The Edwards & Sanborn Solar and Energy Storage Project in Kern County, California became the largest solar farm in the country when it went online last month.
2023 has come and gone, and while some progress has been made in reducing greenhouse gas emissions, this past year was the warmest globally on record by a wide margin. And it was just announced that we started this year with the warmest January globally on record. So what are world leaders doing to make it possible to reduce the temperature trend sooner rather than later? Well, December saw the 28th Conference of Parties (COP28) to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. It was held in Dubai, the most populous city in the oil-rich United Arab Emirates and chaired by Sultan Al Jaber, head of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company. This made climate activists suspicious that the UN had essentially put a fox in charge of the henhouse, and these suspicions were strengthened by a report early in the conference that Al Jaber intended to strike oil and gas deals during the conference.
Having said all that, COP28 did produce a noteworthy agreement to transition “away from fossil fuels in energy systems, in a just, orderly and equitable manner.” The optimistic view is that the world’s nations have agreed that moving on from fossil fuels is necessary to stabilize the Earth’s climate. The pessimist would point out that representatives of Pacific Island nations, who are more vulnerable to the effects of rising seas than anybody else and were not in the room when the agreement was made, feel that the agreement lacks a level of urgency commensurate with their situation. The pessimist would also point out that this need to move on from fossil fuels was sufficiently clear at the time of COP1 back in 1995, if not a decade or two sooner. The science made this acknowledgement inevitable, but it took this long for it to happen.
In practical terms, what does a phaseout mean? Many processes emit greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, but how quickly can these processes be altered to suit to what the climate needs? It’s worth taking a look at the different processes, and where we stand in each case. For this post we will start with power generation, which contributes 34% of global greenhouse gas emissions according to the most recent IPCC report and 25% of United States emissions, according to a recent report from the EPA.
Power generation remains a major source of greenhouse gas emissions, but the good news is that it doesn’t have to stay that way for very long if people don’t want it to. The primary obstacle right now is no longer cost. As I mentioned in my previous post, utility-scale solar and onshore wind are cheaper than the alternatives in many locations, and are now at least cost-competitive where battery storage is necessary. The primary logistical hurdle at this point is the availability of land. To that end, the Bureau of Land Management just updated its roadmap for solar energy, significantly expanding the area of public land available for development.
Where cost does matter right now, quite a bit in fact, is with offshore wind. Several offshore wind deals have fallen through recently, with the primary obstacle being that an inadequate supply chain in this country is keeping the cost of development sky high. Offshore wind has a logistical advantage over other renewable power sources in that it doesn’t compete for dry land with other industrial and residential demands, but that won’t help it if it remains so expensive. And while the supply chain will likely catch up with demand eventually, onshore renewable power continues to expand in the meantime. Offshore wind companies like Oersted may have a hard time re-convincing people that the need justifies the cost, especially if they have to start from scratch.
As for the role of carbon removal in power generation, the most recent Lazard report shows that even “dirty” coal is not cheap enough at this point to compete with other power sources. So unless gas prices drop quite a bit compared to renewables in the future and a major cost-reducing innovation in carbon removal happens, it will remain quite a bit cheaper to generate the electricity without emissions in the first place. In other words, where power is concerned, “net zero” means “zero.”
So the bottom line is that the biggest present barriers to creating an energy sector reliant solely on non-emitting sources are political ones. I’ve written in the past that creating a fully clean grid by 2035 in this county would strand assets in the hundreds of billions, but this administration has already approved bigger spending packages over shorter periods of time. And while stopping and hopefully reversing climate change will require a global effort, we’re the United States. We still have the world’s largest economy and most prosperous democracy. The developing world will look up to us and follow our example, one way or the other.
