The fair cost of renewable energy

摘要

A cost-efficient use of climate funds in developing countries requires rigorousassessment of local mitigation costs. Now research presents a novel way to estimate the increase in energy costs involved in scaling up solar photovoltaic and wind power.Renewable energy technologies are widely regarded as key to achieving rambitious climate change targets. As a recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report has highlighted, the technical potential of renewable energy sources is sufficient to meet the world's entire energy demand for the foreseeable future. In most instances, however, such technologies remain more expensive than conventional, fossil-fuel-energy technologies, and therefore increasing their use leads to higher energy costs (Fig.1). In the case of developing countries, the uptake oflow-carbon technologies can only happen with adequate financial support, as stated by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which specifies that the "full incremental costs" of mitigation measures shall be covered by industrialized countries. Writing in Nature Climate Change, Schmidt et al. present a new methodology for consistently estimating these incremental costs. They find that the costs vary significantly across countries, depending on the combination of country-specific conditions with the technology considered.