Running Out of Time To Deal with Climate Change
Here’s a good and readable, though extremely alarming piece on climate change, providing the precise reason that the governments of the world have only the next 12 years to make sweeping reductions in greenhouse gas emissions if we are to avoid catastrophe.
As you look into the essential core of the governments in the U.S., China and India, do you see any chance of this happening? If so, I’d love to hear some good reasons for optimism; I’m coming up a bit short myself.
It seems to me that the only mechanism that could possibly make this happen is for the U.S. to show true global leadership, to knock off massive tax cuts for billionaires, make significant investments in cleantech R&D, and then disseminating these advancements around the world.
If that appears to be a realistic idea to you, however, you must be wearing some seriously rose-colored glasses.
One reason for optimism remains: We are nearing the point where solar becomes truly disruptive.
Between the more flexible loan structures and the increased longevity of the inverters, a purchase of solar panels is rapidly edging towards the disruption point: a point at which it would be cheaper to buy solar even without subsidies than it would be to continue to purchase fossil-fuel based electricity.
This is likely to be even closer to true in the poorly developed grids within the third world. As that becomes closer and closer still, then growth stands to truly expand exponentially.
The IPCC report didn’t change dramatically, they just lowered the bar. Originally it was 2 degrees, and we had a certain amount of time to offset it. Then they looked at 1.5 degrees, said that will do this lesser amount of damage, and we only have ~12 years to avoid that.
But we’ve known for a generation that most of this lesser damage was going to have to be accommodated. Nothing has changed. We still stand to face truly disruptive societal evolution, that will still happen, and we can offset some of the even worse impacts.
I would guess that the election of Trump set the world back ~6 years, assuming we get rid of his administration in 2020. That will hurt our efforts, and will cause tremendous harm. But there are far more than 6 years in the future, and we haven’t lost them all.
What about the issues surrounding integrating variable resources into the grid-mix at large scale?
Craig,
As is the case with all things, the demand will force the market to shift.
Right now, without the federal and state ITC, and without the state mandate for the local power companies to use net metering… I may not have been able to go solar.
If you cut the cost of solar by another ~15%, then I could have gone solar without the net metering. Another 30% I could have done without the ITC… Another 50% overall, even with no net metering AND no ITC then solar would have been the better choice.
At the current rate, the cost of installed solar will probably be at that level within 6-8 years.
😉
Then it becomes completely disruptive. Power companies will have to deal with tens of thousands of customers going solar, and they will have to figure out how to make themselves relevant… because if they force the price of electricity higher then it would only cause more of their customer base to shift more quickly.
The focus, at that point, would be to manage the inconsistent power production of solar. Instead of new power plants, they would be forced to invest in storage options.. The market will find a way to make money in an environment of solar disruption, and if the power companies cannot figure out how to make it work wholesale, then the individual battery market will soar, and the customer base will remove itself from the grid entirely…
The market will figure this out in real time.
I suspect that increased grid interconnectivity and massive investment in pumped hydrostorage will be the preferred means of dealing with it all… but we’ll see what the future brings.
🙂
The Amount of change we have to make in the next 12 years is enormous. But before we can make those changes we need to stop Trump from destroying our attempts to reduce emissions. All Trump is concerned about is money, so if we can make renewables more profitable, he won’t say no.