The Decade that Was

Graph Courtesy of the New York Times December 30 2009

The BRIC countries—Brazil, Russia, India and China—have emerged this past decade as the countries who have swung the globe into a multi-polar world. In all aspects—wealth, energy production, global clout—the BRICs have been vociferous about their views. The stock market indexes among the BRICs compared to the U.S. S&P 500 demonstrates the disparity in wealth growth. However, the U.S. Gross Domestic Product stands at $14 Trillion, China is a distant second at $4 T and India even further back at $1.5 T.

For the electric power industry, this past decade may go down as the decade of China and India. Not only are they buidling power plants rapidly, but their contribution to the CO2 in the atmosphere is becoming a significant fraction of the total.

As much as the Copenhagen Climate Summit in December 2009 drew a bright line on climate change solutions between the BRICs and the U.S. , we need to be prepared for a more challenging threat that the growth of wealth has indicated. And that is new energy producing technologies. Without legacy equipment to deal with and fewer dissensions among the public, India and China have quietly adopted energy efficiency standards and renewable energy targets that are very aggressive. China has become the world’s leader in solar and wind energy technologies; India is forced to consider wide spread demand side management to close the gap between increasing demand and supply.

What will the end of the next decade reveal for the power industry? Coal- and nuclear power are expected to be the bulwarks for base-loaded power. Less developed countries-- UAE, Jordan, Vietnam-- are likely to adopt smaller mor modular passively safe units, perhaps under strict compliance regimes by the U.N. IAEA. China and India are going to have larger fractions of the their generation portfolio in renewable energy, even larger than many of the Western countries. It is also likely that by the end of the next decade the entire populations of China and India will be electrified, an event that will spur economic growth to even higher levels.