Wow. China accounted for 45% of the world's investment in renewables in 2017 — and built 50 GW of solar last year, as much as the entire world had built up until 2014. fs-unep-centre.org/sites/default/… 
All told, the world invested about $278 billion in renewables last year. That nudged the fraction of electricity the world gets from renewables up from 11% to 12.1%
But there's a key caveat: Renewables still weren't growing fast enough to satisfy the (rapid) growth in energy demand worldwide. Fossil fuels provided the rest, which is why CO2 emissions rose in 2017: nytimes.com/2018/03/22/cli…
Also of note: European investment in renewables declined 36% last year. Some of this was just due to falling costs per MW. But the UK also scaled back subsidies for solar and wind: fs-unep-centre.org/sites/default/…
The UNEP report notes that as subsidies get scaled back, renewables are entering an era where "many projects will have to sink or swim without
any government-backed price support." Costs keep coming down, but financing will be an important question:
any government-backed price support." Costs keep coming down, but financing will be an important question:
On that point: Check out the cost reductions for lithium-ion batteries. Pretty impressive...
And here are cost reductions over time for small solar PV systems. Note that small solar is still a fair bit more expensive in the US and Japan than it is in Germany (or China): fs-unep-centre.org/sites/default/…
Anyway, interesting report! And here's @SominiSengupta's great coverage. Exciting times for renewables — but still gotta accelerate faster to drive emissions down: nytimes.com/2018/04/05/cli…
