Renewable Energy Investment up 60% Per Year in 2007, On Same Pace for 2008

September 5, 2008 in accelerating change, energy generation, growth, policy by nils | Add your comment

Windmills Along the M6, photo by Bob Cox Photography

Saw this news item about the growth of green energy investment last week, which tends to correlate with the idea that the growth rate of renewable energy is not linear, but geometric (that is, doubling every n years, like Moore's Law).

The UN Environment Programme (UNEP) reports that investments in renewable energy in 2007, at $148 billion, were 60 percent above 2006, with 2008 growth continuing. Achim Steiner, head of UNEP, said:

"The clean energy industry is maturing and its backers remain bullish. These findings should empower governments both North and South to reach a deep and meaningful new agreement by the crucial climate convention meeting in Copenhagen in late 2009. It is increasingly obvious to the public and investors alike that the transition to a low-carbon society is both a global imperative and an inevitability. This is attracting an enormous inflow of capital, talent and technology. But it is only inevitable if creative market mechanisms and public policy continue to evolve to liberate rather than frustrate this clean energy dawn. What is unfolding is nothing less than a fundamental transformation of the world’s energy infrastructure."

There was similar news recently about the growth of both solar energy generation and wind energy generation.

Thanks to blow-hard winds, the United States has just become the world's largest generator of wind energy.

Germany previously held this distinction, though since the United States has about 26 times more land than Germany, the milestone isn't a huge surprise. Nonetheless, we weren't expected to reach this point until late 2009. [Emphasis added - npd]

The key point is that we're ahead of schedule on renewables, because the schedule was based on linear growth projections. The big question that remains is not whether the growth is exponential, but what's the time period for doubling? Is it two years? Three years? One year? What do you think?