The global energy system faces deep uncertainty in the near, medium, and long terms. Amidst war in Europe, the urgent need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and many other factors, long-term energy outlooks offer one lens through which to assess the wide range of potential futures for global energy, emissions, and even geopolitics.
The International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) produces comprehensive statistics on a range of topics related to renewable energy. This publication presents renewable power generation capacity statistics for the past decade (2012-2021) in trilingual tables.
lectrification is the most cost-effective way to decarbonise Europe’s economy. Direct and indirect electrification will make up 75% of Europe’s energy demand by 2050. The European Commission wants wind to be half of the EU’s electricity by then. However, this can only happen if power grids are optimised and expanded in a timely manner.
The wind industry enjoyed its second-best year ever amidst pandemic but new installations must still quadruple by the end of the decade to meet a net zero pathway.
In the last 20 years, the People’s Republic of China (hereafter, “China”) has strengthened its position on the global stage as an energy innovator, as illustrated by the stories of solar power and, more recently, electric mobility. This is the result of several decades of increasing policy focus on technology innovation, which underpin China’s ambitions to […]
The global CO2 emissions and energy demand numbers are based on the IEA’s detailed region-by-region and fuel-by-fuel analysis, drawing on the latest official national data and publicly available energy, economic and weather data. Combined with the methane emissions estimates published by the IEA and estimates of nitrous oxide and flaring related CO2 emissions, this new […]
To deliver net zero, the world faces a huge challenge. We must rapidly transition from high carbon energy sources to low carbon technologies such as wind power. Across the last thirty years we have seen the successful maturation of offshore wind. It is now recognised as a low cost, secure power source, able to underpin […]
By 2050, we expect that floating offshore wind power projects will generate 264gw or 15% of the total power generation of all offshore wind power projects. In this case, this is equivalent to more than 3000 times of Hywind tampen, the world’s largest floating offshore wind farm under construction in Norway, or the sum of […]
Europe installed 17 GW (11 GW in the EU-27) of new wind capacity in 2021. This is not even half of what the EU should be building to be on tract to deliver its 2030 Climate and Energy goals. 81% of the new wind installation in Europe last year were onshore wind. Sweden, Germany, and […]
‘Paradigm shift’ as new renewables replace costly gas instead of dirtier coal power