It looks like all of our efforts to embrace renewable sources of energy generation are starting to pay off in a big way. A new report from researchers at the Grantham Institute has announced that by 2020 coal and oil demand is set to decline, and that peak is being brought about by the next generation of green power.
The ramifications for businesses and governments who currently rely fossil fuels are enormous, and this report lays bare the changing reality of renewable power generation. While OPEC was once a force to be reckoned with, as more renewable generation comes online, and more EV’s populate the roads worldwide, the power that petro-states currently enjoy will shrink.
The power of renewable technology to shatter the current status quo is growing, and this report projects that fossil fuels may lose 10 per cent of market share to newer types of green power generation in the next ten years. This is a massive shift towards new solutions for our energy needs, and the effects that it will have on the existing economic structure are hard to overestimate.
While a 10 % change in the market may not seem like a lot, the effects of this shift could be huge.
In the past a similar change in the use of coal for power generation caused the collapse of the coal mining industry in the USA.
Even though that economic pain will no doubt sting, we need to embrace these changes as necessary, and a part of our inevitable movement away from fossil fuels.
“It’s time we fully understood the implications of these technologies’ relentless ride down the cost curve.” Commented Ajay Gambhir, Senior Research Fellow at the Grantham Institute who led the study, assisted by his colleague Dr Tamaryn Napp. Gambhir.
One aspect they explored was how likely advances in solar panels and EV’s would affect fossil fuel demand when compared to current international climate goals. They took a variety of situations using the most current data and economic projections and from this methodology their startling conclusions took shape.
Technological breakthroughs like printable solar panels give the study even more validity, and make some of the more far-fetched conclusions more realistic than we may think is possible.
What people have to pay for solar panels dropped 85 per cent over the last seven years, so it is no surprise that the effects of this highly useful technology are putting the world of energy generation on notice.
It will only be a matter of time until coal is no longer used, and it will be a wonderful day when it happens.
[via phys.org]
