Green Energy to the Rescue.
Our best hope for beating climate change — and the reason the picture has brightened so much in recent years — is technology. Solar power and battery storage are on steep learning curves, meaning that the more of them we deploy, the lower they cost. Batteries are particularly important because they have two main uses: to replace oil as a power source for transportation (electric vehicles), and to help solar and wind replace coal by smoothing out intermittency.
Let’s start with solar and wind. At this point, thanks to massive volumes of Chinese production, solar panels are so cheap they’re practically free. Costs for land and installation have been falling as well, though more slowly. Wind is also getting cheaper, though less quickly, and land costs are higher.
But anyway, because solar and wind are so cheap now, utility companies are starting to install them in large quantities. As of 2022, solar and wind were almost one-eighth of global electricity generation, and 2023 is going to show another large increase:
This really looks like an unstoppable rise. In fact, solar and wind are expanding faster than either nuclear power or liquified natural gas did:
Anyway, on to batteries. As everyone knows, solar and wind are intermittent. Usually you can just fix this with a natural gas peaker plant, which only turns on when the solar and wind run out. That produces some emissions, but a lot less than just using natural gas to power everything. But a much better solution is just to have a bunch of batteries to store excess solar energy during the sunny hours (or wind energy during the windy hours) and then use battery power when solar and wind aren’t available.
There have been a lot of arguments about whether battery storage for the electrical grid will ever be cost-effective. But when we look out at the world, we see battery storage increasing at what looks like an exponential rate:
Of course, batteries are also useful for electric vehicles. And here too, cheaper batteries — along with the natural advantages of electric cars, such as faster acceleration and much less need to visit a filling station — are leading to exponential growth:
This year there were a flurry of stories about how the EV revolution was stalling out in the U.S. So far, those stories have proven inaccurate; the EV transition is continuing to accelerate in America:
It’s also worth mentioning that the green technology revolution is being driven by fundamental technological improvements, not merely by subsidies or economies of scale. Yes, subsidies for green energy are good, because in order to beat climate change we need to install green energy even faster than the market otherwise would. But when you look at the technological capabilities of solar panels and batteries, you see that they’ve continued to get better and better.
First, here’s the number for solar panels. The efficiency with which they convert sunlight to electricity jumped all the way from 16.8% in 2018 to 21.3% in 2023:
For batteries, the key metric — or at least, one key metric — is energy density. Here, we see continuous improvements in the state of the art:
Meanwhile, another claim used to cast doubt on green technology is that there aren’t enough easily recoverable metals in the world to build the necessary batteries. As Hannah Ritchie writes, this is extremely unlikely. For example, here’s her chart for lithium:
She has more charts showing a similar pattern for every other critical mineral — copper, cobalt, graphite, nickel, and neodymium — but their pictures all look even more optimistic.
The realization that the world is full of lithium — the U.S. is finding absolutely massive amounts of the stuff — may be one reason why lithium prices have collapsed so hard over the last few months:
In any case, I think your takeaway from all of this should be that green energy is very much for real, and not a fad being driven by environmentalists and government largesse. The tools now exist to solve the climate crisis; all we have to do is pick them up and use them.
Reducing emissions doesn’t mean degrowth
Finally, it’s worth talking about the effect that addressing climate change will have on the rest of the economy. Some climate activists think that giving up fossil fuels will require degrowth. The basic idea is that emissions and GDP are irrevocably coupled — that there’s no way to increase GDP over the long term while also giving up oil and coal and gas.
Fortunately, this is just wrong. A new IEA report shows global GDP increasingly uncoupled from CO2 emissions:
The decoupling is especially apparent in the U.S., the EU, and other rich countries:
And no, this is not happening because we outsourced emissions to China; that is a myth. When you look at consumption-based emissions, you see very little offshoring of emissions by the developed democracies:
In fact, when we look at China, we see a similar pattern playing itself out there — emissions are still increasing, but the divergence from GDP growth is absolutely massive.
Only Southeast Asia and the Middle East, of all world regions, haven’t seen this decoupling yet.
In other words, the future of the human race looks OK — at least, as far as climate change is concerned. With the magic of solar and batteries, we can keep civilizational progress humming while also reducing our destructive impact on the Earth’s climate. Yes, there are still some big hurdles out there — the Chinese coal industry, Middle East profligacy, NIMBYs in the U.S., and so on. But in stark contrast to 15 years ago, we now possess the tools to get the job done.
Article extract courtesy of Noahpinion blog, here.
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