Sep 2012 1:56 pm 



Yes we are underestimating the ultimate potential of renewables and in 100 years time the night mare vision of Olduvai Gorge will not have materialized.

Having said that, we can forget about a smooth transition. We could have had that if we had listened to Dennis Meadows in the seventees and had acted decisively *then*. Now we are stuck with 7 billion and counting ‘yeast people’, as James Howard Kunstler put it, who only have needs and no solutions. It is unlikely that we will arrive at the Solar Energy Walhalla in 2112 without a terrible lot of drama of biblical proportions in between.

mike on Mon, 24th Sep 2012 1:56 pm 



And yet the economy keeps getting worse….. it’s almost as if the more renewable energy infrastructure we build, the worse the economy gets 😉

Kenz300 on Mon, 24th Sep 2012 2:40 pm 



As the cost of oil, coal and nuclear continue to rise and the environmental damage grows we will all be looking for alternatives. Price will be the eventual motivator that will push the transition to safe, clean alternative energy sources into high gear. Wind, solar, wave energy, geothermal and second generation biofuels made from algae, cellulose and waste are the future. No matter how many advertisements the oil and coal industry put on the TV and radio their greed and the increase in price will push us away.

MrEnergyCzar on Mon, 24th Sep 2012 3:39 pm 



Imagine if they got the subsidies the oil industry gets (military expense)….

MrEnergyCzar

kervennic on Mon, 24th Sep 2012 5:20 pm 



Solar and winds are growing exponentially in an environement where oil, gaz and coal are cheap, making transportation cost of material, mining and so on ridiculously small.

Those prices are already going up and production of some key material are already under pressure.

We will have to do with less and be even smarter.

Max Reid on Mon, 24th Sep 2012 6:19 pm 



With more efficient solar panels and bigger wind mills, renewables will continue to increase.

IEA always maintained that Oil prices will never exceed $40 / barrel and also the Oil will be dominant fuel for decades to come.

See what happened, Oil prices are $110 / barrel and the share of Oil in World energy consumption is just 32.6% and Coal is 30.3%, so in next 2 years, Coal will overtake Oil.

So IEA is nothing, but an Agency of OPEC/Big Oil.

Arthur on Tue, 25th Sep 2012 12:04 pm 



“So IEA is nothing, but an Agency of OPEC/Big Oil.”

Not exactly:

http://permaculturenews.org/2011/05/04/iea-concedes-that-peak-oil-already-occured-back-in-2006/

Lilia Rhodes on Tue, 25th Sep 2012 7:05 pm 



Solar power industry is indeed expanding but it is on its tough time now. Some of these industries are planning to close down as what reports say. I don’t know what went wrong, but maybe this underestimation is one of the reasons.