Clean Technica | By: Geoffrey Styles | GPE – September 05, 2017:
Bloomberg’s renewable energy affiliate forecasts that wind and solar power will make major inroads into the global market share of natural gas within a decade. This is a crucially important question for major oil companies who are betting their future on gas, writes Managing Director of independent US-based consultancy GSW Strategy Group Geoffrey Styles. But according to Styles, it is likelier that coal, not gas, faces the biggest risk from the growth of renewables.
Originally published on Energy Post: A recent story on Bloomberg News, “What If Big Oil’s Bet on Gas Is Wrong?”, challenges the conventional wisdom that demand for natural gas will grow as it displaces coal and facilitates the growth of renewable energy sources like wind and solar power. Instead, the forecast highlighted in the article envisions gas’s global share of electricity dropping from 23% to 16% by 2040 as renewables shoot past it. So much for gas as the “bridge to the future” if that proves accurate.
Battery improvements depend on chemistry, not semiconductor electronics. Assuming their costs can continue to fall like those for solar cells looks questionable
Several points in the story leave room for doubt. For starters, this projection from Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF), the renewables-focused analytical arm of Bloomberg, would leave coal with a larger share of power generation than gas in 2040, when it has renewables reaching 50%.
That might make sense in the European context on which their forecast seems to be based, but it flies against the US experience of coal losing 18 points of electricity market share since 2007 (from 48.5% to 30.4%), with two-thirds of that drop picked up by gas and one-third by expanding renewables.
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