Tracking clean energy progress by IEA

[proteos]

Lately the IEA has released a report on "clean" energy progress. Low carbon energies, that is.

The press release says it all: apart from renewables, nothing is on track with the 2°C scenario. The report itself makes for a sobering read. The table p8 is damning. Looks like the fight against greenhouses gases emissions is far from being won.

There are also strange things in the report. The text says an IGCC coal plant commissioned by Duke energy in the US costs $5600/kW, yet the price tag for such facilities is stuck below $3000/kW in the table on the next page.

edit: Fixed the link to the press release

[davidm]

A little note, the link in the title is a sales piece and the link below is a dead end.

The IEA(International Energy Agency) appears to be an international government-industry group focused on energy security. Nothing necessarily wrong with that. Here is their thinking on a clean energy future. Lots of graphs.
www.iea.org/papers/2011/CEM_Progress_Report.pdf

[proteos]

It's true that the IEA has a focus on energy security. It's also true that it is often wrong in its forecasts.
But I find that the "post-mortem" reports are worth reading and the data they provide very useful.

[Martin Nicholson]

The IEA is really a ‘division’ of the OECD. What I take from the IEA data is not the literal numbers but the trend in current thinking within the IEA which is different to current thinking in OECD members Germany, Japan, Italy and Australia. If the IEA really believed that solar and wind could replace coal and gas they would have built that into their hi-renewable scenario and wouldn’t even have a hi-nuclear scenario. Clearly the jury is well and truly out.