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Renewable Energy Costs To Fall In 2018

 

Breather valves for renewable energy production should be in high demand in coming months, as renewable energy costs are set to fall this year.

They have already fallen significantly over the past decade, with solar prices dropping 62 per cent since 2009. Offshore wind costs have also fallen in recent years, dropping to just £57 per megawatt hour in 2017.

This has quashed one of the main concerns about renewable energy: that it requires subsidies to run. That is now patently not true, and subsidy free solar and wind farms are now being developed.

Much of this is due to growth in Europe, though other countries are playing a role too.

Country level auctions are driving down the cost of photovoltaics in India for example, claims Renewable Energy World associate Editor Jennifer Delony.

This trend comes as no surprise, as the Paris-based energy agency IEA revised its five year forecasts for photovoltaic costs last year, following a record breaking 2016. That year saw a mega 164 Gigawatts of new renewable energy capacity being put online, blowing conventional forms of energy out of the water (there were just 35 gigawats of gas net additions in 2016).

At the time they wrote: “Solar PV and wind together represent 90 percent of India’s capacity growth as auctions yielded some of the world’s lowest prices for both technologies. In some Indian states, recent contract prices are comparable to coal tariffs.”

There are a number of renewable energy projects in the pipeline, with several new offshore windfarms due to go live in 2018 in the UK alone.