What does the data show?
The IRENA report was tabled this week at the World Future Energy Summit in Abu Dhabi.
Its most startling prediction states that by 2020 “all forms of renewable electricity will be consistently cheaper than power produced by burning fossil fuels.”
Here’s the data from today that makes that prediction appear accurate.
Of course, the challenge that wind and solar renewable energy face remains intermittency. But storage technology innovation is bridging that gap. Consider the recent announcement about the building of a thermal solar power plant in South Australia that will use a combination of paneled mirrors and molten salt, as well as the Tesla-built battery that is backing up a wind farm in that state, both facilities capable of providing continuous 24×7 power.
IRENA has provided a roadmap for the decarbonization of energy generation that states renewable power will have to grow to 65% of the global energy supply by 2050 compared to today’s 15% to keep the mean temperature of the planet from hitting the 2 Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) rise discussed in the Paris COP21 Agreement. IRENA data shows that 67% of current greenhouse gas emissions come from producing energy. Take fossil-fuel power generation out of the equation and temperatures can be kept closer to only a 1.5 Celsius (2.4 Fahrenheit) rise.
The difference between the two may seem small but according to climate scientists, the impact on the planet going from 1.5 to 2.0 Celsius will be enormous and something we need to avoid at all costs.
More disconcerting is the lack of cogent plans, to decarbonize and move away from fossil-fuel generated power, by one-third of the countries that signed the Paris Climate Change agreement.
