Energize Weekly, February 14, 2018
Renewable energy generation doubled in the U.S. between 2006 and 2016, reaching 18 percent of the country’s generating capacity. As strong as those numbers are, global renewable energy growth has been even greater.
The National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s (NREL) recently released 2018 Renewable Energy Data Book found that while renewable energy growth in the U.S., particularly in recent years, has picked up, the pace in other countries has been sustained.
In 2016, the most recent year the outlook covers, the year-over-year growth in U.S. installed renewable energy projects was up 12 percent to 215 gigawatts (GW) compared to a 9.1 percent increase in global installed capacity to 2,016 GW. That represented 31 percent of all electric generating capacity worldwide, almost twice the renewables share in the U.S.
In 2016, China led the world in cumulative renewable energy installed capacity followed by the U.S. China also led in cumulative wind, hydropower and grid-connected solar photovoltaic (PV) capacity.
Spain led concentrating solar power (CSP) capacity. The U.S. continued to lead geothermal and biomass installed capacity.
The top five countries for renewable generating capacity were China, the U.S., Brazil, Germany and Canada. While most of the countries focused primarily on wind and solar, Brazil was among the top counties for hydropower and biomass.
Globally, hydropower is still the largest single renewable source, accounting for 54 percent of capacity, followed by wind at 24 percent, PV and CSP at 15 percent, biomass 6 percent and geothermal 1 percent.
Worldwide, PV continued to be one of the fastest-growing renewable energy technologies in 2016, with global PV capacity up 33 percent, while U.S. installed PV capacity increased by 52 percent.
Still, when it came to total installed PV capacity, other countries, including much smaller ones, measure up favorably.
The U.S. had 42.4 GW of PV capacity compared with 41.2 GW in Germany and 43 GW in Japan. Italy with a fifth of the population and 3 percent of the land of the U.S. had 19.3 GW. Taken together, the five largest countries in the European Union had twice as much PV capacity as the U.S.
Globally installed wind capacity grew by 12 percent compared with 2015. In the U.S., wind capacity grew 11 percent to 82 GW.
Again the largest European Union countries (Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Spain and Italy) had a combined capacity of 109 GW. Demark, which in 2019 generated 38 percent of its electricity from wind, had 3.1 GW of wind generation.
While renewable sources provided 15.6 percent of the electricity in the U.S.—in 2016, 640 terawatt-hours (TWh)—worldwide renewable generation accounted for 26 percent of all electricity with 6,211 TWh.
