While this premise is no surprise in of itself, what is eye-opening at this early stage of the decade is the sheer speed with which costs associated with wind energy production are falling, and how quickly producers are leveraging this to galvanise the delivery of new wind projects.
As we reported in Part 1 of this series, nearly three quarters of all new energy generation capacity added in 2019 globally was renewable, while wind energy specifically made up 34% of that total, as China and the US surged with new deployments. In the same year, the MENA region added 894 MW of wind energy to its production capacity. While that actually represents a slight decrease compared to new capacity delivered in 2018, it’s still indicative of a strong trend of investment and a reliable delivery pipeline of projects that is expected to grow significantly in the first half of this decade, as Morocco, Egypt and Saudi Arabia lead the way.
Specifically, the Global Wind Energy Council (GWEC) predicted that the region will install another 10.7GW of wind energy capacity between 2020-2024, which represents a 167% increase compared to the current market status.
Both the current new deployments and the promised pipeline of new ones is predicated on the continuing trend of wind energy production getting cheaper. To highlight just how much of a change has occurred in the past five years, wind is now the cheapest form of produced energy in 12 different countries around the world, including China, Canada, Brazil, Germany, Mexico the US and the UK. At the end of 2014, this only applied to three countries worldwide – Denmark, Germany and Uruguay. Together, wind and solar energy are now the cheapest available forms of power for over two thirds of the world’s populace, a proportion that is highly likely to make inroads on the final third as the decade advances.
