A New Hope: How Solar Energy Might Make A Difference

Cloudy, With A Chance Of Sunshine

“A beautiful skyline of a city on a river during golden hour” by chuttersnap on Unsplash

Forecasting is hard, especially on a global scale. That difficulty is then compounded by the fact that the IPCC is not just predicting a year ahead, it is predicting an entire century of human activity, and the impact thereof on our climate.

The analogy isn’t entirely accurate, but we have trouble determining the weather ten days from now. The weather system is complex, I’ll give you that. But I’d argue that human activity in general is even harder to forecast.

Here’s a forecast on solar energy adoption, published by the IPCC in 2010. This data has been published in the IPCC’s report on “Renewable Energy Sources and Climate Change Mitigation”. It’s a full-blown PDF of approximately a thousand pages of information, compiled by some of the world’s leading scientists in the domain.

Source: http://www.ipcc-wg3.de/report/IPCC_SRREN_Full_Report.pdf , pg 399

The forecast lays out the different scenarios for three different solar-energy related technologies and their adoption. We’ll focus on “Solar PV Electricity” (photovoltaics) for now, more commonly known as solar panels.

The table discusses four different scenarios for solar panel installations worldwide in the years 2010–2020. In being as forthcoming and transparent as can be, the IPCC provided us with four different scenarios:

• a “reference” one, that they call the most realistic one
• a “revolution” scenario, which would be an enormous improvement
• an “advanced” one, which is even more optimistic about the future.
• The IEA also provides us with its own forecast

Here’s a graph that compares all four scenarios:

Interesting to observe is that the reference scenario stays far beneath the other three scenarios following the year 2010. The three other forecasts remain close to each other up to the year 2015 and diverges significantly after that.

So, which scenario do you think we’re the closest to? Let’s compare.

The great news is that the actual numbers are significantly higher than anything that’s been projected by the IPCC. The installed capacity at the end of 2018 will approximately be 508 GW! To put these numbers into perspective, we’re doing:

• 535% better than projected in the Reference scenario (80 GW)
• 141% better than projected in the IEA roadmap scenario (210 GW)
• 52% better than projected by the Revolution scenario (335 GW)
• 16% better than projected in the Advanced scenario (439 GW)

And remember, we’re comparing projected 2020 numbers to actual 2018 numbers, which gives us two more years of PV-capacity growth before the comparison would become entirely valid. It’s not hard to imagine the total installed capacity of PV to reach 700–800 GW by then.

This is great news.
Solar panel installation rates are through the roof, and they keep on growing faster, year over year.

Some more perspective. As I said earlier, the actual result for 2018 is around 508GW. The total world energy usage in 2015 was 13000-million-ton oil equivalent, which translates to 17.3 Terawatts of continuous power during the year.

508 Gigawatts is equal to about 0.5 Terawatt, which puts us at approximately 3% of worldwide energy generation.

We were at 0.12% in 2010. And we’ve barely even started.

Big things have small beginnings.

---

Posted from my blog with SteemPress : https://selfscroll.com/a-new-hope-how-solar-energy-might-make-a-difference/

---