Blog Posts

Renewable energy investment set to decline?

5/6/2019

In previous blog posts I have commented on the stagnant world renewable energy investment level of around $250B since 2011 and the prospect that 2019 will be more of the same. However, while the investment level has stayed in this narrow range, the generation capacity it has purchased has continued to grow, mostly due to the falling price of PV panels from China. This pattern was a source of optimism as it was expected that prices would eventually decline to where subsidies were not needed.

Now, the latest International Energy Agency data for 2018 shows overall 2018 capacity additions flat with 2017 as China reduced its 2018 capacity additions over 2017 while trying to adjust its FIT subsidy policy. Flat investment and flat capacity combined imply flat prices.

What this implies is quite negative for the renewable energy outlook going forward. As I commented previously, the lack of PV investment growth despite significant PV cost reductions was a sign that unsubsidized prices were still too high for a natural market expansion and subsidies were still required to sustain the market. The effect of China’s 2018 pull back on subsidies clearly reinforces this interpretation of dependency on subsidy. More significantly, if investment and capacity were flat in 2018 this implies that prices were stable and the era of rapid price reductions has ended, at least for now.

To summarize, prices have not reduced sufficiently to sustain a normal unsubsidized market and prices have now stabilized, thus guaranteeing that subsidies are still needed and the market size will remain subsidy limited. The question is which way are subsidies heading? All the indications from China, the US and Europe are for reduced subsidies. This implies lower investment levels and declining renewable energy capacity additions going forward.

CO2 levels continue to rise with growing fossil fuel usage. Renewable energy is not having an appreciable effect and based on stagnant to declining investment it will not have an effect. Wishful thinking needs to end and new options need to be considered. Nuclear is on the table but there is no political will, the cost would be enormous and the time to develop and ramp safe clean reactors is many decades. Given the limited options and their problems Stratosolar does not look like an outrageous candidate.

By Edmund Kelly

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China PV installs stalled

4/28/2019

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It's been almost a year since China pulled back its FIT based PV subsidy regime. As yet there is no policy replacement. As a result, China’s PV installations fell 46% to 5.2GW in QI 2019. As China has been the biggest world PV consumer this does not bode well for world PV growth in 2019. This reduced demand has affected PV manufacturers, particularly polysilicon suppliers like Wacker. China continues to support its indigenous PV manufacturers so they continue to operate at a loss with PV price reductions. In affect, China is (and has been) subsidizing low cost PV manufacturing. China’s attempt to alter its subsidy regime is an effort to bring PV manufacturing sector under some degree of control.

As I have discussed many times, overall clean energy investment has been fairly stable since 2011. 2019 is shaping up to be more of the same with overall investment probably declining. There are many competing currents in the clean energy arena and China while committed to some level of clean energy is also strongly committed to coal and is building new coal fired generation at a rapid rate. It's also building substantial nuclear generation.

While climate change activists are ramping up the rhetoric, they are not focused on specific policies to reduce atmospheric CO2 that are politically and economically acceptable. There will be no solution to reducing CO2 emissions until realism rather than wishful thinking prevails.

Despite groundless optimism, current PV is not economically competitive with fossil fuels and as previous posts have emphasized, PV faces significant additional economic hurdles as more of it is installed. Stratosolar represents a path that could solve the mounting problems of PV.

By Edmund Kelly

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California data that shows the limits to PV penetration

2/3/2019

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Ground based PV has three distinct problems that Stratosolar solves (cost, storage, backup). It has long been our observation that these problems with PV will be ignored until they become apparent as PV market penetration grows. This NREL report has data that shows that the problems are real and not just the prognostications of naysayers.

The first problem is still cost. The NREL chart below shows the cost of utility scale PV electricity since 2010. It shows the dramatic drop in cost from around $0.15/kWh in 2010 to $0.038/kWh in 2018. However this low cost represented by the green bars is the subsidized cost. The unsubsidized cost represented by the yellow bars is about $0.06/kWh in 2018. This is still an impressive number but it is substantially higher than natural gas generation at around $0.03/kWh in 2018 as shown in the right hand graph in the following foil. PV has done very well but this data shows that it still needs subsidies now and for the foreseeable future to compete with natural gas. This contrasts with the growing optimistic press that claims that PV is cheaper than fossil fuels without subsidy. Were this true investment in PV adoption should be growing, but as previous posts have shown, PV investment is actually declining.

When PV eventually becomes price competitive it will quickly face the next big problem. The following chart illustrates the problem that solar without storage can only supply a limited amount of electricity demand. It's common sense that solar cannot provide electricity at night, but it is not widely appreciated how little solar can provide before costs start to rise dramatically due to curtailment. Curtailment is where the electricity provided exceeds the current demand and has to be thrown away. As the chart shows, over a year there are lots of occasions where the solar electricity supply exceeds the current demand.

This chart is for California which has the highest solar market penetration in the US. It shows how with a solar penetration of around 18% of demand, solar curtailment is about 1.5% or about 10% of the solar power supplied. When power is thrown away it devalues the total wholesale price of PV. As the chart shows, the price received actually reduced more than linearly from $0.038/kWh to less than $0.020/kWh. This means that PV investments are losing money. The California utility PV capacity factor averages around 25%. It's generally understood that the practical upper limit for PV market penetration is around the capacity factor percentage. California is now providing the evidence that curtailment is a real problem at relatively low penetration and that it is getting close to the limit of PV penetration without adding storage.

This exposes the extension of the cost problem. Adding storage is adding cost. As the first paragraph shows, PV still has a cost disadvantage so adding storage makes this worse. This does not address the cost or availability of energy storage. The reality is that with the added burden of storage, to be competitive, PV is going to need subsidies for a long time.

When PV plus storage becomes price competitive it will face the third barrier of long duration intermittency. This requires backup to cover the 20% that cannot be provided by PV plus storage. This backup will have to be from natural gas until synthetic fuel is price competitive. This makes a 100% renewable energy solution very far in the future.

With current PV technology, Stratosolar can generate electricity for less than $0.02/kWh without subsidy, lower than natural gas. With night-time storage from gravity or batteries for $100/kWh overall electricity can cost $0.030/kWh. Stratosolar does not need long term backup supply, so the natural gas generation can be completely replaced and generation will be 100% renewable CO2 free. This is a complete cheaper replacement for fossil fuels and no subsidies are needed.

By Edmund Kelly

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2018 continues a now eight year trend of stagnant clean energy investment

1/22/2019

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BNEF has published their latest renewable energy investment report that covers 2018. It shows little change from previous years. Overall clean energy investment has been roughly constant at about $70B/quarter for the eight years since 2011, as shown by the yellow line in the graph above. The report focuses primarily on investment and breaks the data down by geography and type of energy. Over the eight years there have been significant shifts. The main change has been Europe declining and China growing. America has been fairly constant. In 2018 China fell and Europe recovered a little mostly due to Spain. In type of energy, overall yearly investment in solar has declined by $22B/quarter over the last two years as shown in the next graph.

Focusing on solar, 2018 investment was $130.8B and capacity installed grew to 108GW. Other analysts however don’t think that capacity installed exceeded 100GW. Either way this says that Solar PV average cost was around $1.30/W worldwide. I have covered the BNEF report in many previous blog posts. In this post from 2016 I discussed the falling cost trend in $/W. In 2010 PV average cost was about $6.40/W and in 2015 it was about $3.20/W. The 2018 average cost of $1.30/W represents an amazing fivefold reduction since 2010. Costs are anticipated to continue falling.

Paradoxically, so far falling PV costs have resulted in increasing PV capacity but reducing PV investment. A possible explanation is that reduced costs have resulted in reduced government subsidies. The implication is that without subsidies current costs are still too high to spur growth in investment.

Taking the big picture view, current investment levels in clean energy though over $300B/y are not growing and are at least a factor of twenty too low at current costs to reduce CO2 emissions by 2050. The sustained decline in solar PV investment despite dramatic cost reduction is deeply discouraging as it is counter to the perception that solar PV is succeeding on a path to rapid and sustainable growth at a level that can reduce CO2 emissions.

From a StratoSolar perspective the dramatic PV cost reductions make Stratosolar an even more viable clean energy alternative. With PV at these lower costs, the increased utilization of Stratosolar is capable of providing electricity at amazingly low prices, well below the cheapest and dirtiest fossil fuels. No long duration intermittency from clouds and weather and the option for cheap, reliable gravity energy storage make the story even more compelling.

By Edmund Kelly

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Revisiting CO2 emissions and climate change

12/30/2018

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In june 2013 I published a blog post that contained a video focused on how to reduce world CO2 emissions from fossil fuels to zero by 2050. There has been a lot of publicity recently prompted by the release of the latest IPCC report on global warming. The IPCC keeps ratcheting up the pressure from the constantly accumulating evidence for the damage of climate change both today and projected forward into the increasingly near future. This focus at the end of another year seems a good time to revisit the primary motivation for Stratosolar. The central theme of Stratosolar is that the only viable solution to CO2 emissions reduction is clean energy that is a complete 100% replacement for fossil fuels that is significantly cheaper. Stratosolar is such a solution and current wind and solar are not.

Back in 2013 annual CO2 emissions were about 32 Gt/y. In 2018 they have increased to about 42 Gt/y, pretty much what was predicted by business as usual. There is a lot of publicity around wind and solar, but as yet they clearly have had little effect on CO2 emissions as we continue to accelerate our march towards climate armageddon. The 2013 video sets a goal of roughly 1 TWy average yearly reduction in fossil fuels to get to zero CO2 emissions between 2020 and 2050. That is still the goal but ramping production of sufficient replacement technology by 2020 is not realistic. To meet the 2050 goal and keep temperature rise below 1.5 to 2 degrees C will need a more aggressive ramp the later we start.

Despite an increasing acceptance of the reality of climate change, the cost, complexity and uncertainty of clean energy solutions means adoption is low and driven mostly by government subsidies and mandates in rich developed countries. Most growth in CO2 emissions is in countries that are not the US, Europe and China. Paradoxically the US is the only player to actually reduce emissions. This has been due to cheap gas replacing coal. Wind and solar growth barely compensate for reduced nuclear.

To get a perspective, todays approximately 100 GW/y of new nameplate solar is about 25GW/y of average generation. The goal is 1TW/y of average new generation. That's a factor of 40. If we split the demand evenly between wind and solar its about a factor of 20 each. That is just the generation. It does not count the storage and backup generation to achieve 100% renewable energy which are at least as much again. Currently we are spending about $250B on wind and solar. 40 times 250 is $10T/y. That cost is about 10 times current world investment in all energy infrastructure. Costs have to reduce by a factor of ten at least to fit current world energy budgets. That level of cost reduction in the relatively short time available is highly unlikely.

Stratosolar eliminates the backup costs and reduces the generation cost by more than three on average, making costs within a viable range with historic cost reduction. 2TW/y of new Stratosolar at $0.75/W is $1.5T/y which is economically compatible with current levels of investment.

As the IPCC shows, we are not on a path to success and time is running out It's time to evaluate what are seen as risky alternatives like Stratosolar.

By Edmund Kelly

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More 100% renewable debate academic papers

11/29/2018

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The 100% renewables debate continues, largely in academia. At least it's a sign that some recognize that current renewables are not a solution and more is needed. Politicians in some places are using the appearance of the debate to promise 100% renewable energy in a timely manner. Unfortunately this creates the illusion that things are on the right track when they are not. As my last post on California pointed out, 100%renewable electricity is not the same as 100% renewable energy.

Academic solutions are focused on what's theoretically possible. They rely on technically plausible but unproven technologies that need decades of development to prove political, technical and economic viability at scale. A previous example of an academic solution was the Hydrogen Economy. This attracted significant investment but never gained traction because of multiple political, economic and technical issues.

Here is a quote from a recent 100% renewables paper about solutions to long duration intermittency of renewables:

“In the first scenario, during periods of extreme weather or when wind and solar energy fail or fall short, Brown and his team suggest imports, hydroelectricity, batteries and other storage methods. Or, in the " worst-case solution," they said hydrogen or synthetic gas produced with renewable electricity could fill that gap. As for maintaining grid stability, they offered technical solutions, such as rotating grid stabilizers and newer electronics-based solutions.”

All of these “solutions” to long term intermittency face severe obstacles. For example, imports relies on long distance transmission. The reality is there is very little long distance transmission in the world today so current transmission is not a good reference to what is needed. At distances that would work to provide electricity from a geography not suffering the intermittency, transmission cost would be higher than generation cost. There would also have to be excess generation to provide the needed long distance electricity. Already this would triple the cost of backup electricity. The amount of transmission lines would have to be sufficient to provide for a large geographic region. Transmission lines are politically difficult to get approved. The transmission and excess generation would have a low utilization factor which would further increase its cost.

All of these problems are economic and political and not related to technological feasibility which is what academic solutions focus on. Solutions like hydroelectricity suffer from a lack of rivers to dam and a political resistance to large hydro. Batteries are expensive and short lived and need technological development which is occuring at a slow pace. Alternative storage, like compressed air have failed to gain traction. The “worst case solution” of hydrogen from electrolysis suffers from a lack of development at scale and the fundamental low round trip efficiency and low utilization factor of the electrolyzer and generation plants. To make hydrogen work requires new technological development and renewable generation to be very low cost.

Viewed objectively, proposals for 100% renewable solutions are all at least as speculative as Stratosolar. Stratosolar risks are in the feasibility of assembling and deploying its large structures which can be proven in a short time frame without a large investment in a supporting infrastructure or a large political consensus. Given the desire for 100% renewable solutions and the problems with all the proposals, it is difficult to understand the lack of interest in a plausible solution.

By Edmund Kelly

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California’s path to CO2 reduction is not what it seems

10/9/2018

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California and Germany represent two large economies that have implemented policies to reduce greenhouse gasses for over two decades. Their stories illustrate the political complexities of what this really involves. They do not paint a positive future for global CO2 emissions reduction even when the political consensus is favourable.
I’m going to use California data as that is what I am most familiar with as a forty year California resident. Germany is different in detail but broadly the same. This article presents a good overview of the current state of affairs. The graph below is from the article and shows a breakdown of the sources of CO2 emissions. California’s CO2 emissions per capita are significantly less than the US average. An important detail to note is the small percentage for electricity generation, 10% in state, 6% more for imports. The in state percentage is well under national or world averages and represents a combination of significant generation from nuclear, hydro, bio and geo along with high efficiency natural gas instead of coal. Most of this implementation of electricity generation CO2 reduction was accomplished before 2000.
This low percentage of emissions from electricity generation has been true for decades and has hardly changed from 2000 to the present. It shows that reducing electricity generation emissions only highlights the other significant sources of emissions.

The next graph from the same article that California has being doing a reasonable if not spectacular job in reducing overall CO2 emissions going from 470 to 440 million tons from 2000 to 2017 or about 6.5% reduction. The graph highlights that it’s been a uphill battle where emissions per capita fell significantly from 14 to 11 tons per capita but population growth reduced most of this gain.This also illustrates the same problem at the world level as world population growth and economic development mean that energy use is naturally growing quite rapidly.

The next graph shows where some of the reductions have come from. It shows around 30 million tons reduction from electricity generation, most of which is from cleaner imported electricity generation. This hides the obvious that there were substantial efficiency improvements in all sectors in the first graph to maintain CO2 emissions stable while population and GDP grew by around 50%.

The next graph shows that California in state electricity generation was essentially flat from 2000 to 2017 despite population and GDP growth. The means of generation have changed mostly from around 2012 when a nuclear plant shut down, solar generation has grown rapidly and wind generation has been constant. Hydro generation has varied due to droughts. The emissions graph above that shows California in state emissions from generation have been mostly flat and most variability was from hydro variability from droughts. The bottom line is that California in state electricity generation has not contributed to CO2 reductions from 2000 to 2018. Overall emissions gains have come from efficient use of electricity and fuels, not cleaner electricity generation.

California recently announced a goal of 100% in state renewable electricity generation by 2040. This sounds very positive at first, but from the discussion above, in state generation only accounts for 10% of California CO2 emissions, so meeting this goal will not reduce CO2 emissions much.

Digging deeper, California’s definition of renewable energy is wind, solar, geothermal and biofuels. It excludes nuclear and large hydro which are politically unacceptable to the California clean energy coalition. This illustrates that CO2 emissions reduction is a lower priority than other environmental concerns.

Already the reduction of nuclear has meant that solar growth has only compensated for the loss of the nuclear CO2 emissions free source. The remaining nuclear is scheduled to close in 2025. Solar and wind will have to compensate for this loss before CO2 emissions will fall. Already the current level of solar causes solar curtailment in spring, and as solar capacity grows this curtailment will grow. California understands this and is putting great emphasis on electricity storage to allow for more solar. The storage story is complicated by the fact that California has legacy pumped storage of nearly 4GW generation capacity but it is part of large hydro which is politically unacceptable to the political status quo in California. Batteries are the great white hope for storage, but the politically incorrect pumped storage is the only current proven bulk electricity storage technology. It is not being used or updated to serve as a solar companion and enable more solar capacity to be deployed without significant curtailment.

The next graph shows that California in state generation capacity has grown from around 50GW to around 80 GW from 2000 to 2017 while generation has stayed roughly constant. Most of the new capacity is wind and solar. The growing capital cost of capacity has to be paid from the constant electricity generation which is the simple explanation for California’s high electricity cost. Storage capacity to bolster solar intermittency will only increase overall capacity and cost of generation while maintaining electricity generation at current levels. California is rich and so far the high costs have proven politically acceptable.

The most direct path to reducing California’s CO2 emissions is electrification of transportation and domestic and commercial energy consumption, where the bulk of emissions are. Electric cars and heat pumps are available technologies to accomplish these goals. A side effect of this would be a need to increase electricity generation. 100% renewable electricity is generally perceived as 100% clean energy and 0% CO2 emissions. As the discussion above shows, this is far from the truth. It really means a 10% reduction in CO2, leaving the remaining 90%. As such slogans like this encourage complacency among people concerned with global warming and take the focus off of efforts that are more important.

This is a complicated article to illustrate a complicated problem. Electricity generation gets most of the attention in reducing CO2 emissions but California (and Germany) show that most of the limited success so far has come from efficiency improvements. Electricity generation has suffered from losses from infighting offsetting gains and costs growing to levels that constrain growth despite strong political support. The world is very far from California’s over two decade investment in CO2 emissions reduction. California’s limited success don’t bode well for the rest of the world.

The added cost of storage and backup mean that costs will only rise, keeping the rate of clean energy growth far below what is necessary to limit CO2 emissions in a timely manner. To the clean energy coalition there is only one path forward and no apparent awareness that this path is failing. There seems to be confidence in the 100% renewables push but little awareness of its impracticality.

The just released IPCC report on climate change is increasing the severity of alarm and the rapidity of action needed to avert damage. Within the political and economic constraints, what is needed is a solar energy solution that is a complete replacement for fossil fuel generation at a lower cost. Current solar falls far short on cost, availability and storage. Stratosolar fixes all these problems and more. It could meet the ICCC goals for rapid deployment without global political wrangling that has never succeeded so far.

By Edmund Kelly

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Energy security

9/30/2018

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While the primary benefit of clean energy is atmospheric CO2 reduction to mitigate climate change, a second major benefit is improving energy security. Energy security is a political benefit. Fossil fuels are not uniformly distributed and most major world economies rely on substantial fossil fuel imports which makes them vulnerable to disruption of energy supplies, particularly oil. When countries are self sufficient in energy they can not be threatened by disruptions in fossil fuel supply.

From the end of world war two to today, the post war “pax americana” has guaranteed stable access to fossil fuels for the OECD economies which encompass the US, Europe, Japan, Korea and other western countries, most of which are substantial fossil fuel importers. With the growth of China, India and other emerging economies the balance started to shift. China is now the world’s biggest oil importer and India is growing rapidly.

The energy world is starting to look like that of pre WW2 where there were competing powers in Europe, Japan and the US. Access to oil was used as a political weapon and many believe this was a major contributor to the outbreak of WW2. This was very clear in the case of Japan, but Germany’s lack of oil contributed to its attack on the USSR.

Because energy security has not been a major issue for over seventy years, complacency has set in. The shift to a world where the pax americana is not the guarantee it once was not yet been widely appreciated. Trump’s antics have exacerbated an already existing trend. In the world of competing global powers that is emerging, oil is likely to become an instrument of that competition, as it was pre WW2.

Clean energy like wind and solar are local and as such do not have the political energy security problems of fossil fuels. There is a growing complacency that wind and solar can be 100% replacements for fossil fuels and that we are on a path toward that future. Unfortunately this complacency is ill founded. There is no clear path as yet to 100% replacement and the rate of growth in clean energy is far too slow to have an impact before the end of this century.

Stratosolar in contrast is a 100% fossil fuel replacement and its favourable economics mean it could be deployed rapidly. It is a viable solution to energy security.

Economies that are dependent on fossil fuel imports have yet to focus on their vulnerability. As usual, it will probably take a crisis that threatens or reduces fossil fuel imports to cause change. Hopefully that crises will not be armed conflict as it was with WW2.

By Edmund Kelly

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Clean energy investment is declining

7/15/2018

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In this blog post in February I discussed BNEF’s forecast for 2018 clean energy investment. This forecast projected clean energy investment in 2018 would match that of 2017. A central theme was the unpredictability of what China would do made the forecast unreliable. This came to pass in June when China announced significant solar cutbacks of around 20 GW for the 2nd half of 2018.

This article discusses the reasons for China’s chaotic solar policy. Basically Investors in Solar manufacturing (like much of Chinese investment) don’t behave like western investors. Investors follow a “if you build it , they will come” approach. They think supply will create the demand. Unfortunately, solar developers can’t develop projects at a rate to match the increased solar manufacturing capacity due to constraints on transmission and distribution. As a result of the reduced demand, PV panels have fallen from around $0.35/W to $0.25/W. This may cause a shakeout in the PV business, but China may prop up companies and not let that happen.

Anyway with China’s reduction, clean energy investment will now decline in 2018. Overall investment will stay in the range it has been since 2011. The graphs above show the regional investment trends from 2005 to 2018. Yellow is solar, blue is wind. AMER is america (mostly US), EMEA is Europe and APAC is Asia, which is mostly China.

As can be seen America has been in a narrow investment range since 2011. European investment has been declining since 2011 and Chinese investment rose from 2011 to 2015, but has declined slightly since then. With Trump in the White house imposing stiff tariffs on PV panels and US subsidies being eliminated over the next few years, American investment is unlikely to grow for the foreseeable future. It is likely that investment in Europe will continue its downward trend since 2011. China’s reduction in PV deployment probably means that Chinese investment will continue its downward trend since 2015.

Germany has long been the driver of clean energy investment in Europe which makes the graph below all the more telling. Investment by Germany over the last three quarters is very low relative to past investment levels. This emphasizes the scale of European decline and is all the more disturbing given Europe's overall enthusiasm for clean energy and meeting the goals of the Paris agreement. The US and China are not uniformly enthusiastic about clean energy and the German reduction to such low level makes a lie of their clean energy aspirations. There is now no one credibly leading the charge for atmospheric CO2 reduction.

The overall declining world clean energy investment does not match the optimism about clean energy. This investment level will not reduce atmospheric CO2 levels The only reason for clean energy is to reduce CO2, otherwise why bother? There is lots of hype about 100% renewables and solar and wind cheaper than fossil fuels, but in the real world progress has stalled. The money tells the true story.

The problems with intermittent renewables are well understood and are becoming increasingly difficult for clean energy enthusiasts to ignore. Potential solutions are in development but are risky and many years from economic viability.

Stratosolar solves all the problems of current intermittent renewables and could be deployed rapidly to provide cheaper energy than fossil fuels in a timeframe that can meet the 450 ppm CO2 goal.

By Edmund Kelly

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BNEF 2018 new energy report with projections to 2050

6/23/2018

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Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF) tracks new energy investment trends. BNEF just released their 2018 new energy outlook report which discusses current trends and also projects demand out to 2050. They bring a financial investment perspective to forecasting the future of the energy electricity generation business. This contrasts with academic or climate change advocate forecasts which tend to either ignore or have unrealistic expectations of the financial aspects of forging a clean energy future. It also contrasts with forecasts from government agencies like the IEA and the EIA or industry forecasts like those from Shell or BP who largely downplay renewable energy.

My persistent theme is that we are not on a path to reduce CO2 emissions sufficiently to limit the damage to a 2 degree celsius rise in global temperature. StratoSolar and other speculative technologies will not get serious attention until it is clear and accepted that we won’t achieve this goal on our path with current wind, solar and storage technologies.

BNEF forecasts very large increases in wind, solar and other clean energy deployment (14 times current installed capacity) along with dramatic increases in improved energy storage technologies. They also forecast continuing price reductions in wind, solar and batteries. They estimate the overall investment in electricity generation will exceed $11.5T by 2050, or an average of $360B/y. They estimate that this will change generation from 66% fossil fuel today to 66% clean energy in 2050. This is a bullish assessment from a large professional team that understands the energy business.

However over this period energy demand rises significantly due to economic growth, so despite this reduction CO2 emissions don’t fall all that much from todays level. Their opinion at the end of their presentation is that significant new technologies are needed to either directly remove CO2 from the atmosphere or provide an economical means to replace the natural gas consumption still needed to provide for long duration intermittency and seasonality.

StratoSolar does not suffer from the long duration intermittency problem because it is above all weather effects. This means there is no need for natural gas generation and its CO2 emissions. Stratosolar's higher utilization makes the same cheap PV panels three or more times more effective. Cheap storage from gravity energy storage or the cheap batteries BNEF forecasts make Stratosolar a complete replacement for fossil fuels before 2050 for far less than the $11.5T BNEF forecasts.

The direct inherent ability of simply not having a long duration intermittency problem is Stratosolar’s key qualitative advantage over ground based wind and solar. Quantitative advantages in cost can be argued as unrealistic and ignored but qualitative advantages that make a solution move from impossible to possible are fundamental. The world has yet to accept the long duration intermittency achilles heel of wind and solar. This BNEF forecast states the problem clearly without much fanfare. It's not their main theme. Their general forecast is bullish for current clean energy investment. The fact that it is not solving the CO2 emissions problem is not an energy investor issue. Investors just want to make money.

By Edmund Kelly

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Renewable energy investment set to decline?

China PV installs stalled

California data that shows the limits to PV penetration

2018 continues a now eight year trend of stagnant clean energy investment

Revisiting CO2 emissions and climate change

More 100% renewable debate academic papers

California’s path to CO2 reduction is not what it seems

Energy security

Clean energy investment is declining

BNEF 2018 new energy report with projections to 2050

Ed Kelly

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