Clean energy goes mainstream

Source: Lazard & BNEF & my projections.
The cost of a 50/50 W/S grid falls below the marginal cost of coal in 2021, while the cost
 of new-build W+S+4 hours of storage is now way below the cost of new-build coal.

 From Inside Climate News

We’re in the midst of a big moment in the clean energy transition, but you might not have noticed.

Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden recently proposed a climate and clean energy plan that aims to get the country to net-zero emissions by 2050. Although there was predictable opposition from the Trump administration and fossil fuel interests, there was little backlash to speak of otherwise.

The lack of broad-based objection to the plan shows that the idea of net-zero emissions by 2050 has gone from the fringes to near the mainstream of U.S. politics.

How did that happen?

I asked experts at two leading energy policy nonprofits: Sonia Aggarwal, vice president at Energy Innovation in San Francisco, and Carla Frisch, a principal at the Rocky Mountain Institute in Colorado.

The big change has been the growing competitiveness of clean energy, demonstrating that the clean energy transition is a boon to the economy, Aggarwal said.

“We are just in such a different place with technology readiness and cost than we were in the last go-around,” she said.

She told me that some of the most striking contrasts were between the way politicians talk about the energy transition today and the way they did in 2009, when Congress was debating the Waxman-Markey bill, which would have started a national carbon-trading system. The bill passed the House but never came up for a vote in the Senate.

In that debate, supporters of the bill said the long-term benefits of carbon trading outweighed the costs of not addressing climate change, but they had to concede that there would be substantial costs in the short-term.

Today, the economics have changed so much that this debate would be different in fundamental ways. Utilities have shown that replacing old fossil-fuel plants with wind, solar and battery storage can lead to a net savings for consumers. State and local policies also have changed substantially, with about 1 in 3 Americans living in a state or city that has adopted a plan to get to 100 percent carbon-free electricity.

“We can decarbonize while also delivering incredible economic benefits,” Aggarwal said.

Frisch said one of the key factors is that Americans are feeling the effects of climate change much more than before, with extreme heat and weather, which makes the issue seem more real to them.

“We know there will be more extreme weather, more extreme storms, more extreme impacts,” she said.

Cities, states, corporations and churches have become the leaders in addressing climate change, she said, many with commitments to get to 100 percent renewable energy and net-zero emissions. Those commitments have helped to push the idea of net-zero emissions into the mainstream to the point that Biden’s proposal isn’t nearly as controversial as it would have been a few years ago.

When Trump talks about energy, he tends to focus on preserving fossil fuel jobs and he often makes unsubstantiated claims about the perils of wind energy.

Biden is “against God, he’s against guns, he’s against energy, our kind of energy,” Trump said last week in Ohio. 

In addition to being nonsensical—Biden isn’t “against energy”—it’s notable that Trump is framing this as a matter of tribal loyalty rather than a pocketbook issue. It shows how the pocketbook arguments against renewable energy have mostly vanished.