Good morning. 🧵on aggregated US power generation interconnection queues.
1/ there is a lot of solar. 674 Gigawatts worth, 42% of it with storage.
There’s also 250GW of wind, 75GW Of gas, 6.3GW of nuclear, 900 megawatts of coal. bloomberg.com/news/articles/… 🧵 on aggregated US power generation interconnection queues.
2/ the further west you go, the more solar+storage there is. Almost no standalone solar plants planned for California. Few in the rest of the west. bloomberg.com/news/articles/…

🧵Great stuff in the new @BloombergNEF Zero-Emission Vehicles report:
1/ EV sales are ⬆️63% year-on-year about.bnef.com/blog/zero-emis… 🧵2/ New @BloombergNEF Zero-Emission Vehicles report:
Battery electrics 71% of sales, Plug-in hybrids 29%, you can guess where fuel cell vehicles end up about.bnef.com/blog/zero-emis…

"We are in a period of unprecedented energy diversity, with many technologies with global average costs around $100/MWh competing for dominance." cell.com/joule/fulltext… "The prices of fossil fuels such as coal, oil, and gas are volatile, but after adjusting for inflation, prices now are very similar to what they were 140 years ago, and there is no obvious long-range trend." cell.com/joule/fulltext…

Quick 🧵on @salesforce announced Net Zero Marketplace.
It raises a major (potentially existential) question for voluntary carbon markets: what is the rate-limiting step for 100x greater scale? salesforce.com/news/stories/s… 🧵2/ Is *carbon offsets availability* the rate-limiting step to 100x greater scale in voluntary carbon markets?
If so, that's a development/origination response: more developers, more places, with more access. salesforce.com/news/stories/s…

15 years ago I joined a little clean energy information startup called New Energy Finance. Today, I'm expanding the remit a bit. It's very exciting.

Data reflections on 15 years of energy and technology change in a quick🧵follow

https://twitter.com/NatBullard/status/1544690285615222784?s=20&t=IYnbPgvi6y4Qz87AX4FuKQ

🧵1/ I joined New Energy Finance seven weeks before the first iPhone launched

Some news from me: 15 years ago, I joined a little UK startup called New Energy Finance. Now, I'm stepping into a new role for @BloombergNEF + @climate: more writing, less operations, and more engagement across the wide world of climate technology founders, funders, and builders. So much has happened in climate tech and markets since 2007: orders of magnitude improvements in technology and orders of magnitude more deployment; $ trillions of investment and trade; industries changed, value created. Oh - and 30% of all anthropogenic CO2 emissions since 1751

🧵Every year, bp publishes its Statistical Review of World Energy. Every year, there are some striking findings. Here are four, charted.
1. Renewable generation is now 13% of global electricity generation (passed 10% in 2019) bloomberg.com/news/articles/… 🧵Every year, bp publishes its Statistical Review of World Energy. Every year, there are some striking findings. Here are four, charted.
2. Wind+solar power now generate more than 10% of global electricity, surpassing nuclear power generation bloomberg.com/news/articles/…

🧵For a brief spell on Saturday April 30, renewable power met 99.87% of California's electricity demand. It's a glimpse of the future, and a call to action for inventors, entrepreneurs, and builders 1/ bloomberg.com/news/articles/… 2/ Power systems outside the U.S. have reached this target before (Denmark with wind power and South Australia with solar alone last year). The California Independent System Operator, needless to say, is a slightly bigger power system bloomberg.com/news/articles/…

🧵/1 On what we see in, and what can learn from, 73 years of U.S. power generation data.
1. Total U.S. generation increased 10x in four decades, 1949 to 1989.
2. It increased another third in two decades
3. It's been flat - with some fluctuation - for 15 years 🧵/2 Post-WWII, with rural electrification still underway, and electrification of industry still underway, year-on-year power generation growth was 10%+.

A quick 🧵on nickel, which just had some _crazy_ price move today, spiking more than 60% Nickel "added more than $10,000 to trade at a 15-year high above $40,000 a ton -- the biggest-ever daily dollar gain in the 35-year history of the contract". Why? Russia supplies 6%, and liquidity evaporated overnight, shorts had to cover bloomberg.com/news/articles/…

Thread: How the world got to $755 billion in energy transition investment in a single year. @BloombergNEF did the math. 1/ bloomberg.com/news/articles/… 2/ Energy transition pulled in $755 billion, a 25% increase over 2020 investment, double what was invested in 2015, and a more than 20-fold increase since 2004. This is deployment money - financing market-ready tech at scale. bloomberg.com/news/articles/…

1/ A few evolving thoughts on what decentralization means for energy and electric transport systems, as both scale up massively in the 2020s. 2/ First we are going to get so much more of...everything. About 300 gigawatts of installed small-scale solar today, going to 10x that much; 22GW of batteries, going to 2,800 (130x). bloomberg.com/news/articles/…

In 2020, the entirety of global power generation growth came from renewable sources. It's a first, for many reasons. But, it's also only part of the global story, and what comes next is even more interesting. bloomberg.com/news/articles/… Despite the Covid-19 pandemic, global power generation fell only two-tenths of a percent for all of 2020. Coal-fired power generation fell 3% year on year; gas-fired power fell 1%, and nuclear power declined 3%. Wind, solar, and hydropower all grew. bloomberg.com/news/articles/…

A short 🧵on challenges of even short-term forecasts of exponential markets: solar PV.
1. @IEA: 150+ gigawatts this year base case. Base is up from 2020, and it's already a bonkers figure: way more than biggest annual coal+gas additions ever iea.org/reports/renewa… 2. But that base is probably too low. And the accelerated case is right around where @BloombergNEF and @solar_chase have our case (~180GW), but as Jenny says, "there's always more solar than you think there is" so maybe that's low

https://twitter.com/solar_chase/status/1466085052756934673?s=20

🧵1/ Some findings from @KPMG annual Global Automotive Exec Survey. Highlights on strategy, electric vehicles, commodities here. Start: 48% of execs say they're very/extremely prepared for the next crisis (or disruption - rather different those) home.kpmg/xx/en/home/ins… 🧵2/ Auto execs are quite concerned about commodity and component supply continuity home.kpmg/xx/en/home/ins…

🧵1/ Lithium-ion battery pack prices fell 6% year-on-year to $132 per kilowatt-hour (real 2021$). That's down 90% since 2010's $1240/kWh! But, there is much more to it than headline figures. Highlights from @BloombergNEF @JamesTFrith follow. bloomberg.com/news/articles/… 2/ On a volume-weighted average basis across the battery industry, prices fell to $132 per kilowatt-hour in 2021. This is down from $140/kWh in 2020 (in real 2021 dollars). The 6% drop isn’t as drastic as the 9% decline we had forecast last year. bloomberg.com/news/articles/…

Today @BloombergNEF published its Zero Emission Vehicle (ZEV) Factbook. Great stuff in here, starting with this: EV sales were 7% of passenger vehicle total in 2Q 2021. 🧵/1 bloomberg.com/professional/d… 🧵/2 Expecting 5.6 million EVs sold this year, up from 3.1 million in 2020 bloomberg.com/professional/d…

THREAD: Exactly 10 years ago, solar PV module manufacturer Solyndra went bankrupt. It's quite the story. VCs, Silicon Valley, the U.S. Treasury, trade, supply/demand, technology risk/innovation, competition.
And the most important thing, 10 years later? It doesn't matter at all. 2/ What it was: a solar novelty in (literally) multiple dimensions. Cadmium telluride thin-film PV, mounted in a glass tube, with a bespoke racking system only for commercial roofs, needing a special rubber roofing backsheet. Mounted, it looked like this:

It’s important to remember that from a climate perspective, nuclear and renewables are not in competition. There will be enough growth in electricity demand to support significant expansion of every zero-carbon power generation technology. bloomberg.com/news/articles/… Nuclear could even wind up being essential to deep decarbonization in other sectors. One @BloombergNEF scenario for 0-carbon 2050 features massive deployment of modular nuclear reactors designed to complement wind, solar, and battery tech bloomberg.com/news/articles/…

Thread:
1/ global renewable energy investment at its highest first half-year level...ever. And just 2% less than 2H 2020, the highest half-year ever. about.bnef.com/blog/public-ma… 2/ Investment in assets actually fell since the first half of 2020 - but let's split that out by technology about.bnef.com/blog/public-ma…

1/10 My 10 charts on energy, transport, emissions, e-commerce, and sustainable finance to put paid to 2020 (and look ahead to 2021).
No. 1: Energy became the smallest component of S&P500 bloomberg.com/opinion/articl… 2/10 Renewable power gen is the cheapest new source of electrons almost anywhere and (related to above) does so with a higher return on equity than most oil supermajors bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…