<
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2024/10/solar-power-energy-revolution-global-south/680351/?gift=1wJJOWpbGcy0FRPza_6RtAO8_T0Gd-v3kZMlfgutBvw>
"Last month, an energy think tank released some rare good news for the climate:
The world is on track to install 29 percent more solar capacity this year than
it did the year before, according to a report from Ember. “In a single year, in
a single technology, we’re providing as much new electricity as the entirety of
global growth the year before,” Kingsmill Bond, a senior energy strategist at
RMI, a clean-energy nonprofit, told me. A decade or two ago, analysts “did not
imagine in their wildest dreams that solar by the middle of the 2020s would
already be supplying all of the growth of global electricity demand,” he said.
Yet here we are.
In the United States, solar accounted for more than half of all new power last
year. But the most dramatic growth is happening overseas. The latest global
report from the International Energy Agency (IEA) notes that solar is on track
to overtake all other forms of energy by 2033. The world’s use of fossil fuels
is already plateauing (the U.S., for its part, hit its peak demand for
fossil-fuel energy way back in 2007). Energy demand is still rising, but
renewables are stepping in to make up the difference. “The really interesting
debate now,” Bond said, “is actually: When do we push fossil fuels off the
plateau? And from our numbers, if solar keeps on growing this way, it’s going
to be off the plateau by the end of this decade.”
The advantages of solar speak for themselves. Solar can be built faster and
with fewer permits than other forms of energy infrastructure, mostly because
the panels are flat and modular (unlike, say, a towering wind turbine or a
hulking gas-fired power plant). It’s also adaptable at any scale, from an
individual erecting a single panel to a utility company assembling a solar
farm. And now, thanks to remarkable drops in prices for solar panels, mainly
from China, simple market forces seem to be driving an all-out solar boom.
“This is unstoppable,” Heymi Bahar, a senior energy analyst at the IEA, told
me.
Globally, some 40 percent of solar’s growth is in the form of people powering
their own homes and businesses, Bahar said. Perhaps nowhere is this better
illustrated than in Africa, where Joel Nana, a project manager at Sustainable
Energy Africa in Cape Town, has been leading an effort to help countries
regulate and integrate the explosion of small-scale solar. When Nana and his
team started quantifying just how much new solar was around, “we were actually
shocked,” he told me. In South Africa, for example, the total amount of energy
produced from solar systems in 2019 was thought to be about 500 megawatts, Nana
said. But in the first quarter of 2023, when researchers used satellite imagery
to count all of the solar installations in the country, they estimated that
solar was producing a combined 5,700 megawatts of energy—only 55 percent of
which had been declared to the government. That story of rapid, invisible
growth is being repeated across the continent. Kenya now has about 200
megawatts of rooftop solar installed, representing 9 percent of the country’s
total energy use, Nana said. Namibia has about 96 megawatts of rooftop solar
capacity in its system, he said—a whopping 15 percent of its energy mix. “It’s
been happening for three or four years, maybe five years, completely off the
radar,” Nana said."
Via
Reasons to be Cheerful:
<
https://reasonstobecheerful.world/what-were-reading-england-farmland-salt-marsh-floods/>
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
