New and Renewable Energy Account for 53%, Beating Fossil-Based Energy

It has been found that power plants powered by new and renewable energy accounted for more than the half of power stations newly built in the world last year. In terms of power source, this marked the first time that new and renewable energy outweighed fossil fuels that have led the energy market over the past 100 years.  

According to the UN’s 2016 New and Renewable Energy Investment Trend Report on July 25, the installed capacity of new and renewable energy-powered power plants newly built in the world last year grew 25.5% to 118GW from the previous year. This volume accounted for 53.6% of the entire new power generation. Green new and renewable energy dwarfed fossil energy in investment volume. Last year, US$130 billion went into the construction of power plants powered by coal and gas. But US$265.8 billion was invested in building new and renewable energy-based power plants.  

This trend continued in Korea, too. Last year, new power generation facilities powered by new and renewable energy swelled 30% year on year to 1.4GW. In particular, 1GW was produced by newly built solar power plants. The proportion of new and renewable energy consumption reached 5.4%, a record high.    

These changes in the energy market are getting faster as the government of each nation is implementing fossil fuel control policies in order to meet obligatory carbon reduction under the Paris Convention on Climate Change and technology development enables the energy industry to get closer to “grid parity” where the unit price of power generation via new and renewable energy equals the unit price of power generation based on fossil fuels.

”An energy revolution” is fueling the growth of various new industries. The electric vehicle market grew more than 50% over the past two to three years. The electric car battery market is expected to expand to US$37 billion in 2020 from US$7.7 billion last year.

The new market of the energy storage system (ESS) for renewable energy generation is growing nearly 100 percent every year. The International Energy Agency (IEA) forecast that investments of US$12.3 trillion will be made in new business sectors such as the new and renewable energy and energy efficiency business by 2030.