NEWS A Totally Green Electric Grid Will Dramatically Speed Up Climate ActionJuly 28, 2020

July 28, Bloomberg News: Read more at: https://​www​.bloombergquint​.com/​b​u​s​i​n​e​s​s​/​w​h​a​t​-​t​h​e​-​w​o​r​l​d​-​g​e​t​s​-​i​f​-​u​-​s​-​e​l​e​c​t​r​i​c​i​t​y​-​b​e​c​o​m​e​s​-​1​0​0​-​g​r​een

Today, 40% of America’s elec­tric­i­ty comes from car­bon-free sources. The Demo­c­ra­t­ic pres­i­den­tial can­di­date has made get­ting that to 100% by 2035 a cen­ter­piece of his $2 tril­lion plan to address cli­mate change and cre­ate jobs. Get­ting there would take an enor­mous expan­sion of solar and wind capac­i­ty in the U.S., backed by mass adop­tion of ener­gy-stor­age tech­nolo­gies and hang­ing onto exist­ing hydro­elec­tric and nuclear plants.

“I call it the first linch­pin,” says Leah Stokes, an assis­tant pro­fes­sor of polit­i­cal sci­ence at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia, San­ta Bar­bara who research­es elec­tric util­i­ties. “As the elec­tric­i­ty sys­tem cleans up, it unlocks oth­er sec­tors more eas­i­ly.” Not every­thing could run on clean elec­tric­i­ty, at least not imme­di­ate­ly. Solar and wind alone may nev­er be able to gen­er­ate enough ener­gy consiste

“Even if you go to clean ener­gy for pow­er plants and vehi­cles, we still use lots of hydro­car­bons to make things,” says Daniel Kam­men, direc­tor of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia, Berkeley’s Renew­able and Appro­pri­ate Ener­gy Lab­o­ra­to­ry, who for­mer­ly served as renew­able pow­er spe­cial­ist at the World Bank. Many of these process­es start to become cost effec­tive when renew­able pow­er reach­es about 4 cents per kilo­watt-hour, he says. Some new solar and wind facil­i­ties can already hit that price point. “The low cost of renew­ables means we could get off of that. This is an oppor­tu­ni­ty to build bet­ter com­pounds at low­er cost.”

Pub­lished: July 28 2020, Bloomberg News