US clean energy sees massive growth in 2008

10 March 2009

Despite growing economic uncertainty over the last year, the three major clean-energy sectors – solar photovoltaics, wind power,and biofuels – kept up a blistering growth rate, increasing 53 per cent from $75.8bn in 2007 to $115.9bn in revenues in 2008, according to the Clean Energy Trends 2009 report. By 2018, the report forecasts that these three sectors will have revenues of $325.1bn.

While 2009 will be a challenging year for the clean-energy industry, given severe credit constraints that have slowed or reversed plans for new manufacturing facilities and development projects, the reports forecasts strong growth over the mid- to long-term:

• Global production and wholesale pricing of biofuels reached $34.8bn in 2008 and are projected to total $105. bn by 2018. Last year, the global biofuels market consisted of more than 19 billion gallons of ethanol and biodiesel production worldwide, and in Brazil, ethanol surpassed petroleum use for the first time.

• Wind power became the first clean-energy sector to surpass the $50bn mark. Its $51.4bn in worldwide revenue in 2008 is expected to grow to $139.1bn in 2018. Last year’s global wind power installations reached a record 27,000MW, including more than 8,000MW in the US, pushing the US ahead of Germany as the world’s leading generator of wind energy.

• Solar photovoltaic (including modules, system components, and installation) totaled $29.6bn last year and will reach $80.6bn globally by 2018. Annual solar photovoltaic installations reached more than 4GW worldwide in 2008, a fourfold increase from four years earlier, when the solar photovoltaic market reached the gigawatt milestone for the first time.

New global investments in energy technologies, including venture capital, project finance, public markets, and research and development, expanded by 4.7 per cent, from $148.4bn in 2007 to $155.4bn in 2008.

Solar photovoltaic and wind power provided more than 600,000 direct and indirect jobs globally in 2008 and are expected to generate 2.7 million jobs by 2018.

This year’s report includes an analysis of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, signed into law by President Obama in February and providing $70bn in direct spending and tax credits for clean-energy and transportation programmes.

Copyright © 2009 newnet

Tags: clean energy, cleantech, photovoltaic, private equity, renewable energy, solar, venture capital, wind

This story was published on Tuesday, March 10th, 2009 at 6:16 pm and is filed under North America, biomass/biofuel, companies, deals, energy efficiency, energy storage, geothermal, policy, solar, water, wind. You can follow any responses to article entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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