The latest United Nations Environment Programme report points out the US as the country that invested the most in green energy in 2015, with around 44 billion dollars, a 19% growth over 2014.
Post-tsunami Japan follows closely, with 36 billion dollars invested, which equals its 2014 investment.
Unfortunately, Europe’s investments on green energy keeps decreasing, with a negative 21%: despite a 17 billion dollars increase in off-shore wind energy, total investment amounted at 49 billion dollars, though it’s still more than what the US and Japan did.
At the end of 2015, the use of wind energy, thanks to offshore investments, surpassed nuclear and hydroelectric energy, thus becoming the third source for cumulated capacity, unfortunately still behind gas and coal energy.
In 2015, renewables made up three quarters of the new installed capacity in Europe, that is 22.3 on 29 total gigawatts.
European wind energy makes up for 44% of the new installed capacity while photovoltaic energy settles at 29%, about 8.5 megawatts.
Luckily, new installations of traditional energy sources such as coal (4.7 gigawatts, 16.3% of the total quantity) and gas (1.9 gigawatts, 6.4%) are lagging behind.
Excerpt from the Sole 24 Ore Nova article “Le rinnovabili oltre la congiuntura” by Elena Comelli.
