Clean energy investments pass trillion-dollar mark

Over a trillion dollars have been invested in renewable energy, energy efficiency and smart energy technologies since records began in 2004.

Analysts Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF) said the landmark was probably passed during the last two weeks of November and would likely have been in the developing world.

Annual clean energy investment has increased nearly five-fold since 2004, rising from $52bn to $243bn last year, at a compound annual growth rate of 29 per cent.

BNEF said it expects 2011 to be another record year, driven by US solar thermal projects, large European offshore wind financings, continued high levels of activity in China and Germany, and India’s new national renewable energy programmes.

Company chief executive Michael Liebreich said the figures should serve as a message to negotiators in Durban to “stop obsessing about a binding deal to cap carbon emissions, and to think much harder about how to speed up investment in the solutions” to climate change.

“The trillionth-dollar milestone shows that the world is not waiting for a deal on climate in order to start turning the super-tanker away from fossil fuels,” he said. “Another five years of investment growth at the same compound rates and the world will have broken the back of emissions growth.”

China is rapidly emerging as the key growth market for clean energy, with new figures this week from the International Energy Agency (IEA) suggesting the country will install 180GW of wind and solar power capacity by 2020, equal to the capacity built by the rest of the world over the past 40 years.

The IEA predicts China’s electricity demand will grow by an average of four per cent per year to reach 9,000 terawatt hours (TWh) by 2035, which represents a tripling of its 2009 demand and equates to 18 times that of France.

While the percentage of China’s energy mix coming from renewable sources is expected to remain below that of the US, the EU and India as late as 2035, the rapid growth in renewable energy deployment will prove globally significant, Fatih Birol, chief economist at the IEA, told news agency Reuters.

“It will bring down the cost of wind turbines and PV solar modules significantly,” Birol predicted. “This is good news for China and the rest of the world.”

http://www.businessgreen.com/bg/news/2130793/clean-energy-investments-pass-trillion-dollar-mark