Comments on: Global Wind Industry to Reach 500 GW by 2017

By: GWEC in press | | GWECGWEC

GWEC in press | | GWECGWEC — Tue, 19 Jun 2012 12:59:38 +0000

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By: Captivation

Captivation — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 13:07:00 +0000

I agree that clean energy is going to get cheaper than filthy energy, but my concern is what happens when demand for dirty fuel declines. It seems to me that fossil fuel prices will fall and some countries will be tempted to return to the filth. Thus there needs to be international agreements to isolate those countries in non compliance. The alternative is to witness the burning of every single possible barrel of oil despite clean alternatives. We can’t handle our current levels of CO2. It seems insane to contemplate handling the massive CO2 increases that such a misguided policy would create.

By: Luke

Luke — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 10:30:00 +0000

500 GW is truly a vast amount of power, but I still think, that despite the expiration of government incentives – the continuing rise in cost, the dwindling provable reserves, and the sketchy speculative reserves of the main hydrocarbons will continue to push renewable development higher and higher. I still believe by 2020, we’ll see 1TW of wind power – the number of truly massive (1-15 GW) offshore farms in the planning/concept stages should keep the total installed capacity rising.

Because oil won’t last much longer. The former VP of Aramco, Sadad I. Al-Husseini said in 2007 that roughly 300 billion barrels of oil in the 1,200 billion barrels of oil reserves worldwide should be reclassified as speculative resources, because they only exist on paper. This leaves 900 billion barrels of oil remaining.

World oil consumption as of November 2011 is currently 90,000,000 barrels/day. 900 billion barrels / 90 million barrels/day gives 10,000 days of oil left, or 27.4 years. From the date Al-Husseini made that remark in 2007, that makes the year of oil depletion ~2034.

We seriously need to start building alot faster…