The market for renewables and other news
Thought you'd be interested in some recent market forecasts that hold optimism and note the complexities for the future of renewables.
Two reports by Boulder-based Pike Research capture the shape of the wind turbine and micro-grid markets, thanks to founder and principal Clint Wheelock. We’ll feature a chat with Wheelock in a future blog.
Wheelock has been research director at a number of high-powered market analysis firms over the past decade and has a team of analysts looking at renewable energy sources and other clean-tech markets. These folks are smart technologists and pragmatic analysts, not evangelists or starry-eyed do-gooders. Thus, their views are worthy of note.
In a report titled “Wind generation capacity and turbine deployments,” Pike Research paints an optimistic, if mixed picture and notes there are bears and bulls in the market. Good news: the U.S. added more wind generation in 2008 than any other country. Not-so-good news: this year’s deep recession not unexpectedly threw the market into turmoil. How the wind turbine market recovers may be pivotal.
“In 2008,” according to Pike Research, “United States wind power generation capacity passed the 25 gigawatt mark by adding over 8 gigawatts from the year before, which represented the largest individual gain of any country in the world. This growth rate of 50% exceeded that of the year before, indicating that the market is still relatively young and has room to grow, despite the economic slowdown.”
In the big picture, “the market for wind turbines will continue to grow through 2015 driven by new generation additions as well as replacements of smaller, older turbines with new, larger, more efficient turbines,” according to Pike Research.
And here’s some perspective: “In 2007, generation capacity from renewable sources made up only 4% of the world’s electricity sources,” according to Pike Research. “But 16% of new electricity generation capacity additions were from renewables with wind power making up more than 80% of these gains by renewables.”
Of course, if you want competing views from bulls and bears in the wind market, you either scratch around the Web or you become a Pike Research client.
Perhaps even more relevant, close to home, is Pike Research’s note on micro-grids, particularly smart grids – a path Boulder County has embarked upon in a relatively expensive partnership between Xcel Energy, the county and myriad vendors.
Pike Research noted recently that “the fundamental architecture of today’s electrical grid, which is based on the idea of a top-down system predicated on unidirectional energy flows, is growing increasingly obsolete,” which “poses risks to grid reliability and security, and could hinder the adoption of renewable power generation.”
In contrast, “micro-grids are being driven in part by the broader push to create a Smart Grid that will add intelligence and automation to the electricity infrastructure while facilitating the integration of renewable energy resources, electric vehicles, and greater customer control over energy consumption,” according to Wheelock’s report.
How the transition takes place will vary by geography and the nature of micro-grid proponents, whether they be communities, corporations or institutions, Wheelock says. But Pike Research forecasts that 3 giga-watts of new micro-grid capacity will be built globally in the next five years, representing a nearly $8 billion investment, with North America accounting for about three-quarters of that work and investment. Here the likely proponents will be institutional, followed by commercial/industrial and communities (insert Boulder here). Elsewhere, in Europe and Asia, Pike Research anticipates that community-led micro-grids will carry the day.
As I have noted, smart money is increasingly pouring into sustainable practices in every field, and I have to suspect that the meltdown on Wall Street over increasingly arcane financial “instruments” that in part brought the nation’s economy to its knees has played a role.
How many more lessons in boom-and-bust do we need? Why does the modifier “inevitable” always precede “boom-and-bust” as if we’re doomed to be stupid forever?
Yes, friends, when smart money understands that sustainable practices can take the edge off boom-and-bust, we’re heading in a new direction. Now’s the time to bring pressure to bear on elected representatives to create the sorts of tax structures and incentives to grow the myriad fields of sustainability for solid economic footing, one that serves the homeowner, taxpayer and citizen. And not the sickening cycle of money and political influence that brought massive tax subsidies to the largest oil companies in the Bush/Cheney administration -- and, to be sure, that continues with other political patrons and this Democratic Congress as well.
And a word on the noise-makers: Those who cry “socialism” over the Obama Administration’s attempt to reform health care or help workers or redirect American policy to encourage renewables were conspicuously absent when the Bush/Cheney crowd gave away billions to cement Big Oil’s hegemony through tax breaks. Since when, under any political philosophy, do you provide tax incentives to massively profitable businesses?
Well, that crowd is using every dirty word and trick in the book to prevent us from a new direction and, personally, I think they’re so bankrupt of ideas and actual patriotism that it’s laughable. As Winston Churchill is reputed to have said, “always do battle with a smile.” This, I believe, is a variant of the even older phrase, “Don’t let the bastards get you down.”
That’s why I spend several weeks a year in the backcountry, which provides lessons of its own, and not just natural ones. I returned recently from 10 days in the backcountry at Dinosaur National Monument, where the Yampa River meets the Green River at Echo Park, named by John Wesley Powell as he boated through en route to his better-known journey down the Grand Canyon in 1869.
I’ve visited for week-long explorations several times a year since the mid-1980s, so after more than 50 visits I’m becoming intimately familiar with the place’s magical qualities, despite its daunting scale. The monument encompasses perhaps 250,000 acres of monument land and a like amount of adjacent BLM grazing lands. One dirt road runs some 40-50 miles across a high plateau south of the Yampa and gives access to the pinon-juniper forests and grasslands along the canyon rim, and access down to the Yampa a thousand feet below, best visited after the jam of rafters cascade through in spring and early summer.
I have personally encountered eagles, vultures, river otters, bighorn rams, elk and seen unmistakable sign of bear and mountain lion in my years up there.
This is one of the quietest places in the lower 48 states, according to measurements taken over the past few decades. Not incidentally, this desert jewel was once proposed for damming but saved by David Brower and the Sierra Club. The monument currently remains under threat of adjacent oil and gas leases – inappropriately close to irreplaceable wildlands and cultural resources -- made in the last days of the Bush/Cheney Administration. This short-sighted move apparently has been reversed by Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar, but keep your eyes open. That’s a lesson that should still reverberate from the last 8 years: if you don’t continually fight for the things that matter, someone or a group of people with an agenda will take it away. Over my dead body, people.
That Dinosaur excursion meant, however, that I missed the Peak Oil conference in Denver. Great concept – that we’re at or near the peak oil production in our history – and that idea, of course, is hotly debated by anyone connected to the oil industry. But oil is a slippery beast and writer Peter Maas – who clearly buys the concept of “peak oil” -- was in Boulder recently to discuss his new book, titled Crude World: The Violent Twilight of Oil, which documents how oil often means prosperity only for despots around the globe and that oil actually harms the quality of life – and chance for a just society -- for citizens of countries that export it. The glaring counterexample is Norway, apparently, which Maas credits with having established civil institutions before oil flowed there. But the litany of oil-fueled despotism took Maas around the globe for ten years. I was very disappointed to miss his talk at C.U.
Anyone who was there care to share?
Okay, up next: this fall, after I emerged from ten blessed days in the backcountry with no news of the outside world, I learned that significant new legislation has been offered on the national front.
Two reports by Boulder-based Pike Research capture the shape of the wind turbine and micro-grid markets, thanks to founder and principal Clint Wheelock. We’ll feature a chat with Wheelock in a future blog.
Wheelock has been research director at a number of high-powered market analysis firms over the past decade and has a team of analysts looking at renewable energy sources and other clean-tech markets. These folks are smart technologists and pragmatic analysts, not evangelists or starry-eyed do-gooders. Thus, their views are worthy of note.
In a report titled “Wind generation capacity and turbine deployments,” Pike Research paints an optimistic, if mixed picture and notes there are bears and bulls in the market. Good news: the U.S. added more wind generation in 2008 than any other country. Not-so-good news: this year’s deep recession not unexpectedly threw the market into turmoil. How the wind turbine market recovers may be pivotal.
“In 2008,” according to Pike Research, “United States wind power generation capacity passed the 25 gigawatt mark by adding over 8 gigawatts from the year before, which represented the largest individual gain of any country in the world. This growth rate of 50% exceeded that of the year before, indicating that the market is still relatively young and has room to grow, despite the economic slowdown.”
In the big picture, “the market for wind turbines will continue to grow through 2015 driven by new generation additions as well as replacements of smaller, older turbines with new, larger, more efficient turbines,” according to Pike Research.
And here’s some perspective: “In 2007, generation capacity from renewable sources made up only 4% of the world’s electricity sources,” according to Pike Research. “But 16% of new electricity generation capacity additions were from renewables with wind power making up more than 80% of these gains by renewables.”
Of course, if you want competing views from bulls and bears in the wind market, you either scratch around the Web or you become a Pike Research client.
Perhaps even more relevant, close to home, is Pike Research’s note on micro-grids, particularly smart grids – a path Boulder County has embarked upon in a relatively expensive partnership between Xcel Energy, the county and myriad vendors.
Pike Research noted recently that “the fundamental architecture of today’s electrical grid, which is based on the idea of a top-down system predicated on unidirectional energy flows, is growing increasingly obsolete,” which “poses risks to grid reliability and security, and could hinder the adoption of renewable power generation.”
In contrast, “micro-grids are being driven in part by the broader push to create a Smart Grid that will add intelligence and automation to the electricity infrastructure while facilitating the integration of renewable energy resources, electric vehicles, and greater customer control over energy consumption,” according to Wheelock’s report.
How the transition takes place will vary by geography and the nature of micro-grid proponents, whether they be communities, corporations or institutions, Wheelock says. But Pike Research forecasts that 3 giga-watts of new micro-grid capacity will be built globally in the next five years, representing a nearly $8 billion investment, with North America accounting for about three-quarters of that work and investment. Here the likely proponents will be institutional, followed by commercial/industrial and communities (insert Boulder here). Elsewhere, in Europe and Asia, Pike Research anticipates that community-led micro-grids will carry the day.
As I have noted, smart money is increasingly pouring into sustainable practices in every field, and I have to suspect that the meltdown on Wall Street over increasingly arcane financial “instruments” that in part brought the nation’s economy to its knees has played a role.
How many more lessons in boom-and-bust do we need? Why does the modifier “inevitable” always precede “boom-and-bust” as if we’re doomed to be stupid forever?
Yes, friends, when smart money understands that sustainable practices can take the edge off boom-and-bust, we’re heading in a new direction. Now’s the time to bring pressure to bear on elected representatives to create the sorts of tax structures and incentives to grow the myriad fields of sustainability for solid economic footing, one that serves the homeowner, taxpayer and citizen. And not the sickening cycle of money and political influence that brought massive tax subsidies to the largest oil companies in the Bush/Cheney administration -- and, to be sure, that continues with other political patrons and this Democratic Congress as well.
And a word on the noise-makers: Those who cry “socialism” over the Obama Administration’s attempt to reform health care or help workers or redirect American policy to encourage renewables were conspicuously absent when the Bush/Cheney crowd gave away billions to cement Big Oil’s hegemony through tax breaks. Since when, under any political philosophy, do you provide tax incentives to massively profitable businesses?
Well, that crowd is using every dirty word and trick in the book to prevent us from a new direction and, personally, I think they’re so bankrupt of ideas and actual patriotism that it’s laughable. As Winston Churchill is reputed to have said, “always do battle with a smile.” This, I believe, is a variant of the even older phrase, “Don’t let the bastards get you down.”
That’s why I spend several weeks a year in the backcountry, which provides lessons of its own, and not just natural ones. I returned recently from 10 days in the backcountry at Dinosaur National Monument, where the Yampa River meets the Green River at Echo Park, named by John Wesley Powell as he boated through en route to his better-known journey down the Grand Canyon in 1869.
I’ve visited for week-long explorations several times a year since the mid-1980s, so after more than 50 visits I’m becoming intimately familiar with the place’s magical qualities, despite its daunting scale. The monument encompasses perhaps 250,000 acres of monument land and a like amount of adjacent BLM grazing lands. One dirt road runs some 40-50 miles across a high plateau south of the Yampa and gives access to the pinon-juniper forests and grasslands along the canyon rim, and access down to the Yampa a thousand feet below, best visited after the jam of rafters cascade through in spring and early summer.
I have personally encountered eagles, vultures, river otters, bighorn rams, elk and seen unmistakable sign of bear and mountain lion in my years up there.
This is one of the quietest places in the lower 48 states, according to measurements taken over the past few decades. Not incidentally, this desert jewel was once proposed for damming but saved by David Brower and the Sierra Club. The monument currently remains under threat of adjacent oil and gas leases – inappropriately close to irreplaceable wildlands and cultural resources -- made in the last days of the Bush/Cheney Administration. This short-sighted move apparently has been reversed by Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar, but keep your eyes open. That’s a lesson that should still reverberate from the last 8 years: if you don’t continually fight for the things that matter, someone or a group of people with an agenda will take it away. Over my dead body, people.
That Dinosaur excursion meant, however, that I missed the Peak Oil conference in Denver. Great concept – that we’re at or near the peak oil production in our history – and that idea, of course, is hotly debated by anyone connected to the oil industry. But oil is a slippery beast and writer Peter Maas – who clearly buys the concept of “peak oil” -- was in Boulder recently to discuss his new book, titled Crude World: The Violent Twilight of Oil, which documents how oil often means prosperity only for despots around the globe and that oil actually harms the quality of life – and chance for a just society -- for citizens of countries that export it. The glaring counterexample is Norway, apparently, which Maas credits with having established civil institutions before oil flowed there. But the litany of oil-fueled despotism took Maas around the globe for ten years. I was very disappointed to miss his talk at C.U.
Anyone who was there care to share?
Okay, up next: this fall, after I emerged from ten blessed days in the backcountry with no news of the outside world, I learned that significant new legislation has been offered on the national front.
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