THE 50 GW RENEWABLE SCENARIO

摘要

The idea that renewable energy is poised for significant growth should not surprise anyone. The potential is so large partly because renewable energy is such a small piece of the U.S. energy landscape today. Despite its small size, however, renew-ables are what is now on the margin, and one of the basic tenets of economics is that what is on the margin is what really matters. How much growth will there be? One approach to answering that question is to aggregate the amount of new investment necessary to comply with the various state renewable energy portfolio standards, the new capacity supported by the public benefits funds, and the capacity needed to supply green pricing and green power marketing efforts. Based on CERA's analysis, this adds up to about 10 GW by 2010, which would increase the existing installed renewable capacity of 17 GW by about 60%.