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In short, energy transitions take a long time.
What’s more, the energy transition we need now is being driven by something that has never mattered before. In the past, we’ve moved from one source to another because the new one was cheaper and more powerful.
It was a matter of economics, not the environment.
Some scientists have argued that gas can actually be worse for climate change than coal is, depending on how much leaks out while it’s being processed.
the first Model T that rolled off Henry Ford’s production line in 1908 got no better than 21 miles to the gallon. As I write this, the top hybrid on the market gets 58 miles to the gallon. In more than a century, fuel economy has improved by less than a factor of three.
Technology is only one reason that the energy industry can’t change as quickly as the computer industry. There’s also size. The energy industry is simply enormous—at around $5 trillion a year, one of the biggest businesses on the planet. Anything that big and complex will resist change. And consciously or not, we have built a lot of inertia into the energy industry.
policies—everything from tax rules to environmental regulations—have a huge impact on how people and companies behave. We won’t get to zero unless we get this right, and we’re a long way from doing that.
One problem is that many of the environmental laws and regulations in place today weren’t designed with climate change in mind. They were adopted to solve other problems, and now we’re trying to use them to reduce emissions.
Our approach to climate and energy keeps changing with the election cycle. Every four to eight years, a new administration arrives in Washington with its own energy priorities.
You could work on an idea for years, only to see a new administration come in and eliminate the incentive you’ve been counting on.
No single country wants to pay to mitigate its emissions unless everyone else will too.
Technologies that will never exceed 1 percent shouldn’t compete for the limited resources we have for getting to zero.
Passenger cars represent less than half of all the emissions from transportation, which in turn is 16 percent of all emissions worldwide.
if you’re trying to come up with a comprehensive plan for climate change, you have to account for much more than electricity and cars.
The good news is that even though electricity is only 26 percent of the problem, it could represent much more than 26 percent of the solution.
On its own, clean electricity won’t get us to zero, but it will be a key step.
If someone tells you that some source (wind, solar, nuclear, whatever) can supply all the energy the world needs, find out how much space will be required to produce that much energy.
Most of these zero-carbon solutions are more expensive than their fossil-fuel counterparts. In part, that’s because the prices of fossil fuels don’t reflect the environmental damage they inflict, so they seem cheaper than the alternative. (I’ll return to this challenge of pricing carbon in chapter 10.) These additional costs are what I call Green Premiums.[*2]
The size of the Green Premium depends on what you’re replacing and what you’re replacing it with.
In rare cases, a Green Premium can be negative; that is, going green can be cheaper than sticking with fossil fuels.
a technology with a negative Green Premium would already have been adopted around the world.
We need the premiums to be so low that everyone will be able to decarbonize.
What’s more important than the specific prices is knowing whether a given green technology is close to being as cheap as its fossil-fuel counterpart and, for the ones that aren’t close, thinking about how innovation might bring their prices down.
In particular, Green Premiums are a fantastic lens for making decisions. They help us put our time, attention, and money to their best use.
Which zero-carbon options should we be deploying now? Answer: the ones with a low Green Premium, or no premium at all.
Where do we need to focus our research and development spending, our early investors, and our best inventors? Answer: wherever we decide Green Premiums are too high.
There’s one last benefit to the Green Premium concept: It can act as a measurement system that shows us the progress we’re making toward stopping climate change.
What would it cost to use the zero-carbon tools we have now? Which innovations will make the biggest impact on emissions? The Green Premiums answer these questions, measuring the cost of getting to zero, sector by sector, and highlighting where we need to innovate—just as the data showed us that we needed to make a big push for the pneumo vaccine.
In other words, using the DAC approach to solve the climate problem would cost at least $5.2 trillion per year, every year, as long as we produce emissions. That’s around 6 percent of the world’s economy.
Unfortunately, we can’t just wait for a future technology like DAC to save us. We have to start saving ourselves today.
if we get zero-carbon electricity, we can use it to help decarbonize lots of other activities, like how we get around and how we make things.
But I think if everyone stopped to consider what it takes to deliver the service we now take for granted, they would appreciate it more.
Hydropower has a lot going for it—it’s relatively cheap—but it also has some big downsides. Making a reservoir displaces local communities and wildlife. When you cover land with water, if there’s a lot of carbon in the soil, the carbon eventually turns into methane and escapes into the atmosphere—which is why studies show that depending on where it’s built, a dam can actually be a worse emitter than coal for 50 to 100 years before it makes up for all the methane it’s responsible for.
Getting all the world’s electricity from clean sources won’t be easy. Today, fossil fuels account for two-thirds of all electricity generated worldwide. (bp Statistical Review of World Energy 2021)
The share of global power that comes from burning coal (roughly 40 percent) hasn’t changed in 30 years.
As of mid-2019, some 236 gigawatts’ worth of coal plants were being built around the world; coal and natural gas are now the fuels of choice in developing countries, where demand has skyrocketed in the past few decades. Between 2000 and 2018, China tripled the amount of coal power it uses. That’s more capacity than in the United States, Mexico, and Canada combined!
In the case of electricity, the premium is the additional cost of getting all our power from non-emitting sources, including wind, solar, nuclear power, and coal- and natural-gas-fired plants equipped with devices that capture the carbon they produce.
Changing America’s entire electricity system to zero-carbon sources would raise average retail rates by between 1.3 and 1.7 cents per kilowatt-hour, roughly 15 percent more than what most people pay now. That adds up to a Green Premium of $18 a month for the average home—pretty affordable for most people, though possibly not for low-income Americans, who already spend a tenth of their income on energy.
What will those potential new customers do? Will they build coal plants or go clean? Consider their goals and their options. Small-scale solar can be an option for people in poor, rural areas who need to charge their cell phones and run lights at night. But that kind of solution is never going to deliver the massive amounts of cheap, always-available electricity these countries need to jump-start their economies.
Because their prices don’t factor in the true cost of climate change—the economic damage they inflict by making the planet warmer—it’s harder for clean energy sources to compete with them.
To get close to 100 percent, we’d have to move lots of clean energy from where it’s made (sunny places, ideally near the equator, and windy regions) to where it’s needed (cloudy, windless ones).
The main culprits are our demand for reliability, and the curse of intermittency.
As we approach 100 percent clean electricity, intermittency becomes a bigger and more expensive problem.
In short, intermittency is the main force that pushes the cost up as we get closer to all zero-carbon electricity.
we’ll save money by building renewables in the best locations, building a unified national grid, and shipping zero-emissions electrons wherever they’re needed.
Deploying today’s renewables and improving transmission couldn’t be more important. If we don’t upgrade our grid significantly and instead make each region do this on its own, the Green Premium might not be 15 to 30 percent; it could be 100 percent or more.
Here’s the one-sentence case for nuclear power: It’s the only carbon-free energy source that can reliably deliver power day and night, through every season, almost anywhere on earth, that has been proven to work on a large scale.
In 2018, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology analyzed nearly 1,000 scenarios for getting to zero in the United States; all the cheapest paths involved using a power source that’s clean and always available—that is, one like nuclear power. Without a source like that, getting to zero-carbon electricity would cost a lot more.
Nuclear power kills far, far fewer people than cars do. For that matter, it kills far fewer people than any fossil fuel. Nevertheless, we should improve it, just as we did with cars, by analyzing the problems one by one and setting out to solve them with innovation.
TerraPower’s reactor could run on many different types of fuel, including the waste from other nuclear facilities. The reactor would produce far less waste than today’s plants, would be fully automated—eliminating the possibility of human error—and could be built underground, protecting it from attack.
