New Renewable Energy Doc from Greenpeace

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Greenpeace has just released a new renewable energy doc that touches on growing renewable energy around the world and the potential to provide the world with 95% of its power by 2050 (38% by 2020).

Here are a couple of nice quotes from that doc you might like to have a look at:

The growth of renewable energy has been unprecedented over the past 25 years. Wind and solar have maintained double-digit growth rates since 2000. No other segment of the energy sector has grown this fast. Wind power is the most economic new power plant technology, due to reduced installations costs, no fuel costs and construction time of less than one year, compared to over 10 years to construct nuclear power plants. In addition to replacing nuclear, renewables could lead to phasing out of over 90% of fossil fuels in the power and heating sectors by 2050, while in the transport sector the use of fossil fuels could be reduced from the current 98% down to about 30% by 2050.

Countries can create an indigenous, locally produced energy supply based on renewables and cut the drain on their resources of buying energy. Since renewable energy doesn’t have fuel costs, the global savings on fuel costs could be $282bn a year through to 2030 and about $964bn a year from 2030 to 2050.

And here are some pretty inspiring facts on recent or current successes in the renewable energy, especially wind energy, sector:

• Spain generated more than half its electricity demand on 9 November 2009 with wind energy.
• Spain’s wind energy overtook coal as its third-largest producer of power in 2009.
• During 2010, China built roughly one windmill every hour.
• The wind industry installed just over 41,000MW of new clean, reliable wind power in 2011, bringing the total installed capacity globally to more than 238,000MW at the end of last year. This represents an increase of 21%, with an increase in the size of the annual global market of just over 6%.
• Today, about 75 countries worldwide have commercial wind power installations, with 22 of them already passing the 1 gigawatt (GW) level.
• More than half of all new wind power was added outside the traditional markets of Europe and North American in 2010, for the first time.
• New Zealand generates 10% of its electricity needs from geothermal power.
• Portugal’s renewables went from 15% to 45% in its electricity grid in just five years

For more, including a criticism of nuclear industry claims, check out the Greenpeace document: Renewable Energy [PDF]


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Zachary Shahan

Zach is tryin' to help society help itself one word at a time. He spends most of his time here on CleanTechnica as its director, chief editor, and CEO. Zach is recognized globally as an electric vehicle, solar energy, and energy storage expert. He has presented about cleantech at conferences in India, the UAE, Ukraine, Poland, Germany, the Netherlands, the USA, Canada, and Curaçao. Zach has long-term investments in Tesla [TSLA], NIO [NIO], Xpeng [XPEV], Ford [F], ChargePoint [CHPT], Amazon [AMZN], Piedmont Lithium [PLL], Lithium Americas [LAC], Albemarle Corporation [ALB], Nouveau Monde Graphite [NMGRF], Talon Metals [TLOFF], Arclight Clean Transition Corp [ACTC], and Starbucks [SBUX]. But he does not offer (explicitly or implicitly) investment advice of any sort.

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