Crude Oil Is Cheap But Clean Energy Market Grows

Clean energy increases despite oil being low

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2016/01/14/why-clean-energy-is-now-expanding-even-when-fossil-fuels-are-cheap/

Interesting. Hopeful.

I see it's mostly China doing the heavy lifting, as America tries to get back to the investment level of 2011, and Europe keeps on giving up.
Looking at the story in detail leaves a slightly different impression from what the Post is relaying.

http://www.bloomberg.com/company/clean-energy-investment/

Not too different. Depends on the subjective orientation when telling the story.

The fact remains that for an emerging technology to grow in spite of incredible cost pressure from dying Petro, means there's a already large and growing understanding that this is the future. They're building the inevitable and obvious infrastructure.

I'm sure this fact is further motivating Saudi high production.

There are so many new technologies to produce oil, Fracking, Multilateral's, Coil tubing drilling.. If anything its alot easier to produce oil than it was say 15 years ago.

You would think that with all this "cheap" energy people wouldn't care about alternative energy, but I think the attitudes are changing.. People want clean energy options.

And all that money you're saving at the pump could be the driving force. Might as well take advantage of it before oil becomes expensive again and everybody is scrambling to come up with an alternative energy plan when crude hits 140+ a barrel.

Rrog said:

Not too different. Depends on the subjective orientation when telling the story.

The fact remains that for an emerging technology to grow in spite of incredible cost pressure from dying Petro, means there's a already large and growing understanding that this is the future. They're building the inevitable and obvious infrastructure.

I'm sure this fact is further motivating Saudi high production.

Click to expand...

The politics of petro-dollars aside, I think you are overlooking a couple details.

Preliminary indications are that, thanks to this utility-scale and small-scale activity, both wind and solar PV saw around 30% more capacity installed worldwide in 2015 than in 2014. The wind total for last year is likely to end up at around 64GW, with that for solar just behind at about 57GW. This combined total of 121GW will have made up around half of the net capacity added in all generation technologies (fossil fuel, nuclear and renewable) globally in 2015.

It bears keeping in mind this is electricity. In 2012, the EIA estimated the global generation of electricity to be--are you ready for this?--21532e+9 kWh. (NB. consumption was 19710e+9 kWh)
121GW (when they operate) will be useful, I suppose, but not exactly paradigm shifting, especially considering the amount wasted/unused already. So when you say you are "hopeful", I'm curious to know what over.
That is, what are you ultimately hoping for from alternative energies?

I understand the glass half empty viewpoint.

Pretty obvious what I'm hopeful about

Your ancestor likely had the same convo when cars just started replacing horses

I'm all for alternative energies, but this will not run on batteries, and I'm all for eatin more.