This Bloomberg graph shows world investment in clean energy declining over recent years. These declines are due to reducing government subsidies in turn reducing investment. This  illustrates that government subsidies drive the market, a point that is rarely discussed, but is extremely important if you want to predict future market trends, as Bloomberg tries to do. If you read the analysis and projections, the fact that they depend almost 100% on predicting subsidies is never really stated. That’s because government actions are fickle and hard to impossible predict for timescales of years.

A bigger issue is that market size is determined by the amount of subsidy. At least one half of the clean energy investment shown is from subsidies. That is a minimum of $125B in 2013. Given that to make a significant impact on energy, we need to provide ten to one hundred times current yearly wind and solar alternative energy  capacity additions, the implication is very large government subsidies of  $1.25T/y to $12.5T/y.

However, overall world subsidies seem set to decline further in 2014 and beyond, not grow. Europe has scaled back its clean energy agenda and the US with cheap gas is likely to reduce subsidies even more.  Growth in China and India is slowing. Wind and solar power generation costs may reduce, but transmission, storage and other infrastructure  costs will easily make up for this.

None of this bodes well for reducing CO2 for the foreseeable future. The only rational strategy is to get an energy source that does not need subsidies to be a profitable investment. Wind and Solar cannot do this. As the numbers show, wind and solar are very large business and can survive and profit within the reduced subsidy domain. They can live happily and profitably off of current subsidies while blocking any potential competitors from any serious attention. While clean energy advocates continue to believe that wind and solar are the only answer, and consider any position that questions this as heresy, no progress can be made.


By Edmund Kelly

This is the Solve For <X> hosted hangout on air for StratoSolar video recording with the addition of pictures when referenced in the discussion. The length of the video and the dialogue is unaltered.

Edmund Kelly

On Tuesday Jan 14th, between 10:00 and 10:30am PST, Solve for X is hosting a google+ hangout on air for StratoSolar.  It's a hosted event where I'm asked a series of questions by a moderator and the audience can also ask questions. I have never done anything like this so I'm not really sure how it will work, but people can watch and participate live and there ends up being a YouTube recording of the event.

The link https://plus.google.com/u/0/events/cv1m6fasvccse8uvlnlk9n0gf4g is to sign up to attend the hangout, post questions ahead of time, and watch it when it happens on the 14th

Another way to ask questions during the event would be to tweet me at @edkellyus

It's an interesting experiment. Please sign up if you can and let others that might be interested know as well.

Also, as I mentioned previously, the StratoSolar solve for x moonshot video has got high ratings on the solve for x site. If you login you can rate the video in various ways.  If you have not done this already, please do. https://www.solveforx.com/moonshots/stratosolar-edmund-kelly

Edmund Kelly