Rocky Mountain Institute had a webinar on “The Energy Future Is Now” on December 13:
“Rocky Mountain Institute CEO Jules Kortenhorst, electricity expert Leia Guccione, and Marketing Director Kelly Vaughn discuss the urgency facing today’s energy decisions, what solutions exist to address the climate challenge, and where we need to invest our innovation, capital, and collective effort to drive a clean, prosperous, and secure low-carbon future.”
https://youtu.be/AQE1WJE8seU
They address the question “Is it [the green transition] happening fast enough? Will we get there in time?”
And, at least, in terms of electricity, John Koltenhorst seems to say yes:
“In some parts of the world, including here in the United States, building a new solar unit or building a new wind plant is actually already cheaper than operating an existing coal plant. So we can start to think about closing down existing polluting capacity and replacing it with new clean capacity.”
This is confirmed by Nathaniel Keohane, senior vice president of the Environmental Defense Fund:
“If you look at renewable energy, like wind and solar, the costs of that energy are plummeting. In some places in the United States, wind and solar are cheaper than existing coal as an means of generating electricity, so cheaper to run than current coal plants.”
Source: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/how-a-global-effort-could-deliver-solutions-on-climate-change
While Leia Guccione adds:
“Leadership in the face of adversity…. We have about 12 years to make some of the greatest improvements and changes in global energy use and the time for leadership is now… It must be us. It is our problem to solve… We have most of the tools we need to solve them. It’s just about action and moving faster, not about necessarily going back to the lab.”
Rocky Mountain Institute has some of those tools we need and has published The Carbon-Free City Handbook (https://rmi.org/insight/the-carbon-free-city-handbook/) and The Carbon-Free Region Handbook (https://www.rmi.org/insight/carbon-free-regions-handbook/)
which
“offer a set of actionable guidelines for cities, state, provincial, and regional governments to move their communities toward climate neutrality.”
The Handbooks cover not only electricity but also buildings and energy, land use, industrial production, mobility and transportation, waste, and finance.
Their materials on net zero energy building as well as net zero and other positive building codes alone are extremely useful.
Nearly zero-energy buildings
https://ec.europa.eu/energy/en/topics/energy-efficiency/buildings/nearly-zero-energy-buildings
Zero net energy Project Guide
https://newbuildings.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/GtZ-ZNEProjectGuide_FINAL.pdf
Santa Monica City Residential Zero Net Energy Guide for New Construction
https://www.smgov.net/uploadedFiles/Departments/OSE/Categories/Green_Building/SantaMonica_Residential%20ZNE%20Guide.pdf
Green Building Energy Code Overview
https://www.smgov.net/Departments/OSE/Categories/Green_Building/Energy_Code_Overview.aspx
The renewables transition is happening faster than even experts expected and is accelerating even now. The more people realize that reality the more speed it will pick up. Pass the word, new solar and wind are cheaper than operating coal plants now, in many places around the world, including the USA.
Never have understood why the fossil fuel industry digs in to maintain advantages for those resources when they can get in on the ground floor of renewable energy and make a killing. IMO we should transfer all subsidies from dirty energy to clean energy and amend building codes to require renewables wherever possible.
The fossil fuel industry has trillions of dollars invested in fossil fuel assets and infrastructure. Renewable energy, when it happens, will make those investments essentially worthless.
So the financial strategy is to milk those assets now and get as much as possible for them. Gas in your tank at $2.75/gallon is FAR more profitable than oil in the ground.
I think there’s at least one comparable analog — the music industry, from about 1970 to now. The companies that dominated vinyl were left in the dust by CD/DVD technology, and the players in that area are now being destroyed by the download/streaming players. There is a “long-wave” in a given technology sector:
a) Emerging technology (small size, slow growth)
b) Industry dominator (large size, rapid growth followed by rapid decline)
c) Mature technology (small size, slow decline)
For any company in that third area, there is always a tension between investing in a mature technology vs whatever is coming next. A given investment often has a higher marginal return in a mature technology than in an emerging technology, especially when risk is factored in.
That’s why relatively few companies successfully transition through several of these cycles.
I agree with your suggestions about subsidies and building codes. I think this is an area where we might be slowly learning that our much-vaunted “free-market capitalism” is being destroyed by the Chinese, who are aggressively subsidizing renewable industry players. While we’re squabbling about Donald Trump and immigrants, the Chinese are absolutely DOMINATING the entire renewable energy industry.
I suspect that by the time the dust settles, most of the hardware we install will be manufactured in Asia and paid for in Yuan/Renminbi.
Fossil fools bought into renewables back in the 1970s and then dropped all of their investments. Some say they bought in only to kill it but I’m not quite sure about that.
Over the last decade, some fossil fools bought in again (remember when BP was “Beyond Petroleum”?) but they are having as little success, it seems, as they did the last time around. Again maybe trying to kill renewables rather than profit off them?
Fossil fools are now trying to take us much oil, gas, coal out of the ground as long as they can and then stick all the rest of us with the bill for their “stranded assets.” Hey, it worked for the USA nuclear industry, didn’t it?