Clean electricity by 2035: Not so hard, actually

This is Bright Ideas, a weekly newsletter about how clean energy is taking on the world with surprising aplomb. I’m Julian Spector—by day, I report on clean energy at Greentech Media; by night, well, I also think a lot about clean energy. The bars are closed, my desert city gets chilly at night, what else is there to do?

If this is your first time here, please subscribe to keep in touch.

If you have questions or comments, I’d love to hear them. Reply to the email, or send your thoughts to brightideas@substack.com. My goal is to convey the rapid uptake of clean energy in language that is both approachable and technically accurate; your feedback is valuable to know how well I’m doing.

Remember when I told you how clean energy is coming faster than many people think, even people who profess to love renewables?

In case my brief account of this theory left you unconvinced, the energy policy experts at U.C. Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy just corroborated it in a rather stunning fashion. By updating figures for the cost of wind, solar and batteries, they concluded that the U.S. could move to a 90 percent carbon-free grid by 2035, and electricity would cost less than it does today. Plus, it would save 85,000 lives by eliminating the power plant pollution I wrote about in last week’s letter, and new jobs would outweigh those lost in fossil fuel industries.

Think about that for a moment. We’ve been taught that “doing the right thing” by investing in clean energy is a costly path for the righteous—or just a costly path, for those who dislike non-polluting energy. What this study says is, we can shut down all the coal, stop building new gas plants, hang onto our existing nuclear plants, and crank the wind, solar and batteries. Then, the cost to produce power will go down, along with emissions and premature deaths.

This story, which I reported for Greentech Media here, reflects the central themes of Bright Ideas: clean energy is coming faster than people think, because it keeps getting cheaper in a way fossil fuels can’t match, and talking about it as an expensive sacrifice is outdated.

This week, I’ll break down how the expert outlook got so bullish.

When past isn’t prologue

I’m a big believer in looking to history to understand the present and discern clues for the future. But that’s not a great way to predict the rise of clean energy, because our ability to create clean power plants today is drastically more evolved than it was just a few years ago.

Imagine predicting future earning potential based on your elementary and middle school years. The odd lemonade stand (or that time a friend and I dispensed with the juice and hawked origami paper cups, for some reason) doesn’t tell you much about what you’ll earn when you have a full-time job.

Looking at how many solar plants the U.S. built, say, 20 years ago, you’d think this was a sorry little thing with no future. But that would be wrong, we know now, as wind and solar are on track to provide the majority of new power plant capacity for the U.S. this year.

Berkeley, where clean energy policy research happens. (Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

Expert forecasts on future costs of clean energy have consistently missed how fast costs came down. You could have outperformed the best estimates of the last decade with a simple plan: bet on more cost reduction than anyone else expected (for a first-person account of someone who did that, and still underestimated clean energy, check out this blog post by author Ramez Naam). The Berkeley study refers to estimates by the federal government from five years ago, which anticipated we’d have to wait until 2050 to get the cheap prices that we see today.

As one of the study’s authors explained:

“The key thing that was very exciting to us, and why we were prompted to do this study, is that the cost declined much faster than all the experts in the field anticipated, including us.”

Wish you could tell your friends about how cheap clean energy’s getting? Now you can!

What’s left to do?

If you sensed a “but” coming, there is one. This 90 percent clean grid isn’t going to spring fully formed from the heads of Berkeley professors.

If we had free markets for electricity, the cheaper option would be expected to win out over time. But a free market doesn’t really exist here: grid policy is fragmented across 50 states, rarely prices externalities such as premature death, and almost always favors incumbent technologies and businesses.

Shoot me a note if you’d like to see an installment about the limits to free markets in energy; that often gets glossed over…

But the 2035 report came out alongside a companion policy memo by think tank Energy Innovation, located just up Market Street from my old office in San Francisco (fun spot for clean energy cocktail parties, back when socializing was allowed).

Key takeaway: Pass a national clean energy standard that mandates 90 percent clean electricity by 2035, ramping to 100 percent by 2045.

There’s also some good stuff for cost-effectively managing the decline of coal plants and investing in emerging technologies. But really, setting that simple, direct standard for carbon in the electrical grid forces all the relevant actors to figure out the barriers in the way.

A clean energy standard is one of the three pillars of climate policy consensus among left-leaning groups that David Roberts identified in a recent Vox article. It seems to have nudged out the carbon tax, that dreamy favorite beloved by economists and hardly anyone else. Still, if federal action is hard to imagine, you can start at the state level. Several states already have.

Investment in clean energy will have to grow to unprecedented levels. But the increase in clean energy installations needed to hit this target is far less daunting than the gap between my childhood lemonade revenue and my meager entry-level journalism salary.

We only need to double the historic record for annual installations through the 2020s, and triple that level in the 2030s. But that’s compared to the industry’s lemonade-stand era. Clean energy is really barely getting started—instead of doubting its potential, check back when it’s had a few years to grow up, and prepare to be surprised.

The Energy Stream

I love learning about energy because it pulls back the curtain on the hidden systems that govern my life, and yours, and society in general. This week, I’m recommending you stream a documentary that does that work of pulling back the curtain on society exceptionally well: Ava DuVernay’s 13th (streaming on Netflix).

This film starts with the 13th Amendment’s abolition of slavery, with one crucial stipulation: “except as a punishment for crime.” From there, the film tracks decades of innovative efforts by Americans to find new ways to criminalize black bodies for profit, social control, and political gain. This culminates in the bipartisan “tough on crime” consensus of the ‘90s, which cemented stunningly high rates of incarceration that still bind this country today.

As I noted earlier, clean energy’s future already looks radically different from its past. The American prison system looks far too much like its past, in all the worst ways. 13th tells the necessary history so skillfully that hidden systems become painfully exposed.