The international agency IEA which is considered as the “authority” on energy globally has proved itself foolish by being extremely conservative on solar growth, despite being proved wrong repeatedly. Even in the past, analysts and market watchers have castigated IEA for being way below the mark in predicting solar growth figures. Even this time IEA has been conservative on predicting solar growth despite being proved wrong.

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It recently raised its forecast of renewable energy capacity from 29% of capacity growth in the next 5 years to 42% of the capacity. This happened after RE capacity increases have become almost 60% of the total capacity growth in developed markets. Even large developing countries such as India and China have been installing huge capacities in solar and wind energy recently. The global blowback against coal continues to grow as the pernicious effects on pollution and climate change makes it a pariah in developed markets. Even developing markets are trying to reduce thermal power capacity as much as they can.

However, IEA most probably because it is held hostage by the fossil fuels lobby continues to downplay the importance of solar and wind energy growth. Though IEA says that they are becoming important it does not give very accurate figures for the growth of these two main RE sources.

Even for 2015,  IEA has given a very low figures for solar capacicty additions while other reputable agencies such as IHS are almost 20-30% higher. Don’t know why these people at IEA smoke or research. Even a high school student should be able to do better research than these guys.

Annual installed PV figures

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