Skyrocketing Global Renewables | Energy Central

Canary Media: “Chart: World could triple renewable energy by decade’s end.” The COP28 meeting in 2023 articulated an ambitious but achievable goal: More than 100 countries pledged to triple renewable energy capacity by 2030. Almost a yr later, we are not on track to hit this target, yet renewables are nonetheless growing at a  blistering pace. “Between 2024and 2030, the world is expected to build over 5,500 gigawatts [GW] — or 5.5 terawatts [TW] — of renewable energy capacity.” As a baseline, between 2017 and 2023, the world added just over 2 terawatts of clean energy.  Rule of thumb is that a GW, with 9 zeroes, is the rating of a typical nuclear plant. So a TW just adds 3 more zeroes. “China alone will build more than half of this total — 3.2 terawatts, to be precise — while the European Union and the U.S. are each set to build about one-tenth. India, forecast to build 350 gigawatts’ worth of renewables between now and 2030, will likely be the next biggest contributor.” The International Energy Agency [IEA] projects that global renewables to grow 2.7-fold by 2030.  The graphic makes it crystal clear that distributed small-scale + utility large-scale solar installations comprise the overwhelming majority of projected growth, leapfrogging past wind + hydropower.” And should IEA’s forecast for overall renewable energy additions prove accurate, just under half of global electricity generation — not [nameplate] capacity, [rather actual total] generation — will come from renewables by 2030. The only questions remaining are how rapidly this will displace fossil fuels + nuclear power. [Good grief, clearly we are not going to build 5,500 or even 550 nuclear plants in the next 6 yrs]. Speed indeed is of the essence—at the speed of light.