SoylentNews

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for SoyCow8162:

2019 saw over 60 gigawatts of wind power installed:

Wind power is now one of the cheapest options for generating electricity. In many areas of the globe, building and maintaining wind power is cheaper per unit of power than it is to fuel a previously constructed fossil fuel plant. While offshore wind remains more expensive, its prices have dropped dramatically over the last several years, and it is rapidly approaching price parity with fossil fuels.

But cost isn't the only thing at issue. Renewables may require new transmission lines to feed their power to where people actually live, and managing wind's intermittent nature may require grid upgrades once its percentage gets high enough. And due to the past successes of wind, a significant number of the best sites are now already in use in some regions. Given those issues, it can be difficult to justify shutting down power plants that may have decades of service left in their expected lifespan. This is especially true in fully industrialized countries, where total electricity use has been trending downward, largely due to gains in energy efficiency.

Despite these potential headwinds, wind saw its second highest total of installs in 2019, at 60.4GW, which represents a 19 percent growth compared to the year before. (The only year with a higher total was 2017.)

This was primarily driven by policy changes in the two wind giants, the US and China. China added about 24GW of new capacity last year, which places its total at 230GW. There, starting next year, all new wind projects will be required to be competitive with the rest of the sources on the grid, which is largely driven by the price of coal power. In the US, a tax credit was expected to expire at the end of this year (it has been extended for an additional year), leading to a large number of plants that were installed to take advantage of this credit. Because of that, the US saw an additional 9.1GW of capacity, bringing its total to over 100GW for the first time.

2019 did see a new landmark: for the first time, more than 10 percent of the newly installed capacity was in the form of offshore wind, at 6.1GW. This places offshore wind at nearly five percent of the total global capacity, at over 29GW total.

Original Submission