UN Report Highlights Rising Green Energy Investment
Green Energy bucks economic downturn
Despite the continuing economic downturn, global investment in green energy has increased significantly over the past year and overtaken fossil fuel investment. This rather surpirsing fact comes from the ‘Global Trends in Sustainable Energy Investment 2009′ report which was prepared for the UN Environment Programme’s (UNEP) Sustainable Energy Finance Initiative by global information provider New Energy Finance.
According to these statistics, 2008 clean energy investment topped the record levels of investment in 2007 by 5%. This has been largely attributed to the significant green investments from the emerging economies of China and Brazil – investments in the US and Europe fell and were more conservative respectively.
Achim Steiner, UN Under-Secretary General and UNEP Executive Director, said in the accompanying press release:
“Without doubt the economic crisis has taken its toll on investments in clean energy when set against the record-breaking growth of recent years. Investment in the United States fell by two per cent and in Europe growth was very much muted. However, there were also some bright points in 2008 especially in developing economies—China became the world’s second largest wind market in terms of new capacity and the world’s biggest photovoltaic manufacturer and a rise in geothermal energy may be getting underway in countries from Australia to Japan and Kenya”.
$155 billion in total was invested in 2008 in clean energy firms and projects worldwide (excluding large hydro projects). $105 billion dollars of this was spent directly developing power generating capacity from wind, solar, small-hydro, biomass and geothermal sources.
These are encouraging statistics, however we would sound a note of caution. The effects of the economic dowturn didn’t really begin to hit home until the fourth quarter of 2008, so here at Green Electricty we would (sadly) be extremely surprised if this level of investment continued in 2009.
Download the full ‘Global Trends in Sustainable Energy Investment 2009′ report here.
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UN Report Highlights Rising Green Energy Investment