Bloomberg: Humans are losing the race against heat.
Existing weather is visibly outrunning our combined efforts to stem global warming.
“Shocking but not really surprising,” is how Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, describes the experience of observing Phoenix pass 110F (43C) for at least 27 days straight this month.
Going even faster means that renewable energy deployed globally needs to triple by the end of the decade while energy efficiency doubles and the oil-and-gas sector cuts methane emissions by 75%, according to the IEA’s models.
Until the last few years, clean-energy alternatives were too expensive to compete with fossil fuels. Today solar power costs just 11% of what it did in 2009. Offshore wind and battery prices fell 74% and 84%, respectively, from 2012 to 2022, BloombergNEF data shows.
Plummeting battery costs have also helped put 27 million electric cars on the road at the start of the year — and the most recent forecast from BloombergNEF sees the global EV fleet reaching 100 million in 2026.
It took 40 years for solar panels to reach mass-market scale. That same process needs to be applied — much faster — The sums needed to virtually eliminate global emissions by mid-century, which would give the world a chance of staying within 1.5C of warming, are head-spinning: $196 trillion in total spending, according to BloombergNEF, or almost double the size of the global economy in 2022.
It took 40 years for solar panels to reach mass-market scale. That same process needs to be applied — much faster — to solutions such as green hydrogen, small modular nuclear reactors and carbon capture,
The green-energy economy has grown faster than the ability of electrical grids to connect all those clean electrons. It currently takes about four years to join solar generators to the US grid, and more than eight years to plant an underground power transmission line. A large part of that time is spent on securing the right permits to start manufacturing or construction.
Bloomberg 28 July 2023
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