Dirt Cheap Clean Energy

The most excit­ing news is com­ing soon­er than I expect­ed. The moment where the biggest fights become where to put all of the wind and solar, rather than hav­ing to end­less­ly fight off plans for nuclear, coal, oil, or gas pow­er plants, or bio­mass or waste incinerators.

The lines are already cross­ing. These are the eco­nom­ic lines where the cost of wind and solar actu­al­ly becomes cheap­er than the cheap­est of dirty ener­gy sources (which, at the moment, is nat­ur­al gas). In the past hand­ful of months, research has shown that — even with­out sub­si­dies — land-based wind pow­er is now cheap­er to build than nat­ur­al gas com­bined cycle pow­er plants which, them­selves, have been under­cut­ting nuclear, coal, bio­mass and trash incin­er­a­tors in recent years, caus­ing some to close because they can’t com­pete with the momen­tar­i­ly cheap gas.

Solar pow­er is on a path to under­cut fos­sil fuels with­in five years, lead­ing to head­lines about how solar pow­er could slay the fos­sil fuel empire by 2030 and whether new super effi­cient afford­able solar pan­els could trump fos­sil fuels. The Boston Globe recent­ly report­ed on how renew­able ener­gy is start­ing to win on price.

The most amaz­ing chart is this one pub­lished in Bloomberg in Octo­ber, titled “Wel­come to the Ter­ror­dome.” It shows solar prices com­ing down from the sky like a light­ning bolt in the last few years, shoot­ing down to lev­els under Brent (oil) and liq­ue­fied nat­ur­al gas (LNG) prices, and fast approach­ing U.S. bitu­mi­nous coal and Hen­ry Hub (nat­ur­al gas) prices.

…and it’s just in time, since we’ll soon be run­ning short on nat­ur­al gas. As frack­ing for nat­ur­al gas takes over in recent years, the myths about gas sup­ply echo that of coal — sup­pos­ed­ly hun­dreds of years of sup­ply left. How­ev­er, coal pro­duc­tion in the U.S. has peaked and U.S. gas pro­duc­tion is like­ly to peak by 2017. When a resource peaks, we’ve used up the cheap half. This means costs will rise as pro­duc­tion can’t keep up with demand, and more extreme extrac­tion meth­ods become necessary.

Thank­ful­ly, near­ly all of our ener­gy needs can be met by a com­bi­na­tion of con­ser­va­tion, effi­cien­cy, wind, solar and ener­gy stor­age. Demand reduc­tion must be pri­or­i­tized, cut­ting use at least in half, which would put the U.S. on par with per capi­ta ener­gy use in Europe. A 2012 study out of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Delaware showed that wind, solar and ener­gy stor­age can meet our elec­tric­i­ty needs with 99.9% reli­a­bil­i­ty by 2030, cost effec­tive­ly, with no gov­ern­ment sub­si­dies. Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty researchers have shown that all ener­gy (includ­ing trans­porta­tion and heat­ing sec­tor use) can be pro­vid­ed by con­ser­va­tion, effi­cien­cy, wind, solar, geot­her­mal and hydropow­er (includ­ing ocean pow­er) by 2050, while sav­ing mon­ey, improv­ing health and cre­at­ing jobs.

Of course, there is no free lunch. Nor­mal wind tur­bines use about two tons of a rare earth met­al, neodymi­um, which is mined in hor­ri­bly destruc­tive ways in Chi­na, yet neodymi­um-free tur­bines exist and could be some­thing we demand. Solar has a tox­ic rep­u­ta­tion, for good rea­son, yet solar tech­nol­o­gy keeps evolv­ing. Some new­er types (like nan­otech vari­eties) could be high­ly tox­ic, while oth­ers reduce or elim­i­nate use of tox­ic mate­ri­als. Even ener­gy effi­cien­cy can be waste­ful where it involves hav­ing to replace mate­ri­als in build­ings, light­ing, appli­ances and motors. Mate­r­i­al short­ages can lim­it the clean ener­gy dream, and it’s hard to say where this lim­it may be. How­ev­er, the sta­tus quo is ter­ri­bly worse. This tran­si­tion must be done as soon as we can, and as just and as demo­c­ra­t­i­cal­ly as we can.

This clean ener­gy rev­o­lu­tion is freak­ing out the ener­gy util­i­ties, who are see­ing the writ­ing on the wall if wind and solar are pro­duced in a decen­tral­ized way where their cen­tral­ized busi­ness mod­el isn’t need­ed. Some are even orga­niz­ing and get­ting states (like Ari­zona) to make it more expen­sive for peo­ple to put solar on their roof and are using race-bait­ing tac­tics such as encour­ag­ing the Con­gres­sion­al Black Cau­cus to see net meter­ing as harm­ing their con­stituents (a claim that NAACP and oth­er envi­ron­men­tal jus­tice advo­cates are push­ing back against).

Ulti­mate­ly, we need our move­ment for ener­gy jus­tice to be a move­ment that not only stops dirty ener­gy in its tracks, but builds solu­tions that are decen­tral­ized, pub­licly-owned, and demo­c­ra­t­i­cal­ly con­trolled. Pub­lic util­i­ties must tru­ly be pub­lic to have eco­nom­ic incen­tives to use less. We can do this. We must.