Today’s Graph of the Day comes from an in-depth report on Australia’s emissions reduction progress prepared by ClimateWorks. It is a massive undertaking and includes sections devoted to various sectors, including energy. Readers of RenewEconomy will be familiar with most of its conclusions, but a few graphs caught out eye.
One was this one to the right, which shows the anticipated renewable energy mix out to 2020 – presuming, of course, that the Coalition (if elected) do not bow to the lobbying of the energy incumbents who are arguing for the renewable energy target to be mixed.
That push is currently being fan-forced by a mainstream media ready to repeat the words of any executive with a big title.
The graph shows that by 2020, the amount of electricity generated by renewables will exceed that of brown coal, and will be well ahead of black coal, which suffers a fall in output of more than 10 per cent in less than a decade.
Mind you, most of that fall has already occurred, thanks to the impact of the carbon price, the RET and rooftop solar. Interestingly, the aggregate amount of gas-fired generation also falls – this follows the experience from South Australia which now has around 30 per cent generation from renewables.
The report says that electricity generation from coal decreased by 14 per cent between 2003-04 and 2012-13, with most of that in the last four years.
This has meant that the historic growth in total emissions from electricity generation has stalled. while emissions from the sector grew steadily from 2003-04 and peaked in 2008-09 at 7 per cent above 2003-04 levels, this trend has since reversed, with a sharp fall in emissions of 13 per cent between 2008-09 and 2012-13.
Here is a graph to the right to illustrate that.
And some other interesting factoids from the report:
+ Generation of large- scale renewables has grown by 62% between 2003–04 and 2012–13, led by an increase in wind and a recovery in hydro generation.
+ Wind now accounts for 31% of renewable generation, enough to power one million households.
+ The rapid uptake of rooftop solar has substituted up to 3 TWh of grid supplied electricity in 2011/12.
+ The National Electricity Market demand in 2012/13 was 10 per cent lower than was projected for this period in 2010.
