Alternative energy presents a tremendous growth opportunity. Currently, there is an ongoing effort to provide sufficient energy sources and secondary energy platforms to fulfill society's rising energy needs. Countries around the world are evaluating energy technologies based on scalability, environmental impact, security of source and costs. Alternative energy, specifically solar and wind, is scalable, provides minimal environmental impact, is a secure source and costs are dropping as technology and scale improve. The world, particularly Europe, USA, the Middle East and China, is rapidly moving towards alternative energy in order to create lesser dependence on oil and coal energy sources. The rapid growth involves both installation of established technologies and emerging renewable energy-related technologies.
The developed world and many of the developing countries (India, China, Brazil, Russia and more) have become increasingly dependent on external energy sources for transportation, production of manufactured goods, and delivery of energy services. Long term, as the world economy continues to grow, energy demand will continue to increase, outpacing increases in supply. Energy supply will be vital to developed nations to sustain the status quo and will be critical to allow people in developing countries to increase their standard of living as they seek to meet basic needs of transportation, electricity, air conditioning/heating, etc.
The global market for renewable energy is growing dramatically. Solar energy growth has been rapid, with worldwide PV cell manufacturing production growing 41% in 2006 and 48% in 2007 in spite of global polysilicon shortages and raw material price increases. In 2007 solar energy revenue was over US$ 70 billion, almost twice as high as the previous year. Solar energy presents a tremendous growth opportunity and despite this recent growth, solar still only accounts for a very small proportion of the world's current electricity production. With projected compounded annual growth of 40% - 50% over the next three years, solar will only constitute 1% of global installed capacity and 7.2% of new capacity by 2011. As for wind energy generation, as of the end of 2007 there was 94 GW of installed wind generation capacity, globally. Analysts expect this number to grow to 650 GW by 2020, which represents CAGR of 16%.
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