Author: Alex Colvill, Research Analyst at 350 PPM.
Welcome to a new feature on the Renewable Money Blog: Weekly Environmental News. Each Friday we will select a few choice environmental titbits from the preceding week, a mixture of news headlines, interesting third party research, 350 PPM company news and perhaps some random stuff thrown in to make things slightly less dull.
In this edition:
Report: Global Landscape of Renewable Energy Finance
Random Stuff: England Welcomes First Polar Bear Cub In Over 25 Years
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Report: Global Landscape of Renewable Energy Finance
The International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) and Climate Policy Initiative (CPI) have produced a concise, accessible summary of finance flows to renewables around the world. The study examines finance flows worldwide in 2013-2016, broken down by technology, financial instrument and region. Although investment in renewables dipped in dollar terms in 2016-2017, they have continued to gain ground against conventional energy sources, particularly for new power plants. The report finds:
- Renewable energy capacity has grown at record-high levels, even as investment has dipped in dollar terms in 2016. Investment levels are highly responsive to policy changes.
- Offshore wind investment has risen steadily – quadrupling in 2013-2016 – and is poised for further growth.
- Private sources provide the bulk of renewable energy investment globally – over 90% in 2016. Conventional debt and equity are the most prominent financing instruments.
- But public finance can play a key enabling role – covering early-stage project risk and getting new markets to maturity. Public spending on policy implementation far outweighs public investments.
- Project developers account for about two-fifths of private investment in the sector. Institutional investors – pension funds, insurance companies, sovereign wealth funds and others – only make up less than 5% of new investments.
- Private investors overwhelmingly favour domestic renewable energy projects (93% of the private portfolio in 2013-2015), whereas public investment is more balanced between in-country and international financing.
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Short Video: What 100 years of climate change did to France’s biggest glacier, the Mer de Glace (“sea of ice”)
1909 balloon aerial photography by Eduard Spelterini. 2017 aerial photography and 3D visualisation by Kieran Baxter.
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News: Encavis realises first project with Solarcentury by acquiring 43.9 megawatt solar park in the Netherlands
The SDAX-listed solar park and wind farm operator Encavis AG based in Hamburg, Germany, this week closed a deal on the acquisition of a construction-ready solar park with a total output of 43.9 megawatts (MW) in the Netherlands. The park’s project developer is Solarcentury, with whom the Encavis AG entered into a strategic partnership in December 2017 about the access to solar parks with a combined output of around 1.1 GW over the next three years. The solar park acquired today is supposed to be connected to the grid in the fourth quarter of 2018 and will double Encavis AG’s total generation capacity on the Dutch solar market to nearly 100 MW. Including debt financing on project level, the total investment volume of the park amounts to around 44 million euros. Read more here.