Almost half of global investment in new electricity generation last year was in renewables, thanks to a hike in investment by developing countries, says a UN report.
Global investment in green energy rose 17 per cent, but developing countries saw a surge of 36 per cent. The big spending was on solar power in Asia, as well as on wind turbines in the North Sea.
Chinese investment – up 37 per cent at $83 billion – again beat the US. But Brazil, India and South Africa were all in the top 10 investors, while Indonesia, Chile, Mexico, Kenya and Turkey all invested more than a billion dollars in green electricity in 2014.
Japan was third and, for the second year running, the UK beat Germany into fourth place, says the Global Trends in Renewable Energy Investment report from the UN Environment Programme.
Europe, once the green pioneer, dominated only one sector: offshore wind, where it launched seven projects worth $1 billion or more. Among these was a $3.8 billion North Sea wind farm off the coast of the Netherlands – the largest non-hydro renewable energy plant to get the go-ahead anywhere in the world in 2014.
In the US, the 103 gigawatts of renewable electricity generating capacity that came on stream last year equalled that provided by the country's nuclear power plants.
Excluding large hydro-plants – which have environmental drawbacks – 9.1 per cent of the world's electricity was generated using renewable sources in 2014, up from 8.5 per cent the previous year. This rise cut carbon dioxide emissions by an estimated 1.3 billion tonnes, says the report.
A key factor behind the boom in green electricity was the continuing fall in the price of renewables technology, said Udo Steffens of the Frankfurt School of Finance and Management in Germany, who co-authored the report's foreword. The boom was unaffected by the falling price of oil, which is mostly used for transport rather than generating electricity. "Oil and renewables do not directly compete for power investment dollars."
If you would like to reuse any content from New Scientist, either in print or online, please contact the syndication department first for permission. New Scientist does not own rights to photos, but there are a variety of licensing options available for use of articles and graphics we own the copyright to.
