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<\/p>\nPresident Barack Obama brokering an agreement at the Copenhagen climate change conference that critics say fails to address the problem of global warming.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
Will the failed\u00a0Copenhagen Climate Change Conference dampen investments in the clean energy sector? The short answer is no. With or without a binding agreement, demand for renewable energy will continue to grow next year and beyond. Ironically, China will lead this growth, in spite of playing an instrumental role in turning Copenhagen into a fiasco.<\/span><\/p>\n For 2010<\/a>, New Energy Finance estimates that globally, companies and governments will invest $200 billion in renewable energy, up nearly 50 percent from $130 billion in 2009 and above the $155 billion invested in 2008.<\/p>\n Things are also looking good for venture capital (VC) firms, which are a key source of funding for renewable energy companies. In a recent post on RenewableEnergyWorld<\/a>, Peter Nieh, founder of cleantech-focused VC fund Lightspeed predicted that the sector would see “increased availability of equity, debt, and project finance capital.”<\/p>\n Need further confirmation that the failed summit will not dampen investment flow into renewable energy?\u00a0 On Saturday, China amended its energy law<\/a> to\u00a0require the country’s power utilities to increase their purchase of renewable energy, including\u00a0wind, solar, or\u00a0hydropower power, even if they are more expensive\u00a0and less familiar than carbon-based electric generation technologies.<\/p>\n The new regulations come just a couple of weeks <\/a>after the China-lead derailment of the climate change summit and provide investors clarity on one of the world\u2019s largest cleantech markets. In short, one can successfully stonewall a global climate change conference and still like renewable energy. The two are not mutually exclusive.<\/p>\n Over the next two years, China has committed to invest $220 billion in renewable energy. As part of this massive green stimulus package China seeks to raise<\/a> its wind power capacity to 100 gigawatts by 2020, or eight times the current level. Some market studies estimate the size of the clean energy market there at nearly a $1 trillion per year<\/a>.<\/p>\n China’s green commitment is not motivated by altruistic environmental concerns. It’s about basic economics.\u00a0 For one, the nation’s leadership views clean energy as a pathway to securing a technological dominance at the expense of the U.S. and European Union countries. On a more micro level, as Sam Jaffe, a senior research analyst at IDC’s Energy Insight tells GER, in China, the price differentiation between coal-generation (it feeds 70 percent of China’s power generation) and renewables is not as steep as in the U.S. For China going green make economic sense.<\/p>\n “The outcome of Copenhagen does not entail a shrinking of cleantech investments,” concludes Ethan Zindler, head of North American research at New Energy Finance. “A realistic assessment of the climate change summit is that from the start it was going to be impossible to get 190-plus countries to agree to a binding agreement.” Zindler points out that New Energy Finance’s NEX – WilderHill New Energy Global Innovation Index<\/a>, which tracks the stock performance of traded clean energy companies, has continued to grow despite Copenhagen.<\/p>\n President Barack Obama brokering an agreement at the Copenhagen climate change conference that critics say fails to address the problem of global warming. Will the failed\u00a0Copenhagen Climate Change Conference dampen investments in the clean energy sector? The short answer is no. With or without a binding agreement, demand for renewable energy will continue to grow […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-112122","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/112122","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=112122"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/112122\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=112122"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=112122"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=112122"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Photo Credit: White House Photo by Pete Souza via Wikimedia.org<\/span><\/pre>\n<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"