SolarSuperState Association forecast: 1,300 GW of solar PV capacity will be installed in 2021 globally

 

On November 24^th, 2016 the SolarSuperState Association (Zurich, Switzerland) published its Annual Report 2015 with a 5 year forecast of its president Wolfgang Hein for cumulative global capacities of solar photovoltaics (PV) power.

According to Hein 1,300 GW of solar photovoltaic generation capacity will be installed in 2021 globally (2015: some 230 GW).

The forecast is based on the assumption of an average annual growth rate of the net annual additions of 50% per year in the five year period 2017–2021.

“Making global warming and the phase-out of fossil and nuclear fuels the first political priorities would require a substantial higher annual growth rate than 50% per year,” Hein says.

“In order to avoid the collapse of the global economy as a result of massive climate change and the following migration, the short term shift to renewable energies is necessary.”

A political option to alter national energy systems

Austria, Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Russia, Japan and the United States of America have gained within the last 110 years two times significant political experience to alter their whole national economies within five years, he added.

At these times, the goal of the economic changes was to win a world war (I and II). This time scale should be regarded as one political option that states still have today which was pointed out already by Preben Maegaard in his introduction to the Annual Report 2012 (page 4). This unique opportunity to change to renewable energies will not exist forever, the association notes.

“This opportunity can vanish within the next few years or decades. Then, it might be impossible to prevent the biggest negative impacts of Global Warming. Going fast for renewable energies is impossible for every state and every company that wants to maintain a high level of nuclear or fossil energy business within its own area of responsibility,” reads the press release.

Since nuclear energy is incompatible with the fast implementation of renewable energies, the fast expansion of renewables could mean short-term bankruptcies of for example major electric utilities with a lot of nuclear or fossil energy production capacity, SolarSuperState concludes. 

source: http://www.solarserver.com