JOHANNESBURG, SOUTH AFRICA - AUGUST 24: South African President Cyril Ramaphosa with fellow BRICS leaders President of Brazil Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, President of China Xi Jinping, Prime Minister of India Narendra Modi, and Russia's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov pose for a family photo, with delegates including six nations invited to join the BRICS group, Argentina, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, during the closing day of The BRICS summit at the Sandton Convention Center on August 24, 2023 in the Sandton district of Johannesburg, South Africa. (Photo by Per-Anders Pettersson/Getty Images)
It’s that time of year again, the time for us to reflect on the energy-related events of the calendar year that will soon come to a close and ruminate on the things that could take place over the 12 months to come. For me, that process begins here, with a review of prediction for 2023 I made a year ago in a piece titled “8 Consequential Energy Predictions For 2023,” and tallying up the score.
Let’s take a look at those 8 predictions, and how they all turned out when reality came down the road.
Prediction 1: The renewable energy sector will see a dramatic expansion in the United States during 2023 – This one was the lowest-hanging fruit of the bunch, given the hundreds of billions of dollars in new green energy subsidies enacted in the U.S. and across the western world during 2022, supplementing the billions that had already been in place. In a new report, Wood Mackenzie estimates global solar capacity installations grew by an amazing 56% during 2023.
Growth of new wind power installations was far slower, especially in the U.S., where S&P Global finds that “As of the third quarter, 3,159 MW of capacity has been installed, compared to the 5,361 MW that had been installed by the same time last year.”
All in all, though, the explosive growth in the solar sector meant 2023 was a record year for overall growth in renewable energy.
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