Clean energy technologies are now big business. Vast sums of money in clean energy supply chains promise to rearrange the geopolitics of industrial competition and energy security. Further, to achieve their increasingly ambitious climate goals, countries are likely to do far more to reshape industrial sectors, compressing in a few years a process that normally takes decades.
An international consortium of energy companies has presented its plans to develop a 6 gigawatt (GW) solar and wind hybrid project in Western Australia, designed to export clean energy to Indonesia through subsea cables.
Western Australia is set to take advantage of its significant solar and wind resources to export renewable energy to Indonesia, contributing significantly to the country’s clean energy future and energy security through reducing reliance on imported fossil fuels.
The proposed project is called Asian Renewable Energy Hub (AREH) and is another mega energy project which underlines the significant opportunities that domestic renewable resources can provide for countries to become the ‘new’ energy exporters.
The hybrid power plant would be spread over 14,000 square km in flat desert land on the north-west coast of Australia.
The world relies heavily on fossil fuels to meet its energy needs, and the development and trade of those fuels has influenced relationships among countries throughout modern history. Most reasonable projections of the next several decades anticipate that the role of coal, oil, and gas will be maintained but lose market share to lower-carbon energy sources like wind, solar, nuclear, and greater efficiency. Despite the continued role for fossil fuels, the push for greater reliance on lower-carbon energy sources has made progress since it began in earnest several decades ago. Nearly $318 billion was invested in new clean energy sources around the world last year, up from $60 billion in 2004. Nearly half of this investment took place in large developing economies, particularly China but also Brazil, India, and South Africa.
Foreignaffair – In the run-up to the Paris talks at the end of the year, governments are preparing their strategies to negotiate national emissions reduction targets. But elsewhere, a different battle is unfolding as firms and governments compete to try to capture the benefits of the rise of the new green economy. A wave of trade disputes in clean energy industries is one result. Since 2010, at least 11 such cases have been initiated. Trade cases in solar photovoltaics, in particular, have emerged as some of the most politically charged in recent history.
Trade disputes over subsidies and price dumping have the potential to stymie the deployment of low-carbon energy technologies by increasing their price relative to fossil fuels. And they are unnecessary; most arise out of the assumption that the clean energy race is a zero-sum game between competing national and regional economies. But that isn’t how green industries work, and government policy needs to catch up with the reality that domestic firms (and efforts to protect the environment) benefit from free trade in the clean energy industry.
Sprott Power Corporation’s Wind Asset Manager Peder Schlanbusch looks out from on top one of the 15 wind turbines which were officially opened in Amherst, Nova Scotia, June 25, 2012.
CVD 