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.

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 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.

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.