\u201cInstalled capacity is not really a useful metric for a lot of purposes,\u201d Mark Jacobson, an engineering professor at Stanford University who studies renewable energy, told me. \u201cWhen you\u2019re asking, \u2018how much is this supplying, how much is wind supplying versus coal?\u2019 you want to look at the actual energy delivered.\u201d<\/p>\n
That\u2019s commonly called generation,<\/em> and is defined as the amount of electricity produced on average over a period of time, such as a year. Sure enough, if you look at generation numbers, coal still beat out renewables in 2015 by a significant margin, 39 percent to not quite 24 percent.<\/p>\n Courtesy of Global Status Report. Read more at www.ren21.net\/status-of-renewables\/global-status-report\/<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Second, and perhaps more importantly, most readers, and apparently many journalists, equate \u201crenewables\u201d with wind and solar. But the IEA\u2019s renewables category also includes hydropower and biomass. According to the IEA, 71 percent of global renewable electricity generation in 2015 came from hydropower, 15 percent from wind, 8 percent from bioenergy and 4 percent from solar. In other words, it\u2019s not wind and solar that have overtaken coal, it\u2019s a basket of renewables heavily dominated by hydropower. While growth in wind and solar installations have certainly helped push renewables\u2019 share up, hydropower also has been growing in recent years. When you include all sources, hydropower currently generates around 16 percent of the world\u2019s electricity; wind, almost 4 percent; biopower, 2 percent; and solar, just above 1 percent.<\/p>\n These two subtle forms of miscommunication, I believe, have led to some unfortunate misperceptions. A recent survey found that, on average, Americans believe that the country gets 20 percent of the total energy it consumes from wind and solar (11 percent wind, 9 percent solar). Part of this is likely due to the common but erroneous conflation of \u201cenergy\u201d and \u201celectricity.\u201d But even if you look at just electricity, the numbers for the U.S. still don\u2019t come close to 20 percent. The U.S. Energy Information Administration\u2019s 2015 statistics show that 4.7 percent of the country\u2019s electricity was generated from wind, with 0.6 percent coming from solar. That\u2019s a 14-plus percentage point difference between what Americans think and the truth.<\/p>\n It\u2019s hard to blame them, with confused and confusing coverage of renewable energy statistics popping up in their social media feeds and on news outlets they\u2019ve come to trust. On top of that, most social media sharers never even read the articles they share. According to a recent study, 59 percent of links shared on Twitter have never been clicked, underscoring the outsize influence of misleading headlines, subheads and header photos. And research has shown that misleading and clickbait headlines have a lasting effect on how those who actually read articles interpret and remember their content.<\/p>\n Making wind and solar seem like they\u2019re doing better than they really are could come back to bite them \u2014 and the climate.<\/span>\u201cThis is typical of modern information consumption,\u201d said Arnaud Legout, co-author of the study on social media sharing, in a statement. \u201cPeople form an opinion based on a summary, or a summary of summaries, without making the effort to go deeper.\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s understandable that environmental organizations and activists would want to build public enthusiasm for renewable energy. But making wind and solar seem like they\u2019re doing better than they really are could come back to bite proponents \u2014 and the climate. If members of the public think we\u2019re well on our way to throwing fossil fuels into the dustbin of history and replacing them with renewables, they\u2019ll be less likely to demand new policies and take actions to lower their own carbon footprints. The public may even come to see wind and solar as capable of outcompeting fossil fuels on their own and therefore undeserving of government subsidies and helpful regulations.<\/p>\n Wind and solar have made real progress in recent years. Their costs are projected to continue to decrease, and more wind and solar farms and rooftop solar arrays will continue to pop up across the country and around the world. But if the goal is to limit warming to anywhere near the level world leaders agreed to in Paris in 2015, significant challeznges remain \u2014 and pretending like everything is going great is not going to fix them. Editor\u2019s note: The views expressed here are those of the author and not necessarily of Ensia. We present them to further discussion around important topics. We encourage you to respond with a comment below, following our commenting guidelines, which can be found here. In addition, you might consider submitting a Voices piece of your own. See Ensia\u2019s \u201cContact\u201d page for submission guidelines.<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/ensia.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/01\/voice-energy-communication-inline.png\")
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