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Renewable Energy Will Reach New Heights In 2022
Record additions planned for next year mean the clean energy transition looks better than ever
Just twenty years ago, as the importance of climate change was becoming clear, the potential for clean energy looked bleak.
Wind and solar power together provided less than half a percent of global electricity production, and high costs were prohibitive for most countries. Hydropower remained a significant source of energy, but it was also declining as a share of total electricity production, down to 17.7% in 2000 from 20% in 1985. Similarly, nuclear power was in the midst of a decline of its own.
Meanwhile, natural gas was growing and coal remained the world’s largest energy source.
It was difficult to see how clean energy sources could ever replace fossil fuels, and skeptics considered green energy to be an expensive and impractical folly.
An Energy Revolution
The progress that occurred over the past twenty years has been astonishing —the cost of wind and solar has declined at a pace many thought impossible, now reaching levels even lower than natural and coal.
The impact on the global electricity mix was obvious. Coal entered a global…
