I found this scary data showing how much money governments are spending worldwide to provide incentives for fossil fuels. It is > $500 billion dollars a year! Imagine this money would be spend on building renewable energy sources.
Lets do a quick and simple calculation for photovoltaic solar panels. Lets assume a pessimistic costs of $100/watt for installed photovoltaic solar power station. Then, $500e9 dollars spend per year could build a number of solar power plants which could produce 5e9 watts of power. That's 5 GW, GIGAWATTS. This means we could build 5 GW power plant every year if those subsidies would be spent on solar energy.
The largest nuclear power station in the world is only 8 GW which is located at Kashiwazaki-Kariwa Nuclear Power in Japan, but typically these power plants are smaller. So, this means from those wasted subsidies we could build an equivalence of roughly one nuclear power station a year of solar power!!!
Good point...but I guess it isn't only the matter of subsidies that postpone renewable energy development...from political reasons for some types of renewables to even very simple barriers such as lack of enough lands for constructing solar farms (not, of course, always the case), all have their own share in this so-called disaster...anyways it's huge money...
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