Renewable
Energy Outpaces All Other Sources for Electrical Generation Growth in 2014
BY
Solar power’s contribution to net generation more than doubled, up 102.8
percent. Wind generation grew by 8.3 percent, biomass by 5.7 percent and
geothermal up by 5.4 percent.
Natural gas
generation declines
By
comparison, net electrical generation from natural gas declined by 0.3 percent
in 2014 over the previous year and conventional hydro contracted by 3.7
percent. Nuclear power increased by 1 percent and coal eked out a modest 0.3
percent increase.
Overall
net electrical generation from all sources grew in 2014 by 0.7 percent.
Underestimating
renewable energy growth
Despite
a tendency for the EIA to underestimate renewable energy growth in the United States, non-hydro
sources of renewable energy generation more than tripled over the past decade.
When including hydropower, renewable energy sources accounted for 13.19 percent
of electrical generation for 2014.
Even more significantly, last year was the
first time non-hydro sources of energy provided more electrical generation than
hydropower, at 281,060 megawatt hours (Mwh) vs. 258,749 Mwh respectively.
Even
these numbers from the EIA almost certainly underestimate the contribution to
electrical supply from renewable energy, as the EIA does not report generation
from distributed and off-grid
sources such as
rooftop solar.
With consistent growth in new
generation capacity from
renewables through all of 2014, renewable energy growth is likely decades ahead
of EIA’s previous estimates.
“Given current growth rates – especially for solar and wind, it is quite possible that renewable energy sources will reach, or exceed, 14% of the nation’s electrical supply by the end of 2015,” noted Ken Bossong, Executive Director of the SUN DAY Campaign. “That is a level that EIA, only a few years ago, was forecasting would not be achieved until the year 2040.”
Surely
the real source of economic growth and energy security – the true “boomtown“- lay with
an increasing focus on the development and deployment of renewable energy.
The SUN DAY Campaign is a
non-profit research and educational organization founded in 1992 to
aggressively promote sustainable energy technologies as cost-effective
alternatives to nuclear power and fossil fuels.
Graph
courtesy of windpowerengineering.com