The Economic Competitiveness of Renewable Energy: Pathways to 100% Global Coverage

Chapter 9

Future Energy Projections – The 150 Peta-Watt-hour Challenge

9.1 Historical Development

It is interesting to observe the radical change with respect to the postulate that renewable Energies will be able to supply all global energy needs – and not in hundreds of years, but cost efficiently in the course of the current 21^st century. When I started my industrial career in the early 1980s no one seriously dared make such a prognosis. Although I personally believed in a substantial – but at the time of the 1980s not a 100% – contribution of renewables I saw the relative role for PV as rather limited. In the 1990s with an annual market of ~50 MW I ventured a guess that PV may have up to 5,000 MW annual installations in 2010 thereby adding measurable TWh electricity – reality showed ~6,000 MW in 2008 (so my guess was obviously not too bad). The initial success of the Solar Thermal Electricity Generating Systems made people believe that this technology would be the large scale solar contributor while PV was seen as the junior partner. Wind started to demonstrate cost efficient production of renewable electricity. In the late 1990s I developed the global HVDC concept (to be discussed in the next chapter) to overcome the variability of wind and solar for a 100% renewable energy world. However, at that time I could only imagine the realization towards the end of this century. Cost efficient storage for electricity at the time was not seen as a viable solution. The cost and price ...