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Visualizing the Global Transition to Green Energy

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Green Energy transition

Visualizing The Global Transition to Green Energy

A fully green future could be closer than you think. With each passing year, the steadily declining price of renewable energy makes it increasingly competitive against fossil fuels.

Today’s infographic from Raconteur breaks down the material shift towards renewable energy, and where in the world it’s taking place.

Time to go green

A recent United Nations report estimates that renewables must make up 70% to 85% of electricity by 2050 to combat the dire effects of climate change.

The good news? Embracing renewable energy is becoming easier on the wallet. Most renewable energy sources are becoming cheaper and quicker to produce, and it’s speeding up widespread adoption.

Cost of electricity per energy source ($ per KWh)20102017
Concentrating solar power$0.33$0.22
Offshore wind$0.17$0.14
Solar photovoltaic$0.36$0.10
Biomass$0.07$0.07
Geothermal$0.05$0.07
Onshore wind$0.08$0.06
Hydro$0.04$0.05

The price of solar photovoltaic cells are projected to dip dramatically over this seven-year period, as solar panel infrastructure moves away from being an experimental technology, and into a trusted energy source easily replicated at scale. Solar also received the most new investment by energy type in 2017, up 18% from the previous year.

Of course, it won’t happen overnight. Even as the world continues to electrify, coal will still make up almost one-third of the world’s energy mix in 2040, while renewables will only be at 25%.

Nevertheless, concentrated efforts to curb our reliance on coal are signals that the fossil fuel is on its way out, and new investment in green energy sources is on the rise in most regions.

The Renewables Race

It’s perhaps not surprising that China is leading the change in renewable growth. The nation tops the list of spenders, spending more on green energy than the United States and Europe combined.

New Investment by Region2016 ($ billion)2017 ($ billion)% Change
China$96.9$126.631%
Europe$64.1$40.9-36%
United States$43.1$40.5-6%
Other Asia and Oceania$35.7$31.4-12%
Other Americas$6$13.4124%
Middle East & Africa$9$10.111%
India$13.7$10.9-20%
Brazil$5.6$68%
Total$274$279.82%

In places where a consistent and reliable source of energy is hard to come by, people are looking to clean energy as a way to leapfrog ahead of using the carbon-intensive electricity grid entirely.

Take Ethiopia for example: the $4 billion Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) project along the Nile River will help meet the area’s rising energy demands. Once completed, it will be the largest dam on the continent and generate around 6,450 MW of power.

This trifecta of innovation, investment, and falling costs could be the answer to bolstering renewable energy infrastructure for decades to come – and it will be interesting to see the ultimate pace at which green energy supply comes online, and what that means for the world.

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Energy

How Much Does the U.S. Depend on Russian Uranium?

Currently, Russia is the largest foreign supplier of nuclear power fuel to the U.S.

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Voronoi graphic visualizing U.S. reliance on Russian uranium

How Much Does the U.S. Depend on Russian Uranium?

This was originally posted on Elements. Sign up to the free mailing list to get beautiful visualizations on natural resource megatrends in your email.

The U.S. House of Representatives recently passed a ban on imports of Russian uranium. The bill must pass the Senate before becoming law.

In this graphic, we visualize how much the U.S. relies on Russian uranium, based on data from the United States Energy Information Administration (EIA).

U.S. Suppliers of Enriched Uranium

After Russia invaded Ukraine, the U.S. imposed sanctions on Russian-produced oil and gas—yet Russian-enriched uranium is still being imported.

Currently, Russia is the largest foreign supplier of nuclear power fuel to the United States. In 2022, Russia supplied almost a quarter of the enriched uranium used to fuel America’s fleet of more than 90 commercial reactors.

Country of enrichment serviceSWU%
🇺🇸 United States3,87627.34%
🇷🇺 Russia3,40924.04%
🇩🇪 Germany1,76312.40%
🇬🇧 United Kingdom1,59311.23%
🇳🇱 Netherlands1,3039.20%
Other2,23215.79%
Total14,176100%

SWU stands for “Separative Work Unit” in the uranium industry. It is a measure of the amount of work required to separate isotopes of uranium during the enrichment process. Source: U.S. Energy Information Administration

Most of the remaining uranium is imported from European countries, while another portion is produced by a British-Dutch-German consortium operating in the United States called Urenco.

Similarly, nearly a dozen countries around the world depend on Russia for more than half of their enriched uranium—and many of them are NATO-allied members and allies of Ukraine.

In 2023 alone, the U.S. nuclear industry paid over $800 million to Russia’s state-owned nuclear energy corporation, Rosatom, and its fuel subsidiaries.

It is important to note that 19% of electricity in the U.S. is powered by nuclear plants.

The dependency on Russian fuels dates back to the 1990s when the United States turned away from its own enrichment capabilities in favor of using down-blended stocks of Soviet-era weapons-grade uranium.

As part of the new uranium-ban bill, the Biden administration plans to allocate $2.2 billion for the expansion of uranium enrichment facilities in the United States.

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