The Economic Competitiveness of Renewable Energy: Pathways to 100% Global Coverage

Chapter 4

Overview of the Most Important Renewable Energy Technologies

4.1 Basics About the Potential of Various Renewable Technologies

In the preceding chapters the finiteness of traditional exhaustible energy sources including their harm to the environment and mankind was discussed. If we just compare the reserves for the various exhaustible energies with the annual primary energy consumption, we can see in Figure 4.1 that with the exception of coal these reserves will only last for a few decades (see also [2-7]). However, if we compare this to the annual solar energy radiation we can easily see that even a substantial increase in exhaustible energies could never reach the input of the annual solar radiation. Taking a look at the various renewable technologies as seen in Figure 4.1 like wind, biomass, geothermal, wave and tidal as well as hydro energy, we realize when comparing their annual energy delivery to that of solar radiation on the continents that solar has by far the biggest contribution to offer [2-7]. It is therefore no surprise that solar will also have the most pronounced place within the portfolio of the future scenarios discussed in later chapters. Figure 4.1 shows the total annual renewable Energy input for each energy form. The technical potential given in Figure 4.1 for the various renewables has also been analyzed by WBGU [2-7]. The numbers they arrived at for the technical potential can be seen in Table 4.1. In addition this group also worked on a so-called ...