Energy

2015 Global Investment in Clean Energy Topped $300 Billion

Paul Ausick

Published: January 14, 2016 1:45 pm

Last Updated: January 13, 2020 3:01 pm

An investment surge in China, India, the United States, Latin America and Africa drove global investment in clean energy to a new record total of $329.3 billion in 2015, up 4% over 2014 investment and 3% higher than the previous record set in 2011. Since 2004, clean energy investment is up nearly 400% on an annual basis.

The largest portion of the 2015 investment, $199 billion, was directed at utility-scale clean energy projects such as solar parks, wind farms, biomass, waste-to-energy plants and small hydro-power projects. According to a report from Bloomberg New Energy Finance, the largest projects to receive investments last year were offshore wind-energy projects in the North Sea and off the coast of China. These projects included the United Kingdom’s 580-megawatt Race Bank and 336-megawatt Galloper, with estimated costs of $2.9 billion and $2.3 billion, respectively; Germany’s 402-megawatt Veja Mate, at $2.1 billion; and China’s Longyuan Haian Jiangjiasha and Datang & Jiangsu Binhai, each of 300-megawatts and $850 million.

In terms of public financing, two top deals last year were a $750 million secondary offering from Tesla Motors Inc. (NASDAQ: TSLA) and a $688 million IPO from TerraForm Global Inc. (NASDAQ: GLBL). The public markets accounted for $14.4 billion of 2015’s total.

Venture capital and private equity investors accounted for $6.1 billion in investment last year, up 27% year over year, but far below the peak of $12.2 billion reached in 2008. The biggest venture capital/private equity deals of last year included $617 million for Indian project developer Welspun Energy and $500 million for Chinese electric vehicle company NextEV.

There was $20 billion of asset finance in clean energy technologies such as smart grid and utility-scale battery storage, representing an 11% rise compared with 2014, the latest in an unbroken series of annual increases over the past nine years. The final category of clean energy investment, government and corporate research and development spending, totaled $28.3 billion in 2015, up just 1%, but still the largest category of investment.

Because the cost of renewable projects keeps dropping, increases in spending are multiplied by the additional installed megawatts. Wind and solar capacity increased by 12,200 gigawatts in 2015, about 50% of all net new capacity installed last year powered by any source.