The True Cost of Renewables: Asia’s Untapped Economic Potential
With economics at the heart of the debate about the role that renewables will play in our future energy mix, the lack of up-to-date, accurate, reliable data on the cost and performance of renewable energy technologies remains a significant barrier to their uptake. IRENA has been working hard to fill this gap and has undertaken increasing analysis on the costs and performance of renewable energy technologies, and has released ground-breaking new work in this area.
IRENA’s cost analysis programme is designed to improve the publicly available analysis and data on costs to allow policy makers and investors to make robust decisions about the role of renewables.
The IRENA Renewable Costing Alliance, is bringing together governments, companies, industry associations and researchers to share, confidentially, their data for real-world renewable energy projects, helping to build further on IRENA’s costing work to date.
IRENA’s cost analysis of over 9 000 utility-scale projects shows concretely, that renewable energy is increasingly competitive and that it is now THE economic solution off-grid. A virtuous cycle of high learning rates and increased deployment are driving down the costs of solar and wind technologies, while biomass for power generation, geothermal and hydropower are mature technologies that offer the lowest cost electricity of any source where economic resources remain unexploited.
However, the public debate around renewable energy continues to suffer from an outdated perception that renewable energy is not competitive.
In this event you will hear about the true costs of renewables. Find out about:
- The rapid declines in solar PV module prices due to high learning rates and how we are now entering a world were solar PV will increasingly be cheaper than utility provided electricity n markets with high power prices.
- How improved technology (higher hub heights and larger swept areas) and declining capital costs make onshore wind where good resources exist, one of the cheapest forms of electricity available for new capacity.
- How hydropower, geothermal and biomass for power; where unexploited economic resources remain, offer some of the lowest cost electricity of any source and how their baseload and balancing capabilities allow high levels of penetration of variable renewables at least cost.
- Why renewable energy is now THE economic solution off-grid, but more needs to be done to address the challenges in meeting the basic electricity needs of 1.3 billion people who today still don’t have access to electricity.
- How to adapt policy support to incentivise renewables in rapidly expanding markets with cost declines, sometimes rapid. How to ensure efficient support for renewables with different policy mechanisms and the data needed to support these decisions.
Programme
Introduction
- Dr Dolf Gielen, Director IITC
The True Costs of Renewables
- Renewable Power Generation Cost Trends and Projections
- Collecting Renewable Cost Data in SE Asia
- Renewables cost in China
Dynamic Policy Adaptation and Data Needs
- Tariff setting and Deployment Support Schemes under Dynamic Market Conditions with rising Renewables Shares: experience
- Data Collection to Support Efficient Policy Development
Riccardo Toixiri, GSE, Italy