Deployment of renewable energy generation capacity has been increasing at pace, as the International Energy Agency’s Renewable Energy Market Update – June 2023 has shown.

An impressive 440 GW is to be added this year, a 32% increase on the 333 GW added last year. this would be the equivalent of the total installed capacity of all power generation in Germany and Spain combined (though capacity factors would be different). The increase is attributed to “expanding policy support, growing energy security concerns and improving competitiveness against fossil fuel alternatives”, which are “outweighing rising interest rates, higher investment costs and persistent supply chain challenges”. Most of the increase is in onshore wind and utility-scale solar photovoltaic capacity, though distributed PV is also projected to increase relative to last year.

Onshore wind deployment continues to be much higher than offshore (shallow-water) wind, this year by more than six times. Next year, however, the absolute amount of onshore wind deployment is expected to decline by around 5%, as permitting and policy support is not as strong as for solar PV. In Europe, the expected deployment of renewable power generation capacity is 40% higher than the IEA expected prior to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, with the energy geopolitics of the war accelerating deployment. As a sign of the drastic change, European countries “introduced more policy and regulatory changes to ease permitting in the last 18 months than over the entire previous decade.” China, meanwhile, is expected to consolidate “its position as the undisputed leader in global deployment”, with the country adding around half of new global generation capacity. The pace of deployment is also increasing in the USA and in India, even though globally in 2022, “policy uncertainties and volatile prices left one-sixth of renewable energy auction volumes unallocated” (probably due to inflation, interest rate rises, and turbulence in commodity prices).

The increasing rollout points to a world in which large excesses of renewable electricity is available at times, and the production of green combustible fuels could become more common.