Once upon a time there was a carbon price.
At $23, it was considered “material” and would grow to be “significant”.
PV was it’s poor cousin, and ugly duckling in terms of carbon abatement. Apparently expensive, problematic and it just didn’t really fit in.
However, people being people, they loved to talk about PV.
“My cousins a duck” people would say. The Government even said ” It’s ugly, but has promise”.
In producing a carbon price and measuring it’s abatement the Government boldly stated “Over time, the electricity sector will move away from coal-fired generation to renewables, with renewable energy growing from 10 to 40 per cent of the generation mix by 2050, and conventional coal-fired generation falling from 70 to below 10 per cent of the generation mix by 2050″
They even drew a picture to show how their sympathy for the ugly duckling, showing how it ranked in their future plans. It saw an opportunity of around 5% of generation capacity for its ugly duckling in 2050.
What does this mean in terms of a life for the ugly duckling? We know there is about 49GW of total energy generation capacity in 2011, and as of this week there is 1GW of PV installed (cumulatively), so we are at about 2% today.
To get to 5%, assuming a simplistic formula of adding new annual PV capacity it means the Government has assumed around 160MW of NEW PV each and every year, for the next 39 years. (this year we have already installed more then 400MW, for reference)
Now growth, no expansion and no increase (or we go over the 5%).
IF however, we very conservatively add 400MW p/a of NEW PV for the next 5 years, then 500MW for 5 years, then 600MW, then 700MW then 800MW then 900MW then 1GW pa we can approximate a more likely growth trajectory.
At this rate by 2050 we would have almost 28GW of PV installed, instead of the ugly little 7.2GW. And the percentage of total energy capacity?
20%. Fancy that.
These numbers are a rough first pass and will be ratified over the coming months but one thing is for sure – PV’s role in the future energy mix has been drastically underestimated by the Government, IMHO.
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