National growth dynamics of wind and solar power compared to the growth required for global climate targets

Aleh Cherp (), Vadim Vinichenko, Jale Tosun, Joel A. Gordon and Jessica Jewell
Additional contact information
Aleh Cherp: Central European University
Vadim Vinichenko: University of Bergen
Jale Tosun: Heidelberg University
Joel A. Gordon: Central European University
Jessica Jewell: University of Bergen

Nature Energy, 2021, vol. 6, issue 7, 742-754

Abstract: Abstract Climate mitigation scenarios envision considerable growth of wind and solar power, but scholars disagree on how this growth compares with historical trends. Here we fit growth models to wind and solar trajectories to identify countries in which growth has already stabilized after the initial acceleration. National growth has followed S-curves to reach maximum annual rates of 0.8% (interquartile range of 0.6–1.1%) of the total electricity supply for onshore wind and 0.6% (0.4–0.9%) for solar. In comparison, one-half of 1.5 °C-compatible scenarios envision global growth of wind power above 1.3% and of solar power above 1.4%, while one-quarter of these scenarios envision global growth of solar above 3.3% per year. Replicating or exceeding the fastest national growth globally may be challenging because, so far, countries that introduced wind and solar power later have not achieved higher maximum growth rates, despite their generally speedier progression through the technology adoption cycle.

Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (48)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-021-00863-0 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natene:v:6:y:2021:i:7:d:10.1038_s41560-021-00863-0

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/nenergy/

DOI: 10.1038/s41560-021-00863-0

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Energy is currently edited by Fouad Khan

More articles in Nature Energy from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().