SOLAR MAGAccording to the recent report World Energy Investment 2016 released on 14 September, by the International Energy Agency (IEA), the total amount of the global energy investment in 2015 reached about 1.83 trillion US dollars, down 8% from 2014 and had been the minimum amount of global energy investment since 2010. The report also indicated that this fall was mainly due to the decline in the oil and gas investment in the context of low oil prices.
Though there was a sharp decline in the oil and gas investment, the amount reached 46% of the investment of 1.83 trillion US dollars. As to the rest, the renewable energy investment accounted for 17%, thermal power plant 7%, power transmission and distribution network 14%, energy efficiency 12% and coal mining and transportation 4%.
It is particularly noteworthy that though the global renewable energy investment had remained steady since 2011, the annually newly added renewable power capacity increased year by year, on account of the decline in the cost of renewable energy. And the investment in power storage in 2015 exceeded 10 billion US dollars, 10 times higher than that in 2010. However, the portion put into power storage only accounted for 0.4% of the overall grid investment. This means the power storage investment is rather insufficient and still has a long way to go.
As for China, the energy investment in 2015 amounted to 315 billion US dollars – accounted for 17% of the total global energy investment. When going into China’s investment portfolio, we can find that there were 90 billion US dollars put into renewable energy investment; 45 billion US dollars for building fossil energy plants (mainly coal power plants; the newly coal power capacity in 2015 approached 45GWs).
