Costs of renewables headed significantly lower: BP

China will have to balance its long-term energy strategy with short-term development needs, an expert said on Tuesday, as a global oil major released some positive news for renewables.

By 2050, all-electric cars and hybrid cars will become the bulk of light-duty transportation, and the battery cost is expected to be reduced to just one-quarter of current levels, according to the BP Technology Outlook released in Beijing on Tuesday.

Also, large-scale solar and onshore wind will grow in the proportion of the world’s energy mix and their costs will fall significantly during the period, the outlook shows.

Due to the large-scale deployment of wind and solar and China’s status as the world’s largest new-energy vehicle market, the projection could be good news to China, a world-leading consumer of energy that gets two-thirds of its oil and one-third of its natural gas from overseas, experts said.

However, Lin Boqiang, director of the China Center for Energy Economics Research at Xiamen University, told the Global Times Tuesday that while such projections gave rosy picture for renewables, China is still balancing its energy strategy between costs and its clean energy ambitions.

“Subsidies and the desire to lower electricity bills have caused China to roll out measures to curb the development of its solar sector,” Lin said.

He noted that there will be ups and downs in the development of renewables in both China and the world.

China is currently the world’s largest energy user, accounting for 23.2 percent of global energy consumption and 33.6 percent of global energy consumption increases, according to BP.