But I don’t agree with you saying that these countries “bite the bullet”. Initial investments have to be made, but there are (among others) overwhelming ecconomic reasons for pushing in this direction.

The most important one is, that fossil fuels have no prospect for providing cheap energy throughout the first half of this century, the situation for global energy security is deteriorating at an unprecedented rate and fossil fuel price volatility is creating choas & uncertainty for the global economy… for most developing nations this even creates a cap for further developement and in many cases pushes them on a road to poverty.
When studying the endgame of this downward spiral of uncertainty, poverty and scarcity of strategic ressources the outcome is an era of intense geopolitical conflicts… one in the like or worse than the first half of the 20th century.

The German Renewable Energy act of 2000 explicitly aimed at adressing those global mid-long term issues by creating an uncapped market for energy technologies, that would shift the odds through industrialization & innovation. (quite successful)

Considering that Germany is an export driven economy specialized on providing the world with tools & services for economic developement & industralization, a world of staggnation would be a death sentence for our economic model.

And since Germany neither has a big army, a desire to use it, nor any significant oil / gas corporations, the “status quo”-path forward is no alternative.

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BTW:
China faces anti-coal / polution Nimbyism at a massiv scale. And Wind Energy does not automatically lead to Nimbyism… that’s mainly an Anglo-American hostility to progress.

“precedent” or “preluded”… on of those pre’s

It is an achievement that has surpassed both the EU’s target of 49% by 2020 and the Swedish parliament adopted target of 50 percent in 2020.The seeds to this success can be traced back to the establishment of the official Oil Commission in 2005, which was charged with reducing Sweden’s dependence on oil. The full story at http://bit.ly/YPYUmv

” the formal foundation of this “coalition of the willing” or “axis of
renewables” initiated by the German government was precluded…”

Please consult your dictionary. If it was precluded (meaning “made impossible” or “prevented”, it could not have happened. Yet your report says it did.

Paraguay certainly did not become water powered in terms of electricity and they don’t produce 10x the amount they can use because they are selfless. They just happen to be in a place on earth were this was the best option when they electrified the country. The challenge this club is determined to to tackle is the extra expense. They could all be making energy cheaper by simply burning more coal. But they don’t. China is the big one here. They really do have impact on total numbers. I somehow think they are also clever enough to do it now, because at the moment there labor is still pretty cheap and they can get away with simply putting wind turbines and solar panels were they want, they don’t have a NIMBY problem, yet. This will of course develop since there population gets richer and better educated as a whole.
India just strike me as weird, they have a space program and nuclear weapons. There population as a whole lives literally in shit. The only way they will ever get power is through decentralised solar power because no one can be arsed to built them a grid.

And conventional hydro-power is hardly a new nor a viable solution to enable economic developement around the world.

The energy transition has to overcome technical, economic & political challanges in order to unlock the benefits of the energy technology revolution.

Every technological revolution in history has had initiators and nations/regions leading the way for others to emulate their role model.

In a way the countries of this “Renewable Club” claim this leadership role. It’s for others to challange their claims… if they dare.

You are correct that we need to make (almost all) our energy sources renewable. But any country that is now producing most of its electricity from renewables is ahead of any of the ten member. No country yet has a major amount of their transportation using renewable energy.

Their objective is to demonstrate high level political support for renewable energy.

http://k.lenz.name/LB/?p=6525