NuClear News No.96 June 2017, What was remarkable about Donald Trump’s announcement on 1st June that the US would abandon the Paris climate agreement was not the almost universal condemnation of the move, but the number of stories about how successful renewable energy has become and how its advance has now become unstoppable.
Donald Trump is so wrong to be taking the US out of the Paris accord on climate change, says Jeremy Warner in the Daily Telegraph. The renewables train has already left the station and won’t now be stopped. Non binding targets for reducing greenhouse gases are no longer relevant and will almost certainly be naturally exceeded of their own accord without any help from inter-government actions. There is therefore absolutely no reason for the US to withdraw. (1)
Although President Donald Trump has presented his energy policy decisions as being focused on creating jobs, the solar and wind industries that could be threatened by leaving the Paris accord employ many more people than the coal industry that is likely to be the principal beneficiary. About 374,000 people spend at least some of their time working in the solar power industry in the US, with 260,000 of those working there more than half the time. A further 102,000 work in wind power. Together that is almost three times the 160,000 people employed in the coal industry, with about 86,000 of those at coal-fired power plants and 74,000 in coal mining and distribution. The number employed in coal mining has dropped from about 89,000 of those at coal-fired power plants and 74,000 in coal mining and distribution
The number employed in coal mining has dropped from about 89,000 at the start of 2012 to about 50,500 in April, following a slight bump of about 1,000 over the past year. Solar power is so labour-intensive in part because the rapid growth of the industry has created a lot of construction jobs installing systems. About 37% of US solar jobs are in construction, with about 27% in wholesaling. Only about 19% of US solar jobs are in manufacturing, and the industry has been heavily reliant on low-cost imported panels, mostly from China, Malaysia and Korea, to enable it to compete against fossil fuel generation. (2)
The US solar industry alone employs more than twice as many workers as the coal sector. Manhattan has more Tesla charging spots than petrol stations, though many are in fee-paying parking garages. And across the US, where power companies are facing lower wholesale prices thanks to cheaper natural gas, renewables are adding pressure too – even in unlikely spots such as oil-rich Texas. Texas now has more installed wind power capacity than Canada and Australia combined. If it were a country, it would rank as the world’s sixth-largest wind power, after China, the US, Germany, India and Spain.
The irony about Mr Trump’s inclination to back old industries, says Magnus Linklater in The Times, is that the US is an innovator in renewable energy, creating hundreds of thousands of jobs. When you add in all the spin-offs, such as electric forms of transport, employment in renewable energy is starting to outstrip that in the declining oil and gas industries. Now is not the time to slow down. Wind turbines are proving a remarkable success. On some days they produce more electricity than Scotland needs, allowing it to export the remainder. In places like Denmark and Germany, where there has been a massive expansion of wind farms, they manufacture so much renewable energy that electricity prices have turned negative, with customers paid to use it. Alternative energy is beginning to turn in some remarkable statistics. On 26th May solar energy produced one quarter of Britain’s energy needs, more even than nuclear and coal-fired power. There is much more of this to come. (3)
Many U.S. states and private companies announced that despite Trump’s decision, they would continue their own existing policies, such as restricting greenhouse gas emissions, as well as pursue new ones to demonstrate urgency in addressing the climate threat. US states accounting for almost 30% of national gross domestic product have pledged to meet the country’s climate commitments. California, New York, Washington and five other states have said they are committed to cutting emissions by 26-28% from 2005 levels, which was the reduction proposed for the US by Barack Obama. (4) City leaders of 102 cities across the US have announced they are adopting the Paris Climate Agreement. Mayors who have signed on to the Mayors National Climate Action Agenda represent roughly 50 million Americans in 34 States. (5)
What is striking is how much of a financial impact this is already having on some companies says Per Lekander, a portfolio manager at London’s Lansdowne Partners hedge fund, who has tracked global energy markets for more than 25 years. Government efforts to tackle climate change and smog have driven down costs and spurred huge technical advances.
Global renewable power generation capacity rose by 9% last year – a fourfold increase from the start of this century – buoyed by the growth of solar power that shot up by more than 30%. For the second year in a row, renewable energy accounted for more than half the new power generation capacity added worldwide. These advances have become too significant for the oil and gas industry to ignore. Saudi Aramco talks about a “global transformation”; Shell says it’s “unstoppable”. Isabelle Kocher, chief executive of French power and gas group Engie, calls it a new “industrial revolution” that will “bring about a profound change in the way we behave”.
Brian Marrs, director of policy and strategy at NRG, the second-largest US power producer says: “I think what we’re seeing in the US now is the German postcard from the future finally arriving across the Atlantic.” Yet fast-growing industrialising nations are seeing some of the most profound changes. Towering over them all is smog-choked China, which has become a green energy juggernaut after designating renewables a strategic industry. China has more than a third of the world’s wind power capacity; a quarter of its solar power; six of the top 10 solarpanel makers; four of the top 10 wind turbine makers and more battery-only electric car sales last year than the rest of the world combined.
India is eager to follow: it built one of the world’s largest solar photovoltaic farms last year; ranks fourth in the world for wind power capacity; and could become the world’s third-biggest solar market this year. It also wants to boost its use of electric cars.
The cost of wind turbines fell by nearly a third since 2009 and solar panels by 80%, according to the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA). “It is as if every country in the world woke up one bright morning to find that it had a North Sea at its disposal”, says London energy analyst Kingsmill Bond. Costs are already lower than widely understood. “In 2010 we financed a 15 megawatt solar plant in southern California that cost $55m to build,” says Jim Long, a partner at Greentech Capital Advisors, a global clean energy advisory firm. “This year we have done another one the same size in the same area that has cost $15m and will produce at least 40 per cent more energy.”
Costs are expected to fall further as expensive subsidies guaranteeing set prices are replaced by competitive auctions or tenders. The amount of auctioned renewable electricity tripled last year compared to 2015, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance, while the average global price of auctioned solar power has plummeted fivefold since 2010. One of the most striking auction results came in Germany in April when Denmark’s Dong Energy, the largest builder of costly offshore wind farms, said it would build two new schemes without subsidies, relying instead on market prices alone. Advances in wind technologies – including the prospect of much more powerful turbines – were one reason for Dong’s move, a step others are expected to follow. “Renewables have reached a tipping point globally,” says Simon Virley, of KPMG. “A subsidy-free future is now in reach for a number of technologies and geographies.”
Even the experts have been caught out by the pace of the shift. In 2010, IEA projections suggested it could take 14 years before there were 180 gigawatts of installed solar capacity. It took less than seven years for the world to reach more than 290 gigawatts, nearly the entire generating capacity of Japan. “Fossil fuels have lost,” says Eddie O’Connor, chief executive of Irelands’s Mainstream Renewable Power. “The rest of the world just doesn’t know it yet.” (6) http://www.no2nuclearpower.org.uk/nuclearnews/NuClearNewsNo96.pdf
No2Nuclear No 96 June 2017 According to the Office for National Statistics the number of full-time equivalent (FTE) direct jobs in the nuclear industry had declined to 12,400 by 2015, but about 9,400 of these workers do not produce electricity at all. They are engaged mostly in legacy nuclear waste management.
In 2015 ONS reported that the number of FTE direct jobs in the renewable forms of electricity generation had increased to 48,900 – about 16 times the number of jobs in nuclear electricity generation. (2) In 2015, 338 TWh of electricity was produced in the UK (DECC data). This comprised 70 TWh from nuclear, 85TWh from renewables and the rest from fossil fuels. (3) That amounts to about 43 jobs per TWh for nuclear and about 575 jobs per TWh for renewables. So not only are renewables cheaper than nuclear, but they also create around 13 times more jobs than nuclear power.
Offshore wind is becoming a double win for policymakers, according to Ray Thompson, Head of Business Development at Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy. He says offshore wind is coming to represent a major challenge to competing technologies. The new Siemens blade manufacturing facility and project execution harbour in Hull which opened in December 2016 has already created 800 new jobs and the numbers on site will rise to over 1,000 when full production is reached. (4)
Renewable energy jobs could “offset” fossil-fuel job losses by 2030 according to the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA). Renewable Energy and Jobs – Annual Review 2017 presents the status of renewable energy employment, both by technology and in selected countries, over the past year. In this fourth edition, IRENA finds that renewable energy employed 9.8 million people around the world in 2016 – a 1.1% increase over 2015. Jobs in renewables, excluding large hydropower, increased by 2.8% to reach 8.3 million in 2016. China, No2NuclearPower nuClear news No.96, June 2017 8 Brazil, the United States, India, Japan and Germany accounted for most of the renewable energy jobs. The shift to Asia continued, with 62% of the global total located in the continent. (5) Nuclear Power and Jobs
A policy which promotes nuclear power significantly diminishes the prospects of creating new jobs in renewable energy industries – in establishing an offshore wind manufacturing base for instance.
Nuclear power is a capital intensive industry, which means it requires a much higher injection of money to produce its final product – it is not a very efficient way of creating jobs. If there were an alternative way of providing or saving the same amount of electricity, but at the same time creating more jobs, clearly that would be a strategy worth pursuing.
One way of comparing the number of jobs created by different energy sources is to calculate the number of jobs for each Terawatt hour (TWh–1 billion kilowatt hours) generated annually. This, of course, will depend on the performance of the generating station. So a new 1.6GW reactor employing 500 people which operates an average of 80% of the time will be providing 45 jobs per TWh. Goldemberg has estimated the number of jobs created per TWh of power generated and found that nuclear produces around 75 jobs per terawatt hour (TWh), whereas wind power produces 918 – 2,400 per TWh. Solar photovoltaics provides 29,580 – 107,000 jobs/TWh. (1) http://www.no2nuclearpower.org.uk/nuclearnews/NuClearNewsNo96.pdf
Solar Portal 6th June 2017 Rooftop solar panels in towns and cities across Scotland were able to generate more than the average home’s demand for electricity throughout May in an “extraordinary month for renewables”, according to WWF Scotland. Analysis of solar data by WeatherEnergy found that homes in Aberdeen, Dundee, Edinburgh and more were able to generate over 100% of the
average household electricity demand, with rooftop solar in Lerwick on the Shetland Islands producing the most kWh last month. http://www.solarpowerportal.co.uk/news/rooftop_solar_generation_reaches_new_highs_in_scotland
Solar lamps light up more African nightshttp://climatenewsnetwork.net/22346-2/ June 5, 2017, by Paul Brown Solar lamps are tackling poverty, ill-health and natural hazards in Africa, thanks to Chinese industry and a UK-based charity.
LONDON, 5 June, 2017 – With 600 million people in Africa still without electricity and relying on expensive kerosene for lighting, the invention of a new high-quality solar light gives hope for a better quality of life for the poorest people of the continent.
And with solar light design and quality constantly improving and prices falling, a brighter future is more affordable – and can even turn a profit for householders.
The lamp is small enough to be used as a hand torch or a bicycle lamp, and has a stand which lets it be used as a table lamp or overhead light. It is tough enough to survive being dropped, or drenched in rain.
SolarAid, which has been pioneering the sale of solar lamps to poor communities in Africa since 2006, says the new model gives twice the light of a kerosene lamp and and, over its five-year guaranteed lifetime, saves a ton of carbon dioxide for each kerosene light it replaces.
Cash generator
Although it is a charity, rather than give the lamps away SolarAid prefers to sell them at cost, creating trade in the economy. Each lamp sold at £4 generates £145 in cash for food and essentials in East Africa, it says.
Jeremy Leggett, founding director of SolarAid, says there are not many social-benefit paybacks as good as this in the world today: “We know that much of the money saved is spent on food and seeds. This is a great way to help people help themselves while famine stalks the continent.”
Most people without electricity in Africa live on less than $1 a day, and buying kerosene takes up around 15% of their annual income. The SM100 runs at full power for up to eight hours when fully charged, and will also charge mobile phones.
As well as helping people escape from poverty, the lamps also help to improve their health; kerosene fumes damage eyes and lungs. The light also allows children to study after dark.
But Leggett says it is the light itself that makes the real difference. “Seeing the faces of Africans who witness a solar light being turned on for the first time in a hut at night, as I have, is a highly emotional experience.
“We often forget how lucky we are in the rich nations – how much we take for granted. One thing I hadn’t realised before I went to Africa is what a danger snakes are at night. With a solar light, you have a chance to see them.
So far SolarAid has sold 1.9 million solar lights to Africa and hopes that this cheaper, later version will be even more successful. One of the problems is that some countries, for example Uganda and Malawi, tax solar lights, making them less affordable for the poor.
“In my view this is short-sighted, because the price has to be passed on to the consumer, meaning fewer lights will be sold, meaning reductions in the cash freed up by savings on the kerosene which is no longer needed”, says Leggett.
Price of a drink
“Those savings, spent in the local economy, would help the governments build a healthy economy much more than the taxes they raise.”
When the Climate News Network last wrote about solar lights for Africa in February 2015, SolarAid was asking companies to donate 5% of their profits to the scheme. It now needs more help to reach more of the 600 million Africans without electricity.
“To get solar lights out to the frontier areas where we work, SolarAid is currently overdependent on increasingly impossible-to-predict and precarious donations from large organisations,” Leggett says.
He is asking all his friends, and many other people besides, to donate £4 a month – “the price of a drink” – to pay for one light a month for Africa. – Climate News Network
Leading the way is Lightsource, Europe’s largest privately-held solar developer, which plans to expand into the US. Last year the company unveiled a world first: a floating solar installation to help power a Thames Water reservoir just outside London.
The 6-megawatt structure lies flat against the water and is made up of 24,000 solar panels that sit on a platform buoyed by 61,000 individual floats and held in place by 177 anchors.
A solar panel does not command attention quite like the stoic thermal power plants that rise up from British landscapes. But on a balmy summer’s day last month, the collective glare of millions of panels proved solar power’s mettle.
The spring bank holiday heatwave began witha new record for solar power generation, which created a quarter of the nation’s electricity mix on Friday afternoon. Britain’s solar panels produced more electricity than nuclear and coal power combined. They are likely to do this again and again as summer rolls on. Five years ago this was a feat few would have dared predict. The solar boom was fuelled by generous subsidies and spurred by rapidly falling costs, at a rate far exceeding expectations.
Paul Barwell, head of the Solar Trade Association, says there are now 12.1 gigawatts of solar in the UK, the same production capacity as eight new-generation nuclear reactors and enough to power 3.8m homes.
He says the “colossal achievement” achieved in just five years sends a positive message that solar has a strong place in the UK energy sector. This is a point Barwell is keen to make because the rise of solar power has been far from assured – the industry has been shattered by knee-jerk political interventions.
In China, policymakers put the country’s manufacturing heft firmly behind developing cheaper solar panels, accelerating the technology’s journey down the cost curve.
Once considered the preserve of the very well-off, in the UK rooftop solar panels were suddenly within the reach of homeowners. Farmers with depleted land found economically it made more sense to farm renewable electricity than sheep. Energy-intensive factories were easily persuaded to generate their own power to cut costs.
Times 2nd June 2017 Flywheels will be used to balance supply and demand on Britain’s electricity grid in a £3.5 million project that could help the country to cope with more wind and solar power. Sophisticated flywheels that can store electricity for long periods of time are to be installed next to the University of Sheffield’s battery storage facility at Willenhall near Wolverhampton, in the first project of its kind in the UK.
The cylindrical structures draw electricity from the grid when surplus is available, powering a motor that makes the flywheel rotor spin at high speed. So far, efforts to tackle the problem have focused on lithium-ion batteries, which
can respond in less than a second to provide or absorb power and restore balance to the grid.
Eight such projects are being built around the UK after winning contracts from National Grid last year. Dr Gladwin said that such batteries would degrade over time the more they were charged and discharged, and were only expected to have a lifetime of ten years. Flywheels were a better way to deal with rapid short-term fluctuations, he said. The flywheel project in Willenhall should provide a megawatt of power for just over a minute before it runs out of energy. https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/business/flywheels-could-join-batteries-in-storing-electricity-for-the-national-grid-fjw95ggqv
Cheaper Solar in India Prompts Rethink for Coal Projects, Bloomberg, by Anindya Upadhyay and Rajesh Kumar Singh June 1, 2017,
Power from solar panels now half the cost of a new coal plant
Shift in electricity economics helps Modi’s goal on pollution
India’s coal-power plant developers are growing more pessimistic about their projects after a plunge in the cost of electricity from solar panels improved the economics of renewable energy.
After a string of federal auctions, solar is suddenly the cheapest source of electricity in India. That’s darkening the outlook for the coal-fired power industry as projects struggle to find customers or face cancellation amid a glut of capacity.
“The crashing solar tariffs are creating a mental block for distribution companies and holding them back from signing long-term purchase agreements with conventional power producers,” said T. Adi Babu, chief operating officer for finance at Lanco Infratech Ltd., an Indian power producer. “A couple of years back, when people talked of solar reaching grid parity, people were skeptical. Now the solar tariffs have gone well below that. It is definitely making conventional players sit up and take notice.”……
evidence of a shift away from coal is gathering by the day.
State-run NTPC Ltd., India’s largest power producer, along with RattanIndia Power Ltd. are considering installing solar panels over land initially intended for thermal projects.
NTPC said in February it’s aiming to have 30 percent of its capacity come from non-fossil fuel by 2032
The Indian subsidiary of Hong Kong-listed CLP Holdings Ltd., which owns both coal and renewable projects, is debating whether to participate in another round of conventional projects. “A transition from coal to solar is a generic direction that all utilities are taking. We are an early mover into the renewables space so our journey continues,” Mahesh Makhija, business-development director for renewables, said in a phone interview.
The government of the sunny state of Rajasthan expects more conventional power to be replaced by clean energy as higher renewable purchase targets are fulfilled. “At the rate the renewable power tariffs are decreasing, the time is not far when renewable power will start replacing costlier conventional power,” Sanjay Malhotra, principal secretary for energy in the Rajasthan government, said by phone.
Solar is now as much as 50 percent cheaper than new coal power, according to solar research firm Bridge to India.
“That’s why we have seen many new coal power tenders being suspended or canceled in the last three months,” said Vinay Rustagi, managing director at Bridge to India…….
renewables are expanding quickly in India. Solar capacity has surged fourfold since December 2014 to about 12 gigawatts, while wind farms now provide 32 gigawatts, up from 22.5 gigawatts over the same period. Modi is seeking an additional 88 gigawatts of solar and 28 gigawatts more of wind by 2022. And those projects are crowding coal out of the power market…….https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-06-01/cheaper-solar-in-india-prompts-rethink-for-more-coal-projects
Ecowatch 30th May 2017. Despite President Donald Trump’s pledge to bring back U.S. coal jobs, hundreds of laid off miners in Wyoming—the nation’s largest coal-producing state—are still seeking work.
But these ex-miners might find hope with a most unlikely employer: a wind power company. The American arm of Goldwind, a Chinese wind turbine maker, has announced a free program to retrain miners to become wind farm technicians, The New York Times reported. https://www.ecowatch.com/wind-jobs-coal-miners-goldwind-2426715170.html
Battery storage paired with wind farm in ground-breaking Spanish trial, REneweconomy By Sophie Vorrath on 30 May 2017
The first hybrid wind power storage plant in Spain using batteries
A world first hybrid renewables trial, pairing a grid-connected wind farm with lithium-ion battery storage and energy management software, has been switched on in Spain, in a bid to boost the integration of variable-generation renewables into electricity networks around the world.
THE WORLD’S LARGEST FLOATING SOLAR POWER PLANT JUST WENT ONLINE IN CHINA https://www.digitaltrends.com/cool-tech/china-floating-solar-power-plant/ByDallon Adams— May 23, 2017China has announced that the largest floating photovoltaic (PV) facility on earth has finally been completed and connected to the local power grid. Long reviled for its carbon emission record, this is the Chinese government’s latest achievement in its ongoing effort to lead the world in renewable energy adoption.
Located in the city of Huainan in the Anhui province, the 40-megawatt facility was created by PV inverter manufacturer Sungrow Power Supply Co. Ironically, the floating grid itself was constructed over a flooded former coal-mining region.
Floating solar farms are becoming increasingly popular around the world because their unique design addresses multiple efficiency and city planning issues. These floating apparatuses free up land in more populated areas and also reduce water evaporation. The cooler air at the surface also helps to minimize the risk of solar cell performance atrophy, which is often related to long-term exposure to warmer temperatures.
This is just the first of many solar energy operations popping up around China. In 2016, the country unveiled a similar 20MW floating facility in the same area. China is also home to the Longyangxia Dam Solar Park, a massive 10-square-mile, land-based facility touted as the largest solar power plant on earth.
This transition to solar is in large part due to the rapidly plummeting cost of the technology itself. By 2020, China could reduce prices offered to PV developers by more than a third with solar power plants projected to rival coal facilities within a decade. The nation has also announced plans to increase its use of non-fissile fuel energy sources by 20 percent.
An annual report released by NASA and NOAA determined that 2016 was the warmest year on record globally, marking the third year in a row in which a new record was set for global average surface temperatures. That said, if we as a species hope to reverse this dire trend, initiatives like this and others will need to be adopted around the globe.
The nation’s solar panels scorched the previous record set last month by generating 8.7GW of power, more than nuclear and coal power combined.
Solar power was the second most used generating technology behind gas-fired power and made up around 25pc of the UK’s electricity, its highest ever share of the market on a working week day.The UK now has just over 12GW of solar power in place, the same production capacity as eight new-generation nuclear reactors.
Paul Barwell, the chief executive of the solar trade association, said: “This is a colossal achievement in just 5 years, and sends a very positive message to the UK that solar has a strong place in the decarbonisation of the UK energy sector.”
The boom in solar panels in recent years, fuelled by subsidies, has far exceeded expectations. The panels feed the power they produce directly into homes or the local electricity grid, cutting demand on the national system to what is expected to be a record low this year.
National Grid said the renewable generation boom posesa challenge to its role balancing supply and demand on the national transmission network second by second.
Duncan Burt, who is responsible for National Grid’s control room said the ability to forecast weather patterns is becoming more significant.“We have an expert team of forecasters who monitor a range of data, to forecast just how much electricity will be needed over a set period,” he said.
“We have planned for these changes to the energy landscape and have the tools available to ensure we can balance supply and demand. It really is the beginning of a new era, which we are prepared for and excited to play our part,” he said.The Government closed off funding for solar projects through its Renewables Obligation scheme in April 2015, allowing a modest grace period for some developers to roll out new sites until April last year. This helped the boom to continue ahead of last summer, but new projects are expected to hit a lull for the next year or two.
Jamie Stewart, a senior power expert at market data provider Icis, said the ebb will give way to a renewed surge in new solar projects because plummeting costs mean it will no longer need Government handouts.
“When this grid parity is reached, the UK can expect to see a lot more solar power put in place up and down the country,” he said.
Abid Kazim, managing director of NextEnergy Capital, said on Thursday at an industry event that he plans to invest in subsidy free solar because the cost of the technology is “collapsing”.
“In energy price terms, solar is low-cost and mostly produces cheap electricity during peak demand hours from 07:00-19:00. This means at peak times it keeps down wholesale power prices, which make up around 45pc of a household bill,” Mr Stewart said.
Utility Week 26th May 2017, Renewable energy could produce three quarters of the UK’s electricity by 2030 without compromising reliability, Friends of the Earth has claimed. In a report published today (26 May), entitled Switching on; how renewables will power the UK, the environmental group predicts that with falling energy costs and advances in storage technology, renewables could provide 75 per cent of the country’s power by that date.
The report predicts 65 per cent of the UK’s power will come from intermittent sources by 2030, and a further 10 per cent will come from less variable sources, like tidal, hydro and geothermal. And as it points out, the UK has gone from 7 per cent renewable electricity to 25 per cent in six years, without causing blackouts. http://utilityweek.co.uk/news/Friends-of-the-Earth-aims-for-75-per-cent-renewables-by-2030/1303782
Will India Ever Need Another Coal Plant?, The country’s energy infrastructure is changing rapidly as solar prices plummet. CityLab.com , KRUTIKA PATHI, @krutikapathi03, May 25, 2017
“…..over the last five months, the price of renewable energy has plummeted so low that analysts have hailed it as both “record-breaking” and “unsustainable” in the same breath. In fact, the pace of change in the country’s energy infrastructure has been so swift that even researchers are scrambling to keep a steady pulse on a constantly developing beat.
As China slowly cut down on its own coal infrastructure, the International Energy Agency in 2015 projected India to be the next coal center in the near future. It stated that “half of the net increase in coal-fired generation capacity worldwide [through 2040] occurs in India.” Nearly a year later, in July 2016, the nonprofit CoalSwarm put out a report that found 370 proposals for coal plants in the works across the country.
The findings revealed a pretty explosive conclusion: that India’s outsized plans for coal energy would wipe out climate goals set out in the Paris Agreement. Merely a few months after the report, the researchers at CoalSwarm were surprised by a new twist.
In December 2016, the Central Authority of India (CAI) laid out an electricity plan that said no new coal plants, beyond those already under construction, are needed for at least the next decade. The CAI also put forth new renewable energy goals—a production of 275 gigawatts (GW) generated from solar, wind, and hydro by 2027.
This means that the majority of the plants that CoalSwarm tracked are now going to be shelved. It’s also a show of India’s push towards reforming its energy infrastructure: the country added more renewable power than thermal in the 2016 fiscal year.“It was hard to keep up,” says Christine Shearer, a senior researcher at CoalSwarm and lead author of the report. “The country is supposed to be at the heart of coal plant growth, but it’s interesting to see the tide go against what we often hear about China and India—that they’re going to keep building coal plants—when actually, they’re both stalling production.”…..
As prospects for India’s coal sector are falling, so is the price of renewable energy. In turn, the country’s future outlook, if all goes accordingly, is pretty good news for the planet. India first set a record-low price in February this year when a kilowatt-hour of solar energy was selling at Rs. 2.97 ($0.046 USD). This month, the country hit another record low—the price of solar dropped 12 percent further, currently selling at Rs. 2.62 ($0.041 USD) per kilowatt-hour. “To spell it out, new solar is 15 percent cheaper than existing domestic coal. No one, anywhere in the world, was expecting solar to get that cheap for at least a decade,” Buckley says, “and India just got there this year.” It’s a marked shift for India—which, in a matter of months, went from potentially thwarting global climate goals to possibly saving them.
The news of falling solar prices in India, and the country’s recent (but significant) efforts to divest from coal as the fundamental energy source, stands in contrast to the current scenario in the U.S. Analysts fear that President Trump’s “America First Energy Plan” will put the country behind China and India in the push to reinvigorate renewable solutions. “What gives me hope is that at a time when Trump is busy trying to destroy the Paris Agreement, the two most important countries in the world for the agreement are China and India,” says Buckley.
According to a study released last week by the Climate Action Tracker, India and China are on pace to “overachieve” their climate goals by 2030. ……
Solutions like off-grid solar panels are one kind of sustainable technology that could address the distribution problem, says Harish Hande, co-founder of SELCO, an enterprise that introduced off-grid solar energy in the Siddhi community in 2010. Within a year, 100 homes in the area were connected to power in the Western Ghats region. SELCO has been nationally awarded for its energy work in under-served households and areas—but, as Hande points out, a long-standing solution has to go beyond the mere mechanics of the supply chain. “It’s much larger than providing electricity,” he says, “and there have to be enough public-private partnerships that cross over education, health, and the bigger ecosystem for sustainable energy services to become more accessible.”https://www.citylab.com/tech/2017/05/will-india-ever-need-another-coal-plant/528111/
Solar industry has 3.09 million people vs 1.2 million in wind
China employment at 3.6 million vs 777,000 in U.S.: Irena
The renewable energy industry employed 9.8 million people last year, up 1.1 percent from 2015, led by the solar photovoltaic business, according to the International Renewable Energy Agency’s annual report on the industry.
Growth has slowed in the past two years, while the solar photovoltaic category, with 3.09 million jobs, and wind business more than doubled their respective employee numbers since 2012, the first year assessed, Irena said in the report.
“The nature of jobs is changing a little bit, with more emphasis on the installation, operational and maintenance side,” Adnan Amin, Irena’s director general, said Wednesday in an interview in Abu Dhabi. “That doesn’t grow as fast as the growth in manufacturing, which was very quick because the technology cost was coming down and you had this huge explosion in equipment.”
Jobs will continue to grow in developing countries, especially in Asia, he said.
Here are some of the highlights from the report:
Global renewables employment has climbed every year since 2012, with solar photovoltaic becoming the largest segment by total jobs in 2016.
Solar photovoltaic employed 3.09 million people, followed by liquid biofuels at 1.7 million. The wind industry had 1.2 million employees, a 7 percent increase from 2015.
Employment in renewables, excluding large hydro power, increased 2.8 percent last year to 8.3 million people, with China, Brazil, the U.S., India, Japan and Germany the leading job markets. Asian countries accounted for 62 percent of total jobs in 2016 compared with 50 percent in 2013.
Renewables jobs could total 24 million in 2030, as more countries take steps to combat climate change, Irena said.
Edie 23rd May 2017Unilever has revealed that all of its UK manufacturing sites are 100% powered by electricity generated from certified renewable sources. The global consumer goods firm became the dedicated beneficiary of energy sourced from a Scottish Highlands-based wind farm in April.
The 23 turbines located in Lochluichart deliver 165GWh – 87% of the farms total output – of renewable electricity to 15 UK Unilever sites. The excess 24GWh of power generated at the farm are also sold-off under a retail tariff to local communities.
The new deal builds on Unilever’s previous agreement with Eneco in the Netherlands, which has seen a North Sea windfarm generate energy for Unilever since the New Year. Both deals mean Unilever’s UK business now sources 100% of its electricity from certified renewable sources. Across its entire global business, Unilever generates 63% of its
grid energy from renewable sources. https://www.edie.net/news/10/Unilever-goes-100–renewable-across-all-UK-sites/
