Our Renewables MMI regained some of the ground it lost last year and climbed back up to 52 this month.
However, renewables are still a market stuck in a low-price rut with little prospect of breaking out of the low range they’ve been settling into over the last four years. Seemingly paradoxically, renewable energy was the biggest source of new power added to U.S. electricity grids last year as falling prices and government incentives made wind and solar increasingly viable alternatives to fossil fuels.
Renewables Lead New Energy Capacity
Developers installed 16 gigawatts of clean energy in 2015, or 68% of all new capacity, Bloomberg New Energy Finance said in its Sustainable Energy in America Factbook released Thursday. U.S. clean-energy investments rose to $56 billion last year, up 7.5% from 2014. The majority, $30.2 billion, went to solar. Investors pumped $11.6 billion into wind energy and $11.1 billion into technology to improve grids, boost efficiency, develop storage systems and other ways to better manage power usage.
With so much investment in the technology, why such a gloomy outlook for the metal products, such as grain-oriented electrical steel and silicon, that go into them? Most are oversupplied and their individual markets have not yet hit bottom in this bearish commodities cycle. We’ve also often lamented that the recently extended tax credits for products that contain these metals actually help keep prices low and discourage any real price inflation based on value.
Low prices for both gasoline in cars and natural gas for electrical power generation will also discourage further adoption as those fossil fuels will look more attractive to investors.
Adoption Keeps Climbing
The good news is that with more adoption, green technologies are getting into the hands of more homeowners, in the case of solar, and more utilities in the case of wind. Some lesser-subsidized technologies such as biomass are also taking a bite out of the electrical power generation market where natural gas is now the dominant player.
Power from natural-gas-fired plants accounted for 25% of capacity added to grids last year. Nearly one-third of all electricity in the U.S. is now generated by gas, putting it nearly on par with a declining provider, coal.
The future is certainly bright for the metal inputs of wind turbines and solar panels. We just wouldn’t advise anyone to invest in these metals right now expecting a turnaround and an escalating market such as nickel’s 2014 climb. Slow, steady and subsidized will win this race.
by Jeff Yoders