Renewable Power Will Soon Come Out on Top

A new report on global energy developments shows how far wind and solar have come—and hints at how far they’ll go.
More than $2.7 trillion has been invested in building up renewable energy capacity over the past decade. In those same 10 years, renewables more than doubled their share of the global power mix, from 5.9% in 2009 to 13.4% last year, Bloomberg reported.
Those are two of the key findings of the latest Global Trends in Renewable Energy Investment report, published by the Frankfurt School-United Nations Environment Program Center and BloombergNEF. 
More investment is needed to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement, and governments and industry groups are touting clean-energy investment as an essential part of recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic. 
But what this report helps see—with the clarity only a decade’s worth of data can provide—is just how much the world’s electricity sector has changed. That’s not just in terms of what’s being built, but also where capital is being applied.
An extraordinary amount of capital for clean energy has been deployed to the developing world—the vast majority to China, with a lesser chunk going to India.
At the peak year, in 2017, developing economies as a group saw almost $200 billion in new investment in renewable energy capacity. 
While investment in China and India has tapered off since then, investment in rest of the developing world has been growing, and hit a record of almost $60 billion last year.