Solar is winning from energy crisis

From the way the public conversation was going, you might think renewable energy was firmly on the back foot as a result of the energy crisis that’s roiled the world since late last year.
Transport fuel taxes have been cut to ease the pain of high crude prices in the European Union, India, the UK and US, among other countries. Europe’s power plants burned 51% more coal in early March than they did a year earlier. China’s rush to use more coal after power cuts last year was even
more dramatic: The country mined 687 million metric tons of solid fuel in January and February, equivalent to nearly two years of European coal consumption and a third more than in the same period of 2019.
That’s troubling, considering the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s warning that carbon pollution must peak by 2025 if the world is to avoid catastrophic global warming.
And yet, the true picture is rather different. Far from
reversing, the renewables transition shows many signs of accelerating.
BloombergNEF estimated last month — a third more than was installed in 2021 and a 7.5% increase over a previous estimate for this year, made as the energy crisis was kicking off last fall.
Figures on that scale are staggering: 245 GW, for instance, is equivalent to about two-thirds of the world’s total installed nuclear capacity. At the start of 2020, a cumulative 651 GW of solar panels had been installed in all of human history. About 12 months from now, we’re likely to have doubled that figure in just over three years.
Players in the solar industry are betting on growth. After shortages of polysilicon raw material drove up prices last year, a flood of new manufacturing capacity has entered the market. The choke point in the supply chain is now silicon wafer production, but even that is sufficient to turn
out about 431 GW of cells each year, according to BloombergNEF. With relatively minor increases in ingot and wafer capacity, the world’s solar supply chain is now large enough to connect about 5,300 GW of panels by 2030 — sufficient to put us on track to net zero emissions by 2050.
Should the industry’s growth rate fall by about 10 percentage points from the average 25% seen over the last five years, we’d still hit that target.
This all sounds rather optimistic. The problem comes on the other side of the renewables coin — wind power. In contrast to the unflagging boom in solar energy, wind generation appears to be hitting the buffers. Turbine capacity installed actually fell marginally last year from 2020’s record total to 94 GW, the Global Wind Energy Council said in a report this month.
It will then stagnate at levels not much higher than that until the middle of the decade, leaving the world in 2030 with only about 64% of the wind power necessary to hit net zero.

—Bloomberg