Energy

Green Energy Isn’t Getting Cheap Fast Enough To Stop Global Warming

(REUTERS/David Gray)

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Craig Boudreau Vice Reporter
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Bloomberg New Energy Finance reports green energy will be the cheapest source of power in the coming decades, but it still won’t be cheap enough to keep projected warming below 2 degrees Celsius.

“Even with rapid technological advancement, 25 cents per watt may be out of reach by midcentury,” claims the authors of the piece published in Nature Energy. Part of the problem is a concept known as “value deflation.” Value deflation states that as more of a product is introduced to the market, it lessens the value of said product.

“As solar’s share of the electricity mix increases, the cost of each new solar project must fall to compete,” Michael A. Levi and Varun Sivaram of Greentech Media explain in a blog for the Council on Foreign Relations.

The current, non-subsidized rate for rooftop solar is $3.00 per watt, and the Bloomberg report claims it will drop to about $1.20 per watt. $1.20 may still not be cheap enough to make solar a cheaper alternative to oil or coal. In a report published in the journal Nature Energy April 7, researchers claim that the price for solar would need to be more along the lines of 25 cents per watt in order for it to power one-third of the world’s energy.

They forecast a similar reduction in price for wind power, too: “onshore wind will fall 41 percent by 2040, and solar photovoltaics by 60 percent” according to the NEO report, “making these two technologies the cheapest ways of producing electricity in many countries during the 2020s and in most of the world in the 2030s,”

The United Nations says keeping Earth’s temperature increase under 2 degrees Celsius will avoid the full effects of anthropogenic climate change, such as sea level rise.

With oil and coal prices already scraping the bottom, renewables certainly have their work cut out for them, especially since the Bloomberg report claims a predicted glut in oil and coal prices stands to keep prices low. The report goes on to say natural gas will be replaced by renewables by 2027, but that “it will be 2037 before they overtake coal.”

“High oil prices force governments and consumers to think about alternatives,” Director of Sustainability and Climate Change for PricewaterhouseCooperJonathan Grant, said in January, according to carbonbrief.org. “Low prices take the pressure off.”

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