Rethink Energy Research

ENERGY POST 2050 AND THE AGE OF RENEWABLES

Energy through the looking glass is a kind of manifesto document to show how the analysts at Rethink Energy see the energy transition going. It’s not only good news either and shows how major market distortions will occur which huge risks to both investors and energy companies.

Sure, renewables wins the race for electricity generation, that’s a given. But until you realize the size and enormity of that task, and its timing, it’s easy to think that it is only about wind, solar and batteries, it’s not.

Already we have a stock in Tesla which has almost no-one in Wall Street recommending, which is flying sky high. Stocks fly on fundamentals, advice from Wall Street, or because a bunch of non-investors believe in them and are ignoring Wall Street’s advice. There is going to be a lot of that.

Tesla is a new market leader that has come unhinged from its fundamentals and has a life of its own. Rethink Energy can see that at least another 15 other stocks will come out of the energy transition, eating up the market capitalization that sits in 100 stocks of companies that are over 100 year old. Out of 60 car manufacturers we expect no more than 15 to survive.

It is a simple 45 page document, showing the rapidly accelerating energy transition and the extent to which it reaches into all the markets adjacent to it. Once you have read it you will look at energy differently.

Anyone who invests in any aspect of energy, property or transport will have to fully understand what is happening in the energy transition. If you work at a decision making level in the utility market, or in one of the many vendors which supply that market, but most importantly invest in any aspect of the energy market, you will need this report.

Companies mentioned in this report:

Alstom Power, Alphabet, Airbus, Apple, Amazon, Anglo American, AntoFagasta, Arris, AstraZeneca, AT&T, Aveva, BAE Systems, Bank of America, Barclays, Boeing, Berkshire Hathaway, BHP Group, BioNTech, Black Rock, Bombardier, Broadcom, BP, Centrica, Chase, Citibank, Comcast, Commscope, Disney, DONG Energy, Dominion, Duke Energy, DGWHyperloop, Equinor, Enel, ESPN, ExxonMobil, EDF, EDP, Engie, EnBW, Eni, E.On, Emerson Electric, Exelon, Facebook, Ferguson, FirstEnergy, Ford, General Motors, General Dynamics, General Electric, Goldman Sachs, Google, Glencore, Hyperloop, Hyperloop Transportation Technologies, Hitachi Transportation, IAG, Iberdrola, Iveco, JP Morgan, JC Penney, Johnson Matthey, Lockheed Martin, Lyft, Moderna, Motorola, Moodys, National Grid, Netflix, Netscape, Neiman Marcus, Northern Rock, NextEra Energy, Nikola, Nissan, Orsted, PG&E, Pace, Pfizer, Philips, Polymetal International, Pennon Group, Persimmon, Raytheon, RWE, Repsol, Rio Tinto, Rolls Royce, Rivian, Schlumberger, Southern Company, S&P, Shell, Siemens Transportation, SSE, Statkraft, Time Warner Media, Total, Toyota, Tesla, Uber, Uniper, Union Pacific, Vattenfall, Vaillant Group, Virgin TransPod, Wal-Mart

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So how fast will the energy storage happen?

According to our latest report, the take off is so steep, that in the past few weeks alone, enough utilities have committed to buying projects involving energy storage, that the market will double this year, despite coronavirus, and double again next year. Battery Energy Storage (BES) will have a ten year CAGR in excess of 44.8%. Markets do not grow much faster than that.

The report mostly deals in GW (Giga Watts), because much of this market is in 4 hour chunks of battery, translating to 1,462 GWh of battery cells.

Our forecast indicates that 365.5 GW of nameplate energy storage capacity will be installed, in total some 1,462 GWh for the entire market, up from 6.9 GW of BES globally today.

This report is critical to anyone working around grid energy storage. It shows the dramatic acceleration going through the industry right now, after years of companies experimenting with lithium ion battery cells, with the USA at the center of activity.

“Global Battery Energy Storage Forecast to 2030: USA flying start triggers rush for Energy Storage leadership,” is a forecast by region of battery energy storage (BES) their size, rate of install and their effect on renewables profitability.

This report will;

• Give you a key numbers to drop directly into planning spreadsheets
• Give you confidence in your scenarios planning fore BES

Support schemes for the wind sector must be extended to prevent a prolonged slowdown in installations, according to a Rethink Energy analysis. In a quarterly tracking service for Q1 2020, the sector saw a 19% drop in installations against the same period in 2019, despite the fact that lockdown measures weren’t implemented in many of the major markets until March.

In the report entitled Covid-19 flattens Q1 2020 wind additions in major markets, a disruption in China’s domestic installations (down 47%) and in its supply chain exports has meant that early ripples have been felt on a global scale, which will inevitably propagate through the rest of 2020. While some markets have extended subsidy schemes, project deadlines and auctions, other regions that are more resistant to doing so, risk a significant volume of capacity that could quite easily fall by the wayside.

Rethink Energy has collated the figures for developments since the end of 2017, from a range of official national sources as well as its own database of deals in both onshore and offshore sectors, providing in depth insight into the largest markets in the world of wind power.

Quarter 1 of 2020 has been a particularly lousy installation period for solar panels with only one quarter in the past 9, being lower with just 15.8 GW getting installed. The only quarter below this level was in Q3 2019, when China previously installed a record low for the past 5 years.

Rethink Energy has collated the figures for solar developments in the first quarter of 2020, based on government and other sources. The sixteen most important global markets have been covered in detail, amounting to about 70% of global installations.

Those sixteen countries installed just 15.8 GW this quarter, a little more than half of the 31.6 GW installed in the immediately prior quarter, and 1.2 GW less than this quarter a year ago. All of this is placed at the door of Coronavirus, but its impact will likely fall even more heavily in Q2.

This report is crucial for management and team leaders from Developers, EPC, Energy companies, DSOs, equipment vendors or investors will benefit from understanding where solar is currently thriving and where it may suddenlybe emerging.

An economic report from Rethink Energy, entitled “Sticking with natural gas will lead to power generation losses of $1 trillion by 2050,” forecasts where these asset losses will be recorded around the world, if investors continue to back natural gas assets for electricity generation.

This forecast shows definitively that rather than focusing purely on the dying coal industry, investors should be questioning the outlook for natural gas – investors, utilities and energy companies should carefully study investment decisions made recently and over the next few years, unless they are happy to absorb investment losses against clean energy portfolios in excess of $1.2 trillion.

The report draws a continuous graph on pricing from today’s gas investments, and shows when each will be “under water” and unable to compete with wind and solar, plus batteries – and when existing assets will go cash negative.

By tracking the LCOE (levelized cost of energy) and LCOS (Levelized Cost of Storage) for each of the technologies, and plotting the point where they cross, we can see that gas has just a few more years of profitability left, before crashing into annual losses – unable to compete. The anticipated ramp in energy storage will begin to undermine gas imminently.

This report makes it clear if you have not used natural gas a ‘bridge’ fuel to zero emissions already, then you are too late – and the current levels of investment will lead to devastating losses in both an economic and environmental sense.

This past quarter is probably the last unhindered quarter of solar business to have no adverse effects from Covid-19, but Rethink Energy has just put together the numbers for solar activity for 2019 – based on government and transmission numbers from a variety of organizations around the world.

This is the start of the Rethink Energy Solar Service, starting with the basic top down reporting data on installed solar during each quarter, initially just for what are traditionally the top countries, which currently represent about 90% of all solar installations each year around the world. Actually here we have included Vietnam, not because it traditionally contributes a fair percentage of solar installations, but because throughout this year it has suddenly jumped its installations tenfold.

In total we have tracked the market at 74.6 GW additions for the year globally, plus estimated additional 8 GW when we add in other parts of Europe, Asia, the Americas and the rest of the world. This takes the end of 2018 global total of 476.6 GW of solar, up to the new total of 559.3 GW of installed solar.
Tracking