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No Cap, Clean Technologies Still Need A Lot More Infrastructure and Research For Deployment!

 

Capacity building is incredibly difficult but a crucial part of clean technology deployment. Not only are there huge infrastructure considerations but there are also market considerations on how viable technologies are.

An example of the importance of infrastructure can be found in United States energy prices. Without subsidies, the prices of generating a megawatt hour of energy through large scale solar and wind is comparable with energy generated by fossil fuels. The crunch point is that the transmission of this energy and its storage is really difficult. 

Renewable energies like wind and solar are incredibly site-specific and often in locations where current transmission infrastructure does not exist. The cost to set up this transmission would significantly increase the per megawatt hour cost of  renewable energy generation. 

Furthermore, wind and solar energy are only available when there is wind and sun which are not always the times in which energy is demanded. The current state of energy storage, such as lithium batteries, are not effective to bridge this temporal gap for renewable energy. The issue of energy storage requires a lot more research and innovation!

Below is energy cost data provided by Lazard, a financial advisory firm.



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