Wind Power

My recent blog comparing the global hydro industry’s stagnation with the rapid growth in the wind and solar sectors was based on preliminary data for wind and solar in 2009, and my guesstimate for that year’s hydro additions. Better statistics are now available for all three technologies. In my blog I stated that the wind industry had likely installed at least a quarter more generating capacity than big hydro in 2009. The new stats, from the “Renewable Energy Policy Network for the 21st Century,” or REN21, shows that large hydro lagged even further behind than I had guesstimated.

Annual capacity additions of dam-based hydro and new renewables I just blogged on the Huffington Post about how the global wind power industry is blowing big hydro right out of the water in terms of how many turbines it is installing every year. In 2002, new installations of wind power worldwide exceeded the capacity of new big hydro for the first time ever. Wind power engineers installed more megawatts than their big hydro competitors three times over the following six years. [While no hydro data are yet available for 2009] data on trends in new big hydro capacity from the last decade sugg