Renewable energy passes 30% of world's electricity supply
Renewable energy passes 30% of world’s electricity supply
Report says humans may be on brink of cutting fossil fuel generation, even as demand for electricity rises
Jillian Ambrose Energy correspondent | The Guardian | Tue 7 May 2024
Renewable energy accounted for more than 30% of the world’s electricity for the first time last year following a rapid rise in wind and solar power, according to new figures.
A report on the global power system has found that the world may be on the brink of driving down fossil fuel generation, even as overall demand for electricity continues to rise.
Clean electricity has already helped to slow the growth in fossil fuels by almost two-thirds in the past 10 years, according to the report by climate thinktank Ember. It found that renewables have grown from 19% of electricity in 2000 to more than 30% of global electricity last year.
“The renewables future has arrived,” said Dave Jones, Ember’s director of global insights. “Solar, in particular, is accelerating faster than anyone thought possible.”
Solar was the main supplier of electricity growth, according to Ember, adding more than twice as much new electricity generation as coal in 2023...more
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/may/08/renewable-energy-passes-30-of-worlds-electricity-supply
= new reply since forum marked as read
This bullshit "percent talk" has been going on over the more than 20 years I've been here, along with bullshit "100% by such and such year.
Since I joined DU in November of 2002, the concentration of the dangerous fossil fuel waste has risen by 54.32 ppm, with antinuke after antinuke blabbing illiterately about "percent talk."
The big lie about so called renewable energy is that electricity demand is growing and is doing so rapidly, particularly in light of the fact, and thus so is the use of fossil fuels. "Percent" doesn't mean shit, except in fossil fuel marketing circles. What matters are real numbers with units, the unit of macroscopic energy being the Exajoule:
The numbers are here: 2023 World Energy Outlook published by the International Energy Agency (IEA), Table A.1a on Page 264.
The solar industry could disappear and no one would notice, other than the trillion dollar price tag that has done nothing to address climate change. It's trivial, unreliable, and is mostly notable for cheering because it can produce electricity when no one needs it, but when electricity is needed - typical peak demand is in the early evening - it's useless electronic crap that requires expensive and environmentally destructive redundancy.
Now, I'm acutely aware that fossil fuel interests want to represent electricity as being "green," - and do things like encouraging the thermodynamic and environmental nightmare of making hydrogen from it relying on contempt for science - but in so called "renewable energy" hellholes like Germany, they burn coal during the long episodes of Dunkelflaute.
Here is the carbon intensity of Germany in the last 12 months:
Note that in that that solar and wind marketing - and thus coal and gas dependent hellhole Germany - generates 400 grams CO2/kWh while neighboring France generates 53 grams CO2/kWh. In "percent talk" Germany is 100%*400/53 = 755% dirtier than France.
We have of course, fossil fuel salespeople here talking about hydrogen trucks and cars in Germany, even though Germany's largest hydrogen plants have been shutting because they've been embarrassed out of funding Vladmir Putin by buying his gas to make hydrogen: BASF closes ammonia production plant in Germany (due to high energy costs).]
The fossil fuel interests here and elsewhere attack nuclear energy for a reason. It's bad for their business which is to sell fossil fuels, coal and gas mainly, when they work to rebrand fossil fuels as "hydrogen" as these are the main sources of hydrogen, which is made by the destruction of exergy, thus making fossil fuels worse than they already are. Even worse, they hawk the most wasteful means of exergy destruction to make hydrogen, electrolysis. There is no decency in the way these types lie.
A Giant Climate Lie: When they're selling hydrogen, what they're really selling is fossil fuels.
Have a nice day tomorrow.