China, India leads global surge in renewable energy

China and India are leading a global surge in renewable adoption committing billions of dollars in investments, cutting coal projects and creating new jobs in the sector.

In January, China announced a plan to invest $360 billion in renewable energy through 2020, with a goal of creating 13 million jobs.

The 13thFive Year Plan, covering 2016–2020, also sets ambitious targets for non-fossil capacity: By 2020, the country expects to install 340 GW of hydropower, 200 GW of wind, 120 GW of solar power, as well as 58 GW of nuclear capacity and 15 GW of biomass.

“The Paris Agreement is a hard-won achievement which is in keeping with the underlying trend of global development. All signatories should stick to it instead of walking away from it as this is a responsibility we must assume for future generations,” says President Xi of China.

India’s 2016 Draft Energy Plan includes a goal of 175 GW of renewable energy capacity by 2021-22, up from about 43 GW currently.

The country’s Jawaharlal Nehru National Solar Mission aims to install 100 GW of solar capacity by 2022. Equally important, through a combination of policies, this initiative’s goal is also to aggressively bring down the costs of solar power to achieve grid parity in that same timeframe.

These two countries contributed massively to the success recorded in the renewable sector in 2016. There were other factors that worked together to ensure the sector witnessed tremendous success.

Steep cost declines in the cost of renewable energy continued, says a report by the Union of Concerned Scientists, as documented by a UNEP-BNEF report. The average capital costs of new solar PV projects in 2016 were 13 percent lower than in 2015, onshore wind costs saw a drop of 11.5 percent and the drop for offshore wind was 10 percent.

Solar costs hit record lows, continuing a year-on-year downward trend. In August 2016, Chile set a record at 2.91 cents/kilowatt hour (kWh), which was quickly beaten by a 42 cents/kWh solar power tariff bid in the UAE. Morocco set an onshore wind record of 3 cents/kWh for bids for large scale wind projects.

For the second year in a row, a majority of the new electricity generation capacity installed globally was (non-hydro) renewable energy, according to the UNEP-BNEF report.

At 138.5 gigawatts (GW), the total 2016 non-hydro RE capacity share amounted to just over 55 percent of all new installed capacity. Solar installations led, accounting for 75 GW. Renewable energy, excluding large hydro, provided 11.3 percent of the world’s electricity in 2016.

9.8 million people were employed in renewable energy worldwide, according to IRENA’s 2017 report on Renewable Energy and Jobs, up 1.1% from 2015. Solar PV with 3.1 million jobs (up 12% from 2015) and wind with 1.2 million (up 7% from 2015) led the jobs numbers.

China and India are leading players in this global clean energy revolution — a fact that was underscored in a recent report that ranked them at the top of Ernst and Young’s renewable energy country attractiveness index, outperforming the US.

Also other countries in Sub Saharan Africa are also increasing investments in Renewable energy. Nigeria plans to increase capacity of renewable energy to 30GW by 2030.

Isaac Anyaogu