One hundred percent renewable energy generation in 2030 with the lowest cost commercially available power plants

TL;DR

This paper argues that following historic exponential growth trends in renewable energy technologies like wind and solar can enable a fully renewable, decarbonized global energy system by 2030, significantly reducing costs and emissions.

Contribution

It demonstrates that continued exponential growth in renewable energy installations can achieve 100% renewable energy supply and decarbonization by 2030, based on historic growth patterns.

Findings

Decarbonization of global energy by 2030 is feasible with exponential growth.

Energy costs become negligible due to cost reductions from technological improvements.

Climate change mitigation and economic benefits can be realized earlier than expected.

Abstract

We hypothesize that the present expansion of energy generation by variable renewable energy (VRE) power plants, such as wind and photovoltaic power plants, leads to a 100% renewable energy supply in 2030 because of its inherent exponential growth function. This behavior is related to the exponential cost reduction of its generated energy and the nearly unconstrained available potential of its natural resources. The cost reduction results from the continuous improvements in development, research, manufacturing, and installation, also showing a growth of its installation power per power plant or aero generator. We prove that if the historic exponential growth is followed in the future, it is possible to decarbonize the world's electric energy systems' power supply in 2026. Furthermore, the global demand on primary energy can be supplied in 2030, which leads to the total suppression of CO2 emissions related to the energy need of humanity. Because of the related cost reduction, energy costs are not anymore relevant. Our extrapolation is based on the continuation of the historic growth functions of the globally installed PV and the wind power plants, and we also discuss the conditions necessary to enable a transition to such a 100% renewable energy production. Considering a non-constrained growth of VRE power plants' installation power, decarbonization related to energy generation and use can be accomplished in a much shorter time frame as previously scheduled. As a result, climate change mitigation, energy cost reduction, and high employment are attained much earlier than previously planned.