SunEdison sees $4trn value opportunity in solar, wind by 2020

US-based SunEdison, now the largest renewable energy company in the world, says it sees a $4 trillion value opportunity in the global wind and solar markets by 2020.

At its presentation to analysts overnight, SunEdison produced a 95-page display making the case for wind and solar energy.

The company argues that the combined capacity for wind and solar will be more than 1,450GW by 2020, about two-and-a-half times larger than the capacity at the end of 2014. The graph below illustrates how SunEdison believes it will be split between wind, large-scale solar, commercial solar, household solar and off-grid installations.

sunedison capacity

That is expected to translate into more than $US170 billion (CAFD) cash available for distribution annually by 2020. SunEdison says this will then translate into a value opportunity of $US4 trillion – the would-be value of any company that held 100 per cent of the market, according to CEO Ahmad Chatila.

That, of course, won’t happen. But Chatila used the hypothetical figure to highlight the opportunity, and underpin why SunEdison recently bought First Wind, and created the TerraForm yeildco venture that will own utility-scale projects. The biggest oil company in the world is worth around $US400 billion.

“That is what we are going after, it’s for the taking,” Chatila told the analysts. “No one should doubt the opportunities. The question becomes how that cake is divided.”

sunedison value

SunEdison says it is targeting the world’s 20 biggest power markets, with a particular emphasis on growth. Another graph, below, highlights some of these major markets (in orange). What was noticeable was that no figures accompanied Australia – possibly given the uncertainty around its renewable energy policies.

sunedison presense

But Australia is one of the big targets in rooftop solar. Chatila says Australia, along with the US and UK, is one of the three big target markets for distributed solar. Those three markets will be worth around 10GW by the end of 2020.

This graph below shows the growth that SunEdison expects  in individual countries – US in shades of blue, UK in orange and Australia in green. It is interesting to see the anticipated contribution of commercial- and industrial-scale solar in the US and UK, particularly.

sunedison residential markets

Comments

4 responses to “SunEdison sees $4trn value opportunity in solar, wind by 2020”

  1. barrie harrop Avatar
    barrie harrop

    Exciting times.

  2. michael Avatar
    michael

    “possibly given the uncertainty around its renewable energy policies” or possibly we are too small to classify as a major opportunity?

  3. michael Avatar
    michael

    CAFD metric, any idea what the current CAFD is for the total electrical energy market? unless the solar companies are making vastly different margins to traditional energy suppliers, there should be a broad shift of value assignment from x to y, not really a creation of value unless the overall demand for the underlying product (electricity) increases substantially

  4. Peter Fiekowsky Avatar
    Peter Fiekowsky

    Why is SunEdison expecting linear growth when the market has been doubling every two years for ten years? At the risk of sounding totally ridiculous, they’re underestimating the market. As prices go down and expertise goes up, solar will push down the price of natural gas, its main competitor for new generation, until no new NG can be profitably developed. Old well production goes down 5% per year–so that 100 GW per year in the US, or 600 GW per year globally is where wind and solar demand will flatten– and become linear growth at 600 GW per year.

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