Things to be grateful for (if you like clean energy)

Back in March, as I clocked in my last visit to the Korean spa in L.A., I meditated on how the emerging virus seemed ingeniously engineered to exploit popular ideas of American liberty. All we needed to beat it was to collectively take it seriously, make temporary sacrifices to ensure the safety of ourselves and our neighbors, and then we could go back to normal. In other words, this thing was gonna wreck us.

As we buckle in for distanced Thanksgiving and whatever Holiday Bump the infection curve is going to show in a couple weeks, I figured I’d take a moment to list some things that we can actually feel good about in the realm of clean energy. My goal with this newsletter is to share facts about the impressive rise of clean energy that for whatever reason have failed to gain widespread acceptance outside of the network of professionals working on it. And to turn those facts into arguments that you can use, should you ever encounter someone whose data need a refresh.

First, a personal note of thanks. I’m grateful that all you readers chose to sign up for this and open my emails once a week! Some of you I know personally, some of you I’ve met through your feedback to my reader queries, some of you I have yet to meet (but I hope you’ll say hello some time!). I started this as a creative outlet to pass the time in the early days of quarantine, and it’s been truly heartening to see that hundreds of people share an interest in seeing what’s up with the energy sources that could possibly avert catastrophic climate change.

If you can think of anyone else you know who shares that interest, please invite them into the fold. Now that I’ve proven to myself I can do this week in and week out, my next hope is to get the message out to more people. I’m grateful in advance for any new friends you bring along for the ride.

And one last personal note: I’ve developed a little tradition of publishing a clean-energy themed holiday etiquette guide each year at this time. You can find the last one—a dystopian sci-fi one-act— here, with links to the previous editions. Top experts tell me it’s actually funny. And look for a new one posting at Greentech Media, some time after this letter comes out.

Clean energy rocked this year

2020 kicked off with the official government prediction that carbon-free power would supply three-quarters of all new power plant capacity in the U.S. this year. That’s remarkable, because wind and solar only produce a few percentage points of U.S. electricity at this point. But if they dominate all the new construction, you can guess which way that trend is pointing.

Then coronavirus hit and turned everything upside down. But something unexpected happened. While the price of oil and gas tanked and sent even the wealthiest of oil companies into financial upheaval, if not bankruptcy, clean energy contracts kind of just kept going like nothing was happening.

The grid battery industry had its best year ever, doubling the capacity they installed last year. We saw record amounts of solar getting built, and progress toward the offshore wind boom that’s forthcoming off the Atlantic coast. It initially looked like stay-at-home orders would hobble rooftop solar, which relied on in-person sales. But now that industry is poised to grow compared to last year; it seems that staying home all the time and using more electricity made people more inclined to invest in clean, secure energy.

Due to how power markets work, the slack demand largely pushed coal out of the picture, while people stopped driving as much. The result is U.S. emissions dropped 9 percent in 2020, putting us back on target to meet our commitments to the Paris Climate Accord. The electricity sector is cleaner now than what was required by President Obama’s Clean Power Plan regulation, which the Supreme Court stopped from happening.

That’s not to say the U.S. will keep hitting those targets without concerted action. But any action to that effect should take into account how the industry has succeeded thus far. After four years of concerted attempts by the Trump Administration to boost fossil fuels, clean energy is stronger than ever.

What are YOU thankful for? The competitiveness of renewable energy in Texas, perhaps? (Photo credit: The White House)

It even rocked in Texas

An outdated retort to clean energy is that it’s a nice idea, but too expensive, and we should let the market decide what’s needed. There’s a discussion to be had about leaving one’s destiny to the abstract conception of The Market, but I’d simply like to point out that this retort no longer works even if you accept the premise.

To see why, take a look at Texas, where the power market, called ERCOT, is the freest, openest, competitionist of them all. Texas doesn’t go for cushy contracts that keep power plants sitting around just in case they’re needed some time. Instead, private investors build plants based on the returns they expect when scarcity hits and prices skyrocket.

So what are these wily investors choosing to build to maximize returns in this free-market paradise? Wind, solar and batteries, for the most part.

Many other states lack this sort of market structure, and instead uphold the American virtues of monopoly and insulating incumbents from competition. Those protected states therefore don’t serve as bellwethers of what would happen if the market decides. But if that’s the guidance you seek, Texas has spoken.

All the utilities say they want it

The other thing I snicker at when people try to pull the “don’t dictate clean energy, let the market decide” argument is, literally all the prominent electric utilities in the country are picking clean energy by themselves.

That sounds hyperbolic, so let me explain. There are a couple hundred investor-owned utilities (as opposed to municipal utilities, for instance); I went in search of major companies that had NOT promised to zero out their carbon emissions by some time between now and mid-century. I found five. One of them, southeastern utility Entergy, then made that commitment a week later. So that leaves four major utilities in the country not explicitly committing to eliminate carbon.

The four were interesting, though. One was NextEra, which is the biggest renewables developer in the country. They own a regulated utility in Florida that has a bunch of gas that it isn’t looking to dump any time soon. Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Energy also made the list because, a spokesperson told me, “the advanced technologies needed to achieve net-zero targets do not exist.” You know what, fair. The people who say they know what they’re doing are actually winging it. But in the meantime, Berkshire Hathaway is already 42 percent carbon free, and certain subsidiaries are moving toward 100 percent even if the holding company isn’t. The other two were Tampa Electric and Oklahoma Gas & Electric, with around 800,000 customers each.

If you ever hear a politician assert that “industry” isn’t ready for clean energy, ask which industry they mean. The electric industry is already far more ambitious and uniform in its planning for a carbon free world than any branch of government is.

Read: Our History Is the Future

This book starts with Thanksgiving. Author Nick Estes notes that Massachusetts Bay Colony Governor William Bradford convened a Thanksgiving “In honor of the bloody victory, thanking God that the battle had been won.” The battle included killing 700 Pequot. “Peace on stolen land is borne of genocide,” Estes notes.

Our History Is the Future is both a firsthand account of the Standing Rock protest against the Dakota Access Pipeline, and a history of the interwoven forces bearing down on indigenous people through the centuries. In the 1800s, the federal government signed treaties limiting the lands the Sioux Reservation, and subsequently encroached even more. In the mid-1900s, the federal government built a series of dams designed to provide flood control and hydroelectric power to the predominantly white communities, while flooding the fertile river bottoms of the Sioux Reservation.

After those decades of land theft, the Army Corps of Engineers re-routed the Dakota Access Pipeline to cross the Missouri River just above the reservation, again to avoid crossing near majority white communities. Standing Rock’s fight against the fossil fuel pipeline therefore channeled centuries of effort by the Sioux to preserve connection to their land and the water that provides life on the plains.

It can be easy for some of us, myself included, to slip into abstract thinking about various sources of energy. It’s hard to do that if certain fuels require theft of land enforced by brutal police assaults on unarmed protesters, and others do not. If you want to see the veneers of ideology fall away and glimpse the power struggles underlying our energy system, check out Estes’ book.