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The US government keeps spectacularly underestimating solar energy installation
Key Excerpts from Article on Website of Quartz
Posted: October 23rd, 2017
https://qz.com/1103874/the-us-government-underestimated-sola...
Every two years, the US Energy Information Administration (EIA), Americas official source for energy statistics, issues 10-year projections about how much solar, wind and conventional energy the future holds for the US. Every two years, since the mid-1990s, the EIAs projections turn out to be wrong. Last year, they proved spectacularly wrong. The Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental advocacy group, and Statista recently teamed up to analyze the EIAs predictions for energy usage and production. They found that the EIAs 10-year estimates between 2006 to 2016 systematically understated the share of wind, solar and gas. Solar capacity, in particular, was a whopping 4,813% [or 48 times] more in 2016 than the EIA had predicted in 2006 it would be. The EIA regularly underestimates the growth in renewables but overestimates US fossil-fuel consumption. These estimates matter because they form the basis for actions by the Environmental Protection Agency and other federal agencies. The agencys projections bear little resemblance to market realities because they ignore publicly available evidence, argues the clean-energy non-profit Advanced Energy Economy. Michael Grunwald at Politico reports the EIA seems to base its projections on the assumption that renewable energy costs wont fall much, when in fact they keep plunging.
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