In this module of Renewable Energy Futures, we're going to talk renewable technologies themselves. We'll talk about the current status where they are now, mostly on markets, how market penetration build rates that sort of thing. Then we'll talk mostly focus on future possibilities where they're going, what are some of new concepts, technologies, approaches that may affect future use of these technologies. We'll talk about five principal technologies that tell different stories. Wind and solar PV as we've talked about in prior courses are dominating. Renewable construction are clearly on a path to play a very large role in electricity futures, as we talked about in the prior module. Current trends are not enough, but they're on the path to become significant. Then we'll talk difference, look at three other renewable technologies to tell different stories, the concentrating solar power, ocean energy and bio-fuels. From this range of technologies, you'll get a sense of different technological paths, different drivers, and a sense of where renewable energy futures will look like. But we'll start with wind power. Again, focus here is on current status and future prospects. If you look at global electricity production, roughly just over a quarter 27.3 percent, that's in the year 2019 came from renewables, 5.9 percent of global electricity production comes from wind power, and if you go back to 2000, that was well under one percent. That 5.9 percent may not sound that big, but keep in mind that's growing quite quickly. Wind is growing quickly in terms of new installations. We are adding about 60 gigawatts per year globally of new wind power. In terms of another metric would be market penetration. Thirteen, some countries get more than 10 percent of electricity from wind and that number is continuing to grow every year as more and more turbine are installed. Why is that happening? Largely or entirely because of costs. Global data and wind power costs. This is for global onshore. We'll find about offshore in just a few minutes. Shown here, total installed costs, that's first costs have dropped from 2010-2019 by roughly 25 percent. Capacity factors, which are, we're talking about a prior cost, but which are a measure of essentially utilization in essence, have climbed quite a bit from 27-36 percent. The levelized cost of electricity in all the indicator that captures first costs and operating costs have dropped down over this time period dramatically from, I'll call it 8.6-5.3 US cents per kilowatt hour. That 5.3 is competitive on wholesale markets with other technologies including those from fossils. That's where we are today, where there's a lot of wind being built of 6k gigawatts a year. The costs are low, competitive with other options, whether it's natural gas, solar, PV, coal, nuclear and so on. That's where we are today with wind. But where are we going next? Well, costs are a critical issue. Here's one way to think about costs. There was a survey done of wind experts, those who had detailed knowledge of the technology, asking them where they see opportunities for further cost reduction or also if they do and the answer is, although wrongly, yes. The estimates of the experts was that we could see a 35 percent reduction in wind costs by 2050. Various drivers for that reduce capital costs, improve capacity factors, longer project lives and so on. But the fundamental idea here is that we have not rung all the cost reduction out of wind yet. This is significant because wind now is cost-competitive. But over time, the cost of wind will go down to the further technological improvements and therefore improving their cost-competitive status in competition with others. Now, those others may be moving as well. Solar PV maybe getting less expensive and it will, we'll talk about that shortly. Natural gas depends on natural gas prices if you don't know where they're going, but winds cost advantage will only strengthen over time. If you do an analysis of where wind costs are going, and of course that is I'm certain as we talked about in prior module, there aren't facts about the future, but there are educated guesses, or educated analysis and those analysis estimate, I would say a 25 percent reduction. In LCOE levelized cost of energy for onshore wind by 2030 and a greater than 50 percent reduction in offshore wind. Notice by these forecasts, where that puts wind relative to fossil fuel costs range. Where onshore wind would, if these forecasts pan out, they are correct and of course we don't know, but if this does happen, by 2030 wind will be out-competing fossil fuel just about everywhere. Wind offshore will be close to that. Now again, there are uncertainties here, but there's agreement that wind will get less expensive over time due to further technological improvement. Wind is not have a mature technology in the sense that it's a commodity, that we can't do better, we can and we will. Now, what's the wind market going to look like? Well, predicting the market is always uncertain exercise, but there's some short-term factors. This is for the US only, but this is a short-term forecasts where through 2019 was actual historical and forecast for '22 and beyond. These short-term forecasts I consider fairly reliable. The dots show various productions by experts and the median or averages shown by the height of the bar and we can expect wind to continue, in least in this next five or so years at roughly the same rate it has historically, at least for the US. Globally we don't know of course, but it's likely will see a similar pattern for wind going forward. Now if we take a longer perspective on wind, this is from a global renewables outlook, which is the scenario building exercise that we talked about in the prior module. Again, making the point that we've seen historical progress in wind, that where we're heading the planned energy scenario, that's the one where we're talking about governments existing plans and programs. If they meet their goals, we'll see a roughly quadrupling of wind by 2050. But in order to achieve climate stabilization, as this study defines it, we'd need to go by a factor of 10. Again, the same point, wind and solar PV are going rapidly, almost all forecasts I've seen show that, but not rapidly enough to achieve our climate stabilization goals. I'll take a quick stop here and come back to talk about technologies within the broad scope of wind from including offshore.
