A $7 Trillion Clean Energy World

Posted on February 6, 2008
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by Willy Ritch

Unless you’ve been living in a cave that doesn’t have cable, you know how world-wide awareness of climate change has increased dramatically over the last few years. And now that the debate over whether or not global warming is real is largely over, the focus seems to have shifted to questions of “How bad is it?” and, more importantly, “What can we do about it?” In a new report, Cambridge Energy Research Associates (CERA) thinks that trend will lead to world wide investment of $7 trillion dollars in the clean energy industry by 2030.

The ingredients for a dramatic increase will sound familiar to you: rising oil prices, increasing willingness on the part of governments to cap and regulate carbon, subsidies for clean energy development and rising demand in Asia for power. CERA says there are already green power hot spots popping up around the world–the solar industry in Germany, wind in Span and the biofuel craze in Brazil.

There is a theory in evolutionary biology called punctuated equilibria or “punk eek.” It’s the idea that some organism evolves very, very slowly then suddenly makes a rapid leap forward. (It’s also the name of my favorite pizza at a local flatbread place, but the connection there is lost on me.) The CERA report talks about a punk eek potential for clean energy.

Clean energy technology could have disruptive rather than incremental impact. Modular and distributed PV could disrupt traditional central-station models of electricity production and distribution. Breakthroughs in cellulosic ethanol can disrupt the traditional vehicle fuel system if scale, logistics, and costs prove manageable.

There’s another side to that phenomena, however. There could be unintended consequences, the report says, to policies that divert food stocks like corn into the biofuel industry, driving up the price and causing a backlash.

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