Clean energy is coming faster than you think
Society’s frozen, the economy is collapsing, a pandemic rages. But clean energy’s actually looking really good.
Welcome to Bright Ideas!
My name is Julian Spector, and I’m starting this newsletter to tell you what’s really going on in the world of clean energy. I’ve been on the climate change beat for a while, but for the last four years I’ve covered the rise of carbon-free power for Greentech Media, the go-to news source for that industry.
After immersing myself in how clean energy actually happens, who builds it and why, I realized that it’s way more competitive with fossil fuels than even some of its fiercest advocates seem to realize. I’m starting this personal newsletter to paint that bigger picture for my friends, family and anyone else who’s interested: After years in which renewables needed serious government help to get anywhere, they now regularly beat the dirtier options, often in places that don’t give a second thought to climate change.
This is a struggle of political ideas, technological prowess and business acumen. The contestants toil in labs designing better solar cells and batteries to fuel the transition. They rally in startups creating new models to bring clean power to the people. They sometimes labor among the incumbents, in massive utility companies choosing to cut out fossil fuels or legacy oil companies investing in the hot new thing as a hedge against their old-line business.
It’s a fascinating competition, but nearly indecipherable if you don’t have a sense of what to look for, like watching a rodeo without knowing the rules. My pledge with this newsletter is to show you how to decipher it, to introduce the key characters and strategies and tensions at play, and give you the tools to tell other people what’s really going on.
In contrast to so many other areas of the news, clean energy supports realistic, fact-based optimism. As I sit in quarantine in downtown Los Angeles, trying to stay connected with people stuck in their homes all over the place, I figured we could use some bright ideas to lighten up the cloudy outlook.
No leap of faith required
Awareness of impending climate catastrophe spurs some people to action, but not enough for a global response commensurate with the problem. That’s why it matters a great deal that clean energy is already winning over people that don’t care about fighting climate change; this type of energy is just better in several key respects, though it comes with its own set of limitations.
New technologies can provoke a lot of mistrust and misunderstanding. The funny thing about clean energy is that most of the things people worry about it being able to do, it’s already accomplished somewhere. Sure, there are some outstanding technical questions to be solved in the next 20 or 30 years (don’t worry, I would never gloss over such things!), but the more immediate challenge is communicating what’s already worked.
We know you can power a country entirely on carbon-free sources, because many already do. Numerous places generate all they need with hydropower—in the Canadian province of British Columbia, my girlfriend Sam grew up with lights powered by so much of that resource that the electric company is called BC Hydro. Others mix their river power with additional clean sources. Sweden meets its needs with hydropower, nuclear and wind. Iceland does it with hydro and geothermal, which also delivers carbon-free heat for a delightful network of public baths. Costa Rica uses hydro, geothermal and wind.
Most places will have a harder time going clean than those endowed with ample water power, but these places at least dispel any notion that a carbon-free grid is unprecedented or unattainable.
We also know that renewables can win on their own terms, because they’re already doing so in states that have no ambitious climate laws in effect. Sure, climate warrior California has the most solar power of any state, but Texas has the most wind power installed, and the runner-up for solar is North Carolina. Iowa leads in percentage of electricity from wind (~42 percent), followed closely by Kansas.
Solar power only works, obviously, in the sunshine. But the combination of solar power and batteries, which lets you pick when you deliver the electricity, has beat out gas plants in places like Arizona, Nevada, Oklahoma, and Florida, even before many coastal climate activist enclaves.
Clean energy 101
I’ll get into the specific advantages and drawbacks of renewables in subsequent posts. And I’ll address how clean energy companies and the energy industry more broadly are facing unanticipated struggles from the coronavirus lockdown and economic slowdown.
But here’s the high level view on where clean energy stands right now.
If you have a lot of sunshine and dry weather, solar power is likely so cheap that you can pay to slap a massive lithium-ion battery on the side of the plant and still provide cheaper power than a fossil fuel plant for the crucial evening hours (highest demand, but no sunshine).
Similarly, If you have a lot of wind, like the Great Plains states, chances are you can make more money more easily by leasing land to a wind farm than most any other use you could put it to.
Electric cars currently cost more than their gas-powered counterparts, but that will change irreversibly in a few years. Some transit and corporate fleets already find that the total cost of owning electric vehicles is cheaper, because fueling and maintenance savings make up for the higher up-front price.
Even the energy officials who historically underestimated the growth of clean energy year after year now agree that it’s coming fast. In January, the U.S. government calculated that 75 percent of new power plant capacity for 2020 would be wind or solar.
Nobody’s building coal plants in the U.S. any more; the only question is when the remaining ones will shut down.
Natural gas plants, on the other hand, are needed to provide the flexibility in the electricity system, ramping up and down in relation to supply and demand and the patterns of renewable production. California’s clean energy miracle currently depends on it, but the primary objective of any state going 100 percent clean is to figure out how to replace natural gas in their system. Since you can’t count on wind or solar around the clock, we need additional technologies to store and deliver power over a period of hours to weeks and maybe even months.
That’s the state of play in the great contest between clean and dirty energies.
This struggle affects us all, whether we pay attention or not. But paying attention to this particular story is so much more fun.
Be safe y’all,
Julian
This is a new adventure for me, and I’m trying to balance accessibility and depth. If something didn’t make sense, please shoot me a reply so I can clear it up. Or if you’ve been in this industry for years and object to how I frame a particular issue, I want to hear that, too. And if you want me to explain particular questions about the subject, I definitely want to know.
Not subscribed yet? Click this button to get more Bright Ideas in your life:
Got a friend who wants to know what’s up with clean energy? How about two friends? They deserve to see this!
The Energy Stream:
Since we’re all looking for things to do in quarantine, I’ll offer quick suggestions for streamable content or reading material that ties into the energy conversation.
I’ll kick it off with A Most Violent Year, available on Netflix. I thought this was going to be an underworld crime drama starring Oscar Isaac set in the dicey days of 1981 New York City. Turns out it’s even better than that: a heating oil distribution drama!
Oscar’s just trying to build up a clean, aboveboard heating oil company, running tanker trucks to homes so they can keep their furnaces going through those Ivey winters people put up with in New York. But the other companies play dirty, in this case by hijacking Oscar’s trucks and taking the fuel oil! Come for the sharply drawn characters and the struggle to stay virtuous in a dirty world, stay for the implicit commentary on the dangers of concentrating great value in tangible fossil fuel assets.
If Oscar’s company was around today, he’d be more worried about his customers getting hijacked economically by Google spinoff Dandelion Energy. This tech startup installs home geothermal devices for New York households, providing fuel-free heating and cooling by drilling a few hundred feet into the earth. The company’s goal is to win over the millions of homes that still burn fuel oil for heat in the New England winter, by offering them something cleaner and cheaper.