The trillion dollar question: will renewables displace natural gas?

A recent story on Bloomberg News, “What If Big Oil’s Bet on Gas Is Wrong?”, challenges the conventional wisdom that demand for natural gas will grow as it displaces coal and facilitates the growth of renewable energy sources like wind and solar power. Instead, the forecast highlighted in the article envisions gas’s global share of electricity dropping from 23% to 16% by 2040 as renewables shoot past it. So much for gas as the “bridge to the future” if that proves accurate.

‘Battery improvements depend on chemistry, not semiconductor electronics. Assuming their costs can continue to fall like those for solar cells looks questionable’

Several points in the story leave room for doubt. For starters, this projection from Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF), the renewables-focused analytical arm of Bloomberg, would leave coal with a larger share of power generation than gas in 2040, when it has renewables reaching 50%. That might make sense in the European context on which their forecast seems to be based, but it flies against the US experience of coal losing 18 points of electricity market share since 2007 (from 48.5% to 30.4%), with two-thirds of that drop picked up by gas and one-third by expanding renewables. (See chart below.)

Read the Energy Post story by Geoffrey Styles - “The trillion dollar question: will renewables displace natural gas?”

Energy experts give Trump the hard truth: You can’t bring coal back

Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF) has a message for the new president: You are not going to bring coal back.

Candidate Trump speaks during a coal
 mining roundtable in Virginia in August. 

Donald Trump won the presidency with claims that he is a brilliant businessman who will create jobs. He railed against a political “war on coal” supposedly waged by President Obama, one Trump claimed was “killing American jobs.” On his first day in office, Trump deleted all the climate change references on the White House website, replacing it with an “energy plan” that asserts he is “committed to… reviving America’s coal industry.”

In a new analysis, leading independent energy experts at BNEF dismantle these claims. “Whatever President Trump may say, U.S. coal’s main problem has been cheap natural gas and renewable power, not a politically driven ‘war on coal,’” explain BNEF chair Michael Liebreich and chief editor Angus McCrone. Therefore “it will continue being pushed out of the generating mix.”

Read Joe Romm’s story on Think Progress - “Energy experts give Trump the hard truth: You can’t bring coal back.”

What’s really warming the world?

Skeptics of manmade climate change offer various natural causes to explain why the earth has warmed 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit since 1880.

But can these account for the planet’s rising temperature?

Scroll down to see how many different factors, both natural and industrial contribute to global warming, based on findings from NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

Read the Bloomberg story - “What’s really warming the world?”

Breaking down the cost of renewables

Kobad Bhavnagri

Debates about renewable energy are back in the headlines.

Tony Abbott popped up on the weekend saying that the Renewable Energy Target should be scrapped, because it will push up power prices.

But yesterday, the Shadow Energy minister Mark Butler told RN Breakfast that the target puts downward pressure on prices.

So can we really continue our transition toward renewable energy without any extra costs?

Listen to today’s Radio National interview by Hamish Macdonald with the, head of Bloomberg New Energy Finance in Australia, Kobad Bhavnagri - “Breaking down the cost of renewables.”

Solar will be more than half of generation capacity by 2040

by Giles Parkinson

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Giles Parkinson.

 new forecast by leading analysts Bloomberg New Energy Finance predicts that Australia will have more than 50GW (50,000MW) of solar capacity by 2040, and more than half of all generation capacity will be “behind the meter” and located in households and businesses.

The forecasts by Bloomberg, made at RenewEconomy’s Disruption and the Energy Industry conference in Sydney this week, also included a prediction that household solar capacity would be 2.5 times greater than that of remaining coal-fired generators by 2040.

Read Parkinson’s story - “Australia tipped to have 50GW of solar capacity by 2040”.

Climate deniers to be the biggest money losers - Mercer Research report

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 major new global financial report finds that investors who remain ignorant of or deny climate science will be big money losers compared to those who are climate-savvy.

The Mercer Research report, “Investing in a Time of Climate Change,” details the prospects — and the pitfalls — of various climate scenarios. For the report, “Mercer collaborated with 16 investment partners, collectively responsible for more than US$1.5 trillion, to produce the report,” including Germany’s Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development and “the private sector arm of the World Bank Group.”

A Bloomberg column by investment guru Barry Ritholtz summed up the report: “In the real world, climate-change deniers are and will be giant money losers.”

Read the ClimateProgress story - “Bloomberg Bombshell: ‘Climate Change Deniers Will Be Giant Money Losers’”.

Unsubsidised renewable energy has the competitive edge

Unsubsidised renewable energy is now cheaper than electricity from new-build coal- and gas-fired power stations in Australia, according to new analysis from research firm Bloomberg New Energy Finance.

This new ranking of Australia’s energy resources is the product of BNEF’s Sydney analysis team, which comprehensively modelled the cost of generating electricity in Australia from different sources.

The study shows that electricity can be supplied from a new wind farm at a cost of AUD 80/MWh (USD 83), compared to AUD 143/MWh from a new coal plant or AUD 116/MWh from a new baseload gas plant, including the cost of emissions under the Gillard government’s carbon pricing scheme.

 However even without a carbon price (the most efficient way to reduce economy-wide emissions) wind energy is 14% cheaper than new coal and 18% cheaper than new gas.

“The perception that fossil fuels are cheap and renewables are expensive is now out of date”, said Michael Liebreich, chief executive of Bloomberg New Energy Finance.

“The fact that wind power is now cheaper than coal and gas in a country with some of the world’s best fossil fuel resources shows that clean energy is a game changer which promises to turn the economics of power systems on its head,” he said.

Bloomberg New Energy Finance’s research on Australia shows that since 2011, the cost of wind generation has fallen by 10% and the cost of solar photovoltaics by 29%. In contrast, the cost of energy from new fossil-fuelled plants is high and rising.

BNEF’s analysts conclude that by 2020, large-scale solar PV will also be cheaper than coal and gas, when carbon prices are factored in. By 2030, dispatchable renewable generating technologies such as biomass and solar thermal could also be cost-competitive.