Brian Merchant at Vice takes a look at a new report from Meister Consultants Group on the global clean energy revolution, and notes that the predictions of practically every agency dealing with the energy sector were wildly off - with one notable exception: Greenpeace.
“Over the past 15 years, a number of predictions—by the International Energy Agency, the US Energy Information Administration, and others—have been made about the future of renewable energy growth,” the Meister report noted. “Almost every one of these predictions has underestimated the scale of actual growth experienced by the wind and solar markets. Only the most aggressive growth projections, such as Greenpeace’s Energy [R]evolution scenarios, have been close to accurate.”
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“Our projections are much closer to actual renewable energy development than those from IEA because we have monitored global and national renewable energy market development and production capacities carefully since the mid 90s, and discuss possible growth rates with the solar and wind industries,” Sven Teske, the lead author of the report, told [Vice] in an email. “We know what they have in their order books for the next 3 to 5 years and extrapolate it for the next 5 years. This gives us a very good idea about what the renewable energy market will do within the next decade.”
