China alone, in just the first four months of this year, for example, deployed 71 gigawatts of solar power capacity. Which is to say, notes the energy analyst Tim Buckley, that in one quarter of one year China built, in solar alone, as much energy capacity as has been created in the entire history of Australia’s National Energy Market.Buckley points to a chart published in recent weeks by the International Energy Agency to try to quantify the extraordinary recent surge in renewables.
“This is a chart that absolutely gives me hope,” he says. “I think when we look back on 2023 it will prove to be the transformational year, one where the world built clean energy investment and manufacturing capacity at such a significant scale that we actually will now have the solutions to be deployed, at the scale required to meet the challenge.”
Buckley sees this as a virtuous arms race that is causing the deployment of capital and technology to accelerate to the point where it may have some impact on the changing climate. “Our latest near-term EV sales outlook is brighter than what BNEF published last year, mostly due to policy changes in the US, where a major investment push sparked by the Inflation Reduction Act will help more than triple the share of EVs in new sales, to 28 per cent by 2026.”