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Power United States

New Renewable Energy Capacity Hit Record Levels In 2019 (theguardian.com) 124

According to data from the International Renewable Energy Agency (Irena), solar, wind and other green technologies now provide more than one-third of the world's power, marking another record. The Guardian reports: Fossil fuel power plants are in decline in Europe and the U.S., with more decommissioned than built in 2019. But the number of coal and gas plants grew in Asia, the Middle East and Africa. In the Middle East, which owns half the world's oil reserves, just 26% of new electricity generation capacity built in 2019 was renewable. The world has invested about $3 trillion in renewables over the past decade, according to Irena, but annual investments must double by 2030 to tackle the climate emergency.

The Irena data shows the increase in new renewable energy capacity slowed slightly in 2019 - from 179GW to 176GW -- but that new fossil fuel power also fell. The total green energy installed to date around the world grew by 7.6%, with the UK's total rising 6.1%. The UK is now 11th in the world for installed renewables. New solar power provided 55% of the new capacity, most of which was installed in Asia, with China, India, Japan, South Korea and Vietnam leading the way. Other major increases were seen in the U.S., Australia, Spain, Germany and Ukraine. Wind power made up 34% of the total, with almost half in China and significant additions in the U.S. Global wind power capacity remains just ahead of solar, with 95% being onshore turbines. Other green technologies -- hydropower, bioenergy, geothermal and marine energy -- all grew modestly year-on-year. While small compared with solar and wind power, geothermal energy -- tapping the heat of deep rocks -- is growing, with Turkey, Indonesia and Kenya leading the way.

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New Renewable Energy Capacity Hit Record Levels In 2019

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  • Hurray Capacity! (Score:4, Insightful)

    by LynnwoodRooster ( 966895 ) on Monday April 06, 2020 @09:27PM (#59915668) Journal
    But what about generation? That matters a bit more than capacity...
    • But what about generation? That matters a bit more than capacity...

      But what about TESLA, LynnwoodRooster??? My god, did you forget the ELON MUSK exists????

      • A question for you: would you rather have 1 MW of solar capacity, or 1 MW of natural gas turbine capacity?
        • Is that a joke? I don't see a punchline. You should have used humor to respond to people who are not serious, if you respond at all.
        • well since the gas can and will produce 1MW any time all the time and the solar will produce about probably 0.3MW some of the time (less than half) and peak at the 1MW kind of straight forward answer. Capacity for renewable is a weak measure but makes a good marketing number.
        • by dwywit ( 1109409 )

          Truly, I'd prefer 1MW of PV - that way, I don't have to keep paying for gas - which is cheap at the moment, but that's not a guarantee. The sun is free.

          Yes, panels have to be replaced periodically, but then so do gas plants. I'd also venture that gas plants have significant ongoing maintenance costs.

          • So you want 200-300 kW of output, on average... And none at night.
            • by dwywit ( 1109409 )

              What I've actually got is a nominal 2.6KW of PV, and 1320ah of batteries. I only run the backup generator when it's raining or very cloudy for extended periods.

              And as I've said before - being off-grid has its advantages. No electricity bills and I'm already prepped for natural disasters, e.g. there was a big cyclone here in 2011. My grid-dependent neighbours had to throw out all their fridge and freezer contents, and they couldn't even flush their toilets. The water mains don't make it out this far so nearl

            • Except for /. ere
              Basement nerd kids
              And WoW players:

              Everyone slept at night. The only power I need at night is my fridge ... which basically uses ZERO power.

              Why are you brining this stupid at night meme every time renewables are mentioned?

              • Because without storage the concept of renewables powering the country is just stupid.

                "at night" is pretty obvious point to make for solar power. But its not that simple in practice when peak demand is between 4 and 7pm and fluctuates all the time. Renewables on the other hand, provide energy when they want to, which is not necessarily when we want to consume it. If that imbalance is too great, and there is not enough alternative to make up the difference, then the grid will shut down.

                A lot of people run th

                • why are you assuming Solar is it the only renewable?
                  • ""at night" is pretty obvious point to make for solar power."

                    that's why. Even the most obtuse can understand that having 100% solar generation contributes nothing at night. It also contributes little in winter, but the "at night" point should be super obvious.

                  • by zieroh ( 307208 )

                    why are you assuming Solar is it the only renewable?

                    Because they are confusing smugness with smartness.

                • by radl33t ( 900691 )
                  Wind blows at night and combined with solar, up to date transmission, and gas backup, a clean grid is cheap, simple, and robust. Half the US gas capacity sits around waiting to fire anyway to backup existing fossil plants. It's really not a big deal. The relative emissions from a grid that is 20% natural gas 80% carbon free are negligible compared to other energy sectors, industry, ag, transportation. Plus 1 to 3 cent renewable electricity will make cost competitive synthetic fossil fuels at scale.
                  • You'd be surprised how intermittent it is though. When there is a storm, the wholesale price of energy goes negative, when there's little wind it rise dramatically. When the wind doesn't blow, at night, is exactly the problem you have to deal with, and having gas backup for those nights means you have to have as much gas capacity as we have today.

                    • by radl33t ( 900691 )
                      I wouldn't be surprised, I study it. I watched about 6GW of wind capacity go offline because it got too cold. This was a huge, unexpected outage, but shorter duration than plant outages on coal and nuclear facilities that happen with some regularity. Backup capacity is critical to the past grid, the current grid, and the future grid.
                    • Question for you: were those coal/nuclear plant closures scheduled, or completely random events like the icing up of wind turbines?
                    • Re:Hurray Capacity! (Score:4, Informative)

                      by radl33t ( 900691 ) on Tuesday April 07, 2020 @11:00AM (#59917130)
                      Both, the consequences of either are more disruptive than anything I've yet to see with wind or solar under performance by an order of magnitude (weeks v days, LMPS in the 100s $/MWh vs 100 $/MWh). Need backup in either case. A grid that is geographically dispersed is less sensitive to plant level or transmission level failures. The worst I've seen with wind is the polar vortex that put 3 GW to about 200 MW for 2 days over 3-4 states. I've seen both very large coal and nuke plants experience unplanned outages lasting ~3 weeks in the last few years, out of a fleet of maybe 15 plants over 500 MW ? The grid is already designed for the redundancy necessary for high penetration renewables.
                  • Wind blows at night

                    A lot less. There is a diurnal cycle [weather.gov] where winds tend to calm quite a bit as he sun sets. Ask any sailor, they'll confirm.

                    and combined with ... gas backup, a clean grid

                    Wait, are you saying we can have natural gas (or - GASP - maybe even nuclear?) and have a clean grid!? No - you don't get to use ANY fossil fuels - renewables only. That's the "dream" - so that's what you get.

                    • by radl33t ( 900691 )
                      No - you don't get to use ANY fossil fuels - renewables only. That's the "dream" - so that's what you get.
                      Says who? People you argue with on the internet ?
                    • A lot less. There is a diurnal cycle [weather.gov] where winds tend to calm quite a bit as he sun sets. Ask any sailor, they'll confirm.
                      I'm a sailor.

                      That is nonsense.

                      If you had not skipped class in school you knew that.

                      Wind might calm down somewhere in the middle of the USA, no idea about your wind patterns. It certainly does not in the middle of Germany.

                      Hint: the west cost is not even 1000k away ... and we even have a coast in the north. And big wind systems as we have in the current climate situation: are

                • Re:Hurray Capacity! (Score:5, Informative)

                  by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) on Tuesday April 07, 2020 @09:45AM (#59916888) Homepage Journal

                  Storage is only needed for a bit of smoothing and to handle peaks, you don't need a whole-country UPS or any of that nonsense.

                  Take the UK. We have about 20x as much wind energy as we need to meet our own demand. Much of it is offshore where the wind never stops blowing and with a bit of geographic distribution we can guarantee 100% supply all day, all year from wind alone.

                  • Seriously? Right now, looking at the generation numbers, demand is running at a mere 27GW. Wind is contributing 1.2GW of that (and its 10:27 pm so no solar at all)

                    I think seriously underestimate how much demand there is for energy, even in the late evening, and just how variable wind supply can be.

                    so you'd have to have either 25GW of storage (and hope that tomorrow its windy again) or increase the wind farms by 10 times and also have about 5GW of storage. The trouble with doing that latter is that when it i

                    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

                      Do you think we have tapped all the available wind energy in and around the UK?

                    • I think seriously underestimate how much demand there is for energy, even in the late evening, and just how variable wind supply can be.
                      Which part of:
                      a) he is living in the UK
                      b) he is talking about the wind around the UK
                      c) where the UK actually are

                      Did you not grasp?

                      Wind? There is wind all over the place. Northern sea, channel, North Atlantic.

                      That is the definition of wind

                      Why the funk do you think we are building wind plants all over the place?

                      Because we have no wind? Moron ...

                • Because without storage the concept of renewables powering the country is just stupid.

                  Even with storage the concept of renewable energy powering the country is just stupid.

                  Think of the storage needs to keep streetlights, refrigerators, and so on running through the night after a day of being charged up from wind and sun. Now think of the storage needs to meet the daytime peak with storage being charged up all night with nuclear power. But that's just the storage needs if the sun is always shining and the wind blows without interruption, which is known to happen once in a while. There's a

                  • Sure, and I think nuclear is the answer, with renewables combined with storage making up the remainder of demand peaks.

                    at the moment we have storage - its called gas, stored energy in the fuel that we extract as needed. If we have to give that up, we will need to replace the stored energy with something else. 100% nuclear isn't the answer as the demand peaks and troughs all the time, so nuclear should really be for a baseline.

                    China is building out a 800MWh vanadium flow battery storage unit, so we'd only ne

              • Because clearly your grocery stores, hospitals, phone systems, street lights, and other infrastructure doesn't use power at night, does it? All of Germany shuts down at sunset, right?
                • As mentioned in other threads: at night power consumption goes down to 40%-60% of daytime.
                  It does not matter that there is no solar power at night.

                  Get a dam clue, stupid troll.

            • So you want 200-300 kW of output, on average... And none at night.

              No, I want 1 MW of output from a 4-5MW installation of dirt cheap solar panels and I'll electricity at night when demand is low anyway from a battery installation, or pumped storage. Why would I want the constant monthly cost of polluting and expensive natural gas that is price fixed by fossil fuel mega corporations when I can sink a one time sum into a solar array + storage and after that get sunlight generated energy for free?

              • Why would I want the constant monthly cost of polluting and expensive natural gas that is price fixed by fossil fuel mega corporations when I can sink a one time sum into a solar array + storage and after that get sunlight generated energy for free?

                Solar power is not a one time cost, PV cells experience wear like everything does. As soon as they are put into use their output slowly fades with time. Then there is the matter of storm damage, the wind slowly sandblasting the glass and turning it opaque, wild animals getting into the wiring, and so on.

                Storage is also not a one time cost. This "sunlight is free" nonsense needs to die. There is no free lunch. The sunlight is only useful for energy after investing considerable labor and materials into t

              • So - nameplate capacity doesn't matter, does it? Thank you for proving my point!
            • by zieroh ( 307208 )

              So you want 200-300 kW of output, on average... And none at night.

              You're using the specific characteristics of a single renewable to somehow argue that renewables -- all renewables -- are inherently inferior. If we were talking about wind, you'd be pointing out that the wind doesn't always blow.

              It's a childish argument. Different renewables have different strengths (and weaknesses!) but they all have one strength thing in common: they don't produce ongoing carbon emissions. Until you can say that about gas, or coal, or any of the other fossil-based fuels, you are just bei

        • My house does no even use 1MW/h (in case you mix up MW with MW/h) in a year ... and I do not care where it comes form, but bottom line would prefer solar.

          Are you really that uneducated?

          • Far from uneducated, I'm a realist and also understand things like capacity and generation. So, for your 600 kW needs for a city block, would you rather have 1 MW of solar of 800 kW of gas or nuclear? It's called science - that thing in your sig that you claim to want to follow, led by a 16 year old figurehead...
            • Well, your sig says enough tooo

              E.g. the Spanish flu originated in the US.

              So, for your 600 kW needs for a city block, would you rather have 1 MW of solar of 800 kW of gas or nuclear?

              That does not make any sense, so why are you talking about since?

              I want 1MW solar during daytime, and a bit gas to compensate for fluctuations. And 400kW gas at night, if that are the only options you give me. Obviously you would use pumped storage during daytime for fluctuations, but that option you did not offer.

              Hint: go read s

        • A question for you: would you rather have 1 MW of solar capacity, or 1 MW of natural gas turbine capacity?

          1 MW of solar capacity, obviously. What good is 1 MW of natural gas turbine capacity if I'm destroying my environment system with the emissions it generates. But your case is stupid anyway. Nobody chooses between 1MW of solar and 1MW of natural gas. At the prices of Solar these days I can just install 4 MW of solar panels and a battery to make up for the lower generation rate of solar without exceeding the costs of a 1MW gas turbine installation and the decades of wildly fluctuating and continually rising f

          • What color is the sky on your world?

            If your claims had anything close to validity then we'd not see another natural gas plant built anywhere again. One problem is that solar power needs land, and lots of it. Land costs money.

            Another problem is that storage doesn't help solar power, it hurts it. If a utility is able to tank up on cheap power from a steam plant (be that from coal, natural gas or nuclear) and draw from that as needed then why bother with solar power?

            Right now the cheapest means to store ele

          • Natural gas comes with continually rising extraction costs and never ending price fixing by fossil fuel cartels, sunlight is free.

            The 1 MW gas turbine will get you a lot more power than the 1 MW solar panels (which will be hard-pressed to do 1/3rd that - and effectively zero during the evening hours).

            Natural gas comes with continually rising extraction costs and never ending price fixing by fossil fuel cartels, sunlight is free.

            Does it? The cost of natural gas has been slowly dropping over the last decade [businessinsider.com], and plunged these last few months as Russia and Saudi Arabia had a big tussle. But

        • How much does each cost over 40 years?
          • Are you factoring in the 1 MW gas turbine you need to keep as backup for your 3.5 MW solar installation, for when the sun doesn't shine?
        • depends if you are asking at midnight or midday.

      • by dwywit ( 1109409 )

        Hey, mister "UID with fewer digits than ratzo", perhaps you should call the pharmacy to deliver your medication.

        Clearly, you've run out.

        • Hey, mister "UID with fewer digits than ratzo", perhaps you should call the pharmacy to deliver your medication.

          Dude! Did you really just take the time to look up my comment history, and then type that insult out... like it was a good one??? :D OMG

    • Trump already sent thousands of generators to New York [twitter.com]
  • by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 06, 2020 @10:01PM (#59915718)

    solar, wind and other green technologies now provide more than one-third of the world's power

    This is carefully worded to deceive. Capacity has units of power, but integrating delivered power over a year has units of energy. Wind and Solar accounted for 7% of electrical and <4% of all energy in 2018. See world energy consumption [wikipedia.org] for energy delivered by various sources; this is what must be replaced, not nameplate capacity.

    Capacity (and sales) are meaningless numbers, only useful for headlines, where they vastly overstate actual progress by ignoring the low capacity factor [wikipedia.org] of wind and solar. Those "green" technologies no doubt also included combusting biomass, hydro, and possibly even nuclear to enable them to make that ridiculous claim. Looking at wind and solar alone paints a sobering picture.

    The world has invested about $3 trillion in renewables over the past decade

    See what we got in return [electricitymap.org]. The only places that have substantially decarbonized have done so with hydro and nuclear, and only the latter is scalable. Wind and solar have contributed very little in reducing carbon intensity. Pouring our entire economic output into green elephants won't impact carbon much, but people will certainly suffer. I suppose that is the goal, since the same folk are cheering Covid-19 for grinding the world economy to a near halt.

    • by clovis ( 4684 )

      solar, wind and other green technologies now provide more than one-third of the world's power

      This is carefully worded to deceive. Capacity has units of power, but integrating delivered power over a year has units of energy. Wind and Solar accounted for 7% of electrical and <4% of all energy in 2018. See world energy consumption [wikipedia.org] for energy delivered by various sources; this is what must be replaced, not nameplate capacity.

      Capacity (and sales) are meaningless numbers, only useful for headlines, where they vastly overstate actual progress by ignoring the low capacity factor [wikipedia.org] of wind and solar. Those "green" technologies no doubt also included combusting biomass, hydro, and possibly even nuclear to enable them to make that ridiculous claim. Looking at wind and solar alone paints a sobering picture.

      The world has invested about $3 trillion in renewables over the past decade

      See what we got in return [electricitymap.org]. The only places that have substantially decarbonized have done so with hydro and nuclear, and only the latter is scalable. Wind and solar have contributed very little in reducing carbon intensity. Pouring our entire economic output into green elephants won't impact carbon much, but people will certainly suffer. I suppose that is the goal, since the same folk are cheering Covid-19 for grinding the world economy to a near halt.

      Thanks.

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by Uecker ( 1842596 )

      Well, this is a bit misleading. Is is more interesting to look at recent changes. Nobody decarbonized in recent years using nuclear, as is is too expensive and too slow to roll out. But here are the numbers for actual electricity production in TWh (so energy not capacity) in Germany for the last five years

      2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019
      lignite 156 155 150 148 146 114
      coal 119 118 112 93 83 57
      nuclear 97

  • by Geodesy99 ( 1002847 ) on Monday April 06, 2020 @10:47PM (#59915802)
    This is a huge lie: https://www.iea.org/data-and-s... [iea.org] Pure bullshit: "(Irena) shows solar, wind and other green technologies now provide more than one-third of the world’s power, "
  • by WindBourne ( 631190 ) on Tuesday April 07, 2020 @12:49AM (#59915976) Journal
    What really needs to happen is to stop building new FF plants, but esp. coal plants. China continues to add massive amounts of these. India is slowing that down, but Japan is now planning on joining China in a massive buildout of coal plants. If China's and Japan's plans go through, Japan will have some .3+TW and China will have 1.75 TW of coal plants by 2030. IOW, just in 2 nations, more than the entire rest of the world ever built.

    We will not even get 4C, let alone 2C at this rate. ALL NATIONS MUST STOP ADDING new FF plants and instead, bring their CO2 emissions down.
    • What really needs to happen is to stop building new FF plants, but esp. coal plants.

      That won't happen until we start building new nuclear power plants at a rate exceeding that of the peak of construction from the 1970s.

      Many of these nuclear power plants built in the 1970s will soon reach their end of life and will need to be replaced with something. This will be coal, natural gas, or more new nuclear. That's because we need reliable power that wind and sun cannot provide.

      Energy storage technologies will not solve the problem of how unreliable wind and solar power are. Storage costs mone

      • by Anonymous Coward
        Some of the WindBourne is rubbing off on you...

        Also, does anyone think a battery cares where it gets the electricity to charge it? It does not. If we have cheap energy storage then that makes steam thermal power plants more attractive. Steam is made from coal, natural gas, or nuclear power.

        No body is going to build a coal power plant when it's already cheaper to build wind/solar etc. The only way to make coal even slightly competitive is to run it 100% flat out and not try and follow. Storage wont help with that. Storage will only help with variable plants like solar and especially wind.
        Gas can ramp anyway. Nuke has the same problem as coal, if you are going to the expense of building the plant you want to run it 100% not idle it as soon as your

        • Storage will only help with variable plants like solar and especially wind.

          I believe that you didn't think this through.

      • I agree that we need to build new nukes. LOTS of them. Sadly, the Dems may try to block it again, which means that they are not looking at how other nations are doing; say Germany/Spain vs Iceland/France/Norway/Greenland. In the previous cases, the nations have pushed heavily towards wind/solar, and have HIGH Co2 and HIGH prices / kwh. OTOH, the other 4 have low to no wind/solar and have heavy use of electricity, along with low CO2. Why? Because of Nukes, Hydro, and Geothermal.

        Wind/Solar are actually chea
  • So many want to simply look at the total output / nation with absolutely no normalization. It is a horrible metric
    Here is population (2020) rounded to million [worldometers.info]
    China: 1,439M
    America: 331M
    Germany: 84 M
    UK: 68M
    France: 65M


    End of 2019 wind energy(GW) : Capita M /GW (lower is better) [irena.org]
    China : 210 : 6.8 M / GW
    America: 104 : 3.2
    Germany: 61 : 1.37
    UK: 24 : 2.8
    France: 16 : 4

    End of 2019, solar energy (GW): capita M / GW (lower is better) [irena.org]
    China : 205 : 7 M / GW
    America: 61 : 5
    • As always WindBourne, you (conveniently) forgot the most important metric.
      How much electricity do they use... [indexmundi.com] Americans per person use way more electricity than all the other countries on your list. Does it really make that much difference if America is 20% cleaner, and then uses 2-3 times as much electricity... It's way more polluting. It's going to be greener to just use less electricity.
      Electricity consumption MWh per capita.
      America 11.8
      France, Germany 6.7
      UK 4.7
      China 4.0.
      For example if China's ele
      • Unfortunately, because the U.S. tends to have lower energy costs and higher labor costs, U.S. industrial output tends to favor goods which have higher energy content and lower labor content. The U.S. could certainly decrease their manufacturing base (or attempt to switch to lower energy input/higher labor input manufacturing) with the resultant decrease in CO2 emissions -- but it would certainly come at a price (i.e. lower GDP, lower wages, lower tax revenue, etc.) -- and at the end of the day, that higher
        • U.S. industrial output tends to favor goods which have higher energy content and lower labor content. The U.S. could certainly decrease their manufacturing base (or attempt to switch to lower energy input/higher labor input manufacturing) with the resultant decrease in CO2 emissions

          Industrial output isn't really the cause of the high amount of electricity use in America.
          Industry (25%) is in third place [eia.gov] Behind both commercial (36%) and residential (39%).
          You could eliminate industrial electricity completely in America, and it would still use more electricity per capita than Germany, France, UK or China.

          WindBourne just likes to deflect blame away from residents and consumers and blame industry for everything...

          • I wouldn't necessarily disagree that the U.S. uses more electricity -- but some of that might be due to the cost of electricity (i.e. the average German residential cost is .35/kWh, while in the U.S. it is .12/kWh). To be honest, Canada suffers from the cost effect to an even greater extent, where the average cost is .10/kWh. Average household consumption of each is: Germany: 3,500 kWh/annum, U.S.: 10,900 kWh/annum and Canada: 11,100 kWh/annum. The net cost to each household are quite similar. Humans being
            • Caffeinated Bacon is a total troll.
              Look, the idea that our use of electricity is too high is just a red herring. Did you notice who are the nations using even MORE electricity than America? Iceland, Findland, Sweden, and Norway, all use more electricity than America. Why is electricity so high? Because they use it for heating, and shortly, it will go higher for all of us as we move to EVs.
              Yet, Those nation's CO2 emissions are much lower than not just America, but lower than Germany, France, and obviousl
              • Caffeinated Bacon is a total troll.
                Look, the idea that our use of electricity is too high is just a red herring. Did you notice who are the nations using even MORE electricity than America? Iceland, Findland, Sweden, and Norway, all use more electricity than America. Why is electricity so high? Because they use it for heating, and shortly, it will go higher for all of us as we move to EVs.

                WindBourne logic. America's electricity use isn't higher than those countries, because some other different countries are even higher.

                America's CO2 per capita is higher than Europe and China, you can't deny it by pointing fingers at other bad places. It's just a fact.

        • Cheap electricity is good for GDP, but sadly, industry makes poor decisions with it. In particular, it leads to sloppiness and waste. Think of how many homes that you know of with incandescent lights? Way too wasteful, except for Alaska. Likewise, HVAC is one of our worst areas. This is why I continue to call CONgress critter and governors trying to get them to them to push a simple regulation:

          require all new buildings HVAC BTUs.

          That simple regulation with solar being high prices, would not only move buildings to more efficient design, but

  • Read their statement. It is stacked with conditional words that Slashdot took out in their title.

    "Almost three-quarters of new electricity generation capacity built in 2019..."

    Capacity != Production when discussing renewables. This is different for nuclear or hydro power or most other types of electricity production. Normally installed capacity was very close to what is being produced on demand on any day (or night).

    When it comes to solar, no one sells a unit which can actually produce the power s

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