Thanks to decades of these policies and investments, the clean energy future has already arrived for five key technologies: wind turbines, utility scale solar PV, distributed solar PV, electric vehicles, and LED light bulbs, each of which has seen drops in cost and growth in consumer demand over the past six years, as highlighted in Revolution Now: The Future Arrives for Five Clean Energy Technologies
The technologies in this report are already making a big impact and are easily visible: wind towers dot the landscape, solar panels appear on rooftops, LEDs are on every hardware shelf, and the latest EV models can be seen on many neighborhood streets.
Today, clean energy technologies are providing real-world solutions—not only do they reduce the carbon pollution that causes climate change, but they are increasingly becoming more cost-competitive with existing technologies, even without accounting for the climate benefits.
Highlights from the report include:
- Land-based wind accounted for 41 percent of all new capacity brought online in the United States in 2015.
- Utility-scale PV generated enough electricity in 2015 to power more than 2 million homes. It also represented 15 percent of all newly installed electricity generation capacity in 2015.
- More than 1 million distributed PV systems have been installed on American homes and businesses.
- Total installations of A-type LED bulbs exceeded 200 million through 2015 - growing 160 percent over 2014.
- Total sales of electric vehicles has soared closer to the half million mark with 490,000 EVs on the road as of August 2016.
Click here to learn more about the 2016 Revolution Now report.