The new year dawns full of the promise and perils that the renewable energy industry has grown accustomed — or some cases, inured — to.

In 2018, installed wind and solar farms surpassed the one-terawatt (TW) mark for the first time — a phenomenal milestone from many standpoints, not least for the fact that well over half this worldwide fleet has been powered up in the last five years by sectors that have simultaneously managed to drive down the levelised cost of energy (LCOE) for both technologies to under $30MWh.

And this is just the start, of course. Forecasts are that the next 1TW of clean-energy will be on line by 2023 — at an LCOE halved again, as the industrialisation of offshore wind ramps up, turbines scale up further, PV is further commoditised, the price of energy storage plummets, and a post-subsidy merchant renewables market establishes itself.

By 2050, by most estimates, a world-girding decentralised — and so democratised — energy network crackling with 2.1TW of wind and 2.3TW of solar will be covering 80% of electricity demand, by then making up almost 50% of total energy consumption.

Yet, the bitter reality remains that only by the most optimistic calculus will wind and solar be able to take over enough of the planet’s power production to keep global temperatures to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels as set out in the Paris Agreement.

Indeed, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has warned that only 12 years remain to move global decarbonisation meaningfully forward to avoid the most catastrophic impacts of climate change. By its figuring, this would require a near-impossible 70-85% of total demand be met by renewables by mid-century.

Heart-felt declamations to drive the energy transition forward further and faster fall short. What is required, as Vestas chief Anders Runevad declares in his recent op-ed for Recharge, is for renewables to move beyond “trying to do what we do in ever cheaper ways… to take on the bigger responsibility of supplying the baseload energy the world needs… while addressing [the challenges of] climate change”.

Renewables cannot do it alone. The sector will need to link arms with the wider energy industry.

For renewables, this means shifting from being chiefly power providers to becoming integral to a new energy system. The key elements are in place: evermore powerful and efficient wind and solar generation technologies, ever-cheaper energy storage being fostered by a rapidly gearing-up electric vehicles market, and the digitalisation technology that will be the lifeblood of the internet of things and the future super-intelligent grid.

But renewables cannot do it alone. The sector will need to link arms with the wider energy industry, network operators, regulators, the transport, housing and heating sectors, as well as corporations of every stripe. And even then we’ll still need to count on humanity’s Promethean genius for invention to puzzle out the final pieces of the world’s shape-shifting energy transition.

How this will all work together in one seamless system is a great unknown. However, with the latest climate change-fuelled devastations, from the super-typhoons which deluged swathes of Indonesia and China to the wildfires that razed 230,000 acres of California, time waits for no-one.

As the English man of letters Samuel Johnson once said: “When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.” Let’s hope we can slip the noose. 

Transition

'Renewables must become integral to the global energy system'