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A transformation is happening in global energy markets that's worth noting as 2016 comes to an end: Solar power, for the first time, is becoming the cheapest form of new electricity.
This has happened in isolated projects in the past: an especially competitive auction in the Middle East, for example, resulting in record-cheap solar costs. But now unsubsidized solar is beginning to outcompete coal and natural gas on a larger scale, and notably, new solar projects in emerging markets are costing less to build than wind projects, according to fresh data from Bloomberg New Energy Finance.
The chart below shows the average cost of new wind and solar from 58 emerging-market economies, including China, India, and Brazil. While solar was bound to fall below wind eventually, given its steeper price declines, few predicted it would happen this soon.
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"Renewables are robustly entering the era of undercutting" fossil fuel prices, BNEF chairman Michael Liebreich said in a note to clients this week.
Will we see a sharp pivot in energy production, or a gradual tailing off of fossil fuels as renewables take hold?
(Score: 1, Interesting) by khallow on Sunday December 18 2016, @05:40AM
And if you think I'm paranoid, look what they have done to undercut climate science
Look at the numbers. They are peanuts, on the order of a low single digit percent of a single quarter's profits for a 20 or so year span ($1.7 billion profit for 2nd quarter of 2016, which was an unusually low profit quarter in recent time compared to perhaps $40 million of alleged climate change denialism for the two decade period in question).
They aren't even trying. Meanwhile the World Wildlife Fund, the largest NGO supporting the current climate change narrative, reported revenue of almost $280 million [forbes.com] for 2015 alone with $48 million in government support. So when one of the Wikipedia links claims that "Exxon has given more than $20 million to organizations supporting climate change denial" in the decade 1997-2007, I can in turn note with the same rhetorical equivalence, "governments of the world have given almost $50 million to a single organization in 2015 which supports climate change alarmism".
The numbers aren't even close. No matter how you pump up the "denial" side, alarmism outspends denialism by at least an order of magnitude. This has the same absurd propaganda characteristics as the recent blaming of the Clinton loss on Russian hacking and fake news. It all reminds me of Emmanuel Goldstein from 1984. He died in some decades-old power struggle yet was blamed for everything that went wrong in totalitarian Oceania. Certain ideologies need scapegoats in order to function. Exxon and the Koch brothers are such scapegoats.
But if you should ever become interested in truth, you'll need to look elsewhere for why climate change rhetoric isn't faring well these days.