Last week we blogged about a group of corporate executives calling on international leaders to commit to a carbon neutral economy by 2050. Here are a few examples in the clean technology sector that demonstrate how economic growth can be decoupled from carbon emissions.
After a temporary setback in 2013, a new record was set in 2014 for wind power installations. Globally, wind capacity grew by 51,000 megawatts in 2014, a surge of 44% over 2013 and a 13% increase over 2012. The biggest single contributor to new wind power in 2014 was China, where over 23,300 megawatts of wind capacity was installed, nearly half the global total. In Europe, wind power made up 43% of new energy capacity and in Canada we installed 1,900 megawatts.
A report from Clean Energy Canada found Canada’s green energy sector employs 23,700 people and garnered over $25 billion of investment in the past 5 years. In the United States one out of every 78 new jobs created in 2014 were in solar energy and the total number of solar-related jobs grew to 173,807, an increase of over 22 per cent from 2013.
Another area of clean technology experiencing growth is the fuel cell industry. Ballard Power, a Burnaby, BC based company, saw the value of its stock jump 57 per cent in February 2015 when it announced that it had inked an $80 million deal with Volkswagen. Volkswagen officials hailed the deal as a step towards getting hydrogen fuel cell technology to a wider market and some analysts believe the licensing scheme could allow Ballard to expand its fuel cell technology into diverse sectors, including busses and telecommunications.
With the current price of oil what it is, the economic opportunities in clean technology are looking increasingly attractive. This is the kind of economic development, decoupled from carbon, advocated for by Paul Polman and his B Team colleagues.
Photo Credit: http://www.nrdc.org/