Almost everything you know about clean energy is outdated

[kristopher]

Almost everything you know about clean energy is outdated
“This is a different world from three years ago” — renewables are no longer “alternative energy.”

Renewables and efficiency have already won the battle for the future of electricity.

At least, that was the message at the Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF) Summit in New York City last week. In his must-see keynote talk, BNEF founder and chair Michael Liebreich explained that if you blinked, you missed the clean energy revolution: “This is a different world from three years ago.”

BNEF has been at the forefront of documenting the clean energy revolution, which continues to be ignored or misreported by major media outlets like the New York Times.

At last year’s summit, Leibreich debunked the myth promoted by Bill Gates and others that we needed a clean energy miracle to solve the climate problem, in a keynote titled “In Search of the Miraculous.”

https://vimeo.com/214732046

More: https://thinkprogress.org/watch-almost-everything-you-know-about-clean-energy-is-outdated-594cd2bfccdd


Text summary of the presentation is here:
http://scalinggreen.tigercomm.us/2016/04/8180/

And last week, Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF) Chairman Michael Liebreich made his case that Gates’ “miracle” is already here. Liebreich cites several key data points in making his case.

- Plummeting Costs for Wind and Solar: “Wind unsubsidized at 3¢ US per kilowatt hour. There is no other form of generating capacity that can produce power to build at 3¢ a kilowatt hour…[Solar] costs [have] come down by a factor of 150 since 1975. We’ve seen volume up by 115,000. How much more ‘miracally’ do you need your miracles to be?”

- Clean Energy Scaling: “In terms of scale, solar have seen seven doublings in 15 years. And even wind, four doublings in 15 years. To be a miracle you need scale and there you see the rate at which those technologies are growing.”

- Low-Cost Solar Lighting: “Now Bill Gates also showed, in his concern for the need for a miracle, this picture – a girl studying by the light of a candle. Well that technology…that is a solar lamp and it costs two dollars. The entire population of children studying by candlelight could be given those lamps for a cost of just over one billion dollars, or more to the point that families could, perhaps, buy them for two dollars each.”

- Rooftop Solar: “We’ve done a lot of work on rooftop solar. 99 million households by 2020 will be using rooftop solar systems, not just tiny lanterns, but also larger ones. This trend gets underestimated persistently. The IEA forecasts for wind and solar over years have gone up and up and up…In the case of solar, fourteen-fold increase since the year 2000.”

- Electric Cars: “Electricity is not the whole energy system. We need to talk about a few other areas where there are potential miracles. This one I call the miracle of Musk…Nearly two thirds of U.S. households have second cars. Tell me why they wouldn’t all, or almost, all go electric in the next decade?”

- Batteries: “The price of batteries is coming down 77 percent by the time the gigafactories and other battery manufacturers scale up in 2018. And we project that out, experience curves, and you can see that cost parity with internal combustion cars will be between 2022 [and] 2026, depending on price of oil and so on.”

- Smart Grid: “Now there will also be miracles, implications of the solar and the renewable energy shift and the electrification of vehicles nowhere more than in the grid. We have to have a grid to tie it all together. It’s not just a smart grid… in the future, new technologies that will be playing these roles of balancing long-term, medium-term, and short-term. We’re talking demand response, battery storage, thermal storage, chemical storage, power to gas.”

[texasfiddler]

1. This article is so true

As an electrical engineer who has worked in the fossil fuel utility world all of my life, they still see renewables as costly and unreliable. I am starting to build my solar array at the house. It will be complete and operational next year. What will be interesting is that I will have people come over (Trump supporters) to visit and they will ask about cost, reliability, payback etc. and they will be surprised by the time they leave. No state, local or utility rebate with a $.09/kWhr rate and it still has a 8 year payback and 25 year warranty on panels and inverters. That means right before I retire, it is all paid for and 90% of my electricity bill is gone. No moving parts and no maintenance. All of this discussion will occur without one word about CO2. This is happening all across America.