But new figures from the global Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) show that the picture is quickly changing. BNEF predicts 37GW of small-scale solar PV - mostly on rooftops - and 33GW of battery storage will be installed by then.
The result is that, with global electricity generation rising by 56% between 2014 and 2040 as economies develop and populations grow, global power sector emissions will increase from 13.1 gigatonnes to a peak of 15.3Gt in 2029.
The BNEF report follows predictions from the Australian Energy Market Operator, and even some of the main utilities, which follow along the same lines.
In an energy-starved country like India, there is tremendous potential for increasing the share of solar energy, as the cost of the solar panels has dropped by a whopping 60-70% during the last couple of years.
Renewables will account for two thirds of that total over the next 25 years, with coal, gas and nuclear generation attracting respectively $1.6tn, $1.2tn and $1.3tn. “By 2040, developing economies will have spent $1 trillion on small PV systems, in many cases bringing electricity for the first time to remote villages”. BNEF’s sectoral products provide financial, economic and policy analysis, as well as news and the world’s most comprehensive database of assets, investments, companies and equipment in the clean energy space.
However, despite this boost in renewables, there will still be too much fossil fuel capacity remaining in the system, meaning that climate goals will not be met.
Yet new coal-fired power generators and legacy fossil fuel plants will undermine the climate gains, the New Energy Outlook 2015 report warns. This is one reason why Big Oil recently called for a substantial global carbon price to help push out coal generation.
New mining projects, such as those in Queensland’s Galilee Basin, supplied coal only for export and it had been “quite some time” since a new coal power station had been built in Australia, he said.
In Australia, the grid faces similar problems.
It will be cheaper to replace retired electricity plants with wind or solar farms rather than with modernized coal plants even without the government’s participation, Kobad Bhavnagri, the head of Australia’s Bloomberg New Energy Finance, told the Guardian. He predicts large-scale solar PV (currently small more than 130MW) will reach 15,000MW, overtaking wind energy (now 3,500MW) which will be 13,000MW. As stated in the REN21 report, renewables now comprise an estimated 27.7 per cent of the world’s power generating capacity.
“This will require sophisticated market mechanisms to be developed to enable the system to effectively utilise these assets”, Hugh Bromley, BNEF’s specialist in distributed energy, said. It draws on the expertise of more than 100 analysts and researchers around the world specialising in the energy transition. The low cost and long life of coal generation will mean power sector emissions fall by only 9 per cent by 2030, compared to 2014.
The renewable energy target was “the only policy now operational that will have an impact on the power sector“, Bhavnagri said.
The area where government policy had an important role to play was the extension of the life of coal power plants.
“Fossil fuels are the core problem: it’s the issue we need to get at, to start reducing emissions from fossil fuels burned”, Professor Flannery said at a climate change forum in Sydney.
