Happy Climate week.
Hope you’re planning to vote.
Climate optimism is fading. Higher costs, pushback from businesses and consumers, and the slow rollout of technology are delaying the transition from fossil fuels.
Renewable energy is growing faster than expected. But surging demand for power is sucking up much of that additional capacity and forcing utilities to burn fossil fuels, including coal, for longer than expected.
With greenhouse-gas emissions continuing at record levels, scientists expect floods and heat waves to get worse. This year is on track to be the hottest on record.
“The pace of our response is obviously totally insufficient,” said Sonia Seneviratne, a climate scientist at Swiss university ETH Zurich. On this trajectory, “it will become increasingly impossible to face the changing climate we are going to experience,” she said.
The energy transition gained momentum in recent years as prices for renewable energy tumbled. Trillions of dollars in government and private investment flowed into technologies to address greenhouse-gas emissions. Industries like autos embraced major shifts in their businesses, and companies started to count and disclose their emissions.
That momentum stalled recently when costs soared, consumers balked and businesses fought against new regulations. Politicians stepped back from ambitious climate goals or campaigned against them. A victory by former President Donald Trump in November could make those goals even harder to reach.
“We have this really difficult moment,” said Danny Cullenward, a senior fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Kleinman Center for Energy Policy. “The election is a giant cliff.”
The bumps aren’t surprising. The energy transition was always going to be a huge, complicated, expensive effort. It has never moved fast enough to minimize the damage of climate change. But positive momentum, spurred in part by the 2022 U.S. climate law, created hope that the shift could accelerate.
This week, businesses, climate activists and government officials are converging on New York for the United Nations General Assembly and related climate events dubbed “Climate Week NYC.”
Overshadowing the gathering is a surge in electricity demand. The U.S. power sector had been a bright spot. Emissions have declined as natural gas and renewables supplanted coal. But new data centers and factories are halting progress. A shift to electric vehicles and appliances could lead to a bigger crunch.
“We really are going to need just about every resource that’s available if demand growth continues at a rapid pace,” said Paul Segal, chief executive of LS Power, which operates natural-gas and renewable projects across the country. Research firm Rhodium Group expects U.S. electricity demand to rise 24% to 29% by 2035, nearly twice the rate it projected a year ago.
LS revived the expansion of a gas plant in Ohio after halting it five years ago when power demand was muted and state subsidies unfavorable. It recently raised nearly $4 billion for its natural-gas portfolio.
New York state’s aggressive goal of getting 70% of its electricity from renewables by 2030 has been upended by permit delays, rising costs and the cancellation of several early offshore-wind projects.
More than 40% of the world’s electricity came from low-carbon sources in 2023, with wind and solar comprising more than 90% of new capacity, according to BloombergNEF. Six years ago, electric vehicles made up 2% of new car sales globally. Roughly one in five new cars is now electric.
But the gains are uneven. China accounted for more than a third of all wind and solar output last year and is by far the largest EV market. The spread of EVs has slowed in the U.S. and Europe.
n some sectors, things have gotten worse. Investment in improving the efficiency of buildings—a major driver of emissions—fell last year, the International Energy Agency says.
Spending decisions happening now can lock in emissions for decades. Multibillion-dollar liquefied-natural-gas terminals being built in Texas and Louisiana could serve a projected demand boom in places such as Southeast Asia.
Wind and solar are growing fast in that region but are limited by the grid and other factors, said Nitin Apte, CEO of Vena Energy, a renewables developer. “It’s like we’re running really, really hard, and we’re still not running in place,” Apte said.
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New green technologies are the best hope for significant progress in reducing emissions, experts say, and cash is pouring into promising startups.
Recent investments include $645 million for Twelve, which makes low-carbon aviation fuel, and a $1.56 billion government loan commitment to an ammonia producer that plans to capture its carbon emissions. Ammonia is a key ingredient in fertilizer and doesn’t emit carbon when burned as fuel.
Some startups are facing surging costs. Even when things go smoothly, the pressure is on to make a dent in emissions.
Form Energy, a maker of iron-based batteries that can discharge electricity for days—a boon for intermittent renewables—recently opened a factory in a former steel mill in West Virginia. It has orders from utilities and plans to expand its manufacturing capacity in the next few years.
“Even that—which is a massively successful business, assuming we get there—is a tiny drop in the bucket,” Form CEO Mateo Jaramillo said.
“But surging demand for power is sucking up much of that additional capacity and forcing utilities to burn fossil fuels, including coal, for longer than expected.”
In effect, growth. But I’m beating a dead horse.
Growth is such a squishy term, so I’m not sure what you mean.
In Texas, for example, growth in power demand is due largely to the increasing power draw for air conditioning for higher temperatures all around and especially these more intense heat domes. Further north, more people are adding air conditioning to their homes.
US population growth is at an all-time low since the Baby Boom at just under 8%, and that includes immigration and people living longer.
https://www.prb.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/article1-fig1@4x-1024×451.png
Global average fertility is just above replacement rate.
https://ourworldindata.org/images/published/World-population-by-level-of-fertility-without-projections_1350.png
(In any case we don’t know how population forecast trends will fare in a >1.5°C world.)
Sure, people use the term ‘growth’ in different ways. I see it in its most basic form as global energy and resource consumption, which is driven mainly by economic activity and population. It’s highly unpopular as an idea, even (and sometimes more so) here on this blog, and even though I’ve personally commented on growth maybe 100 times here the past decade, I mostly shut my trap these days about it. Goes nowhere = dead horse.
It shouldn’t be unreasonable that a planet of 8+ billion people uses a bit more in resources and energy than a planet of 1 billion, or that a planet of 8+ billion all using the Western mode of consumption is going to need far more mining, industrial processes, and energy use in the future.
It’s unpopular for two reasons – 1) no one actually wants ‘degrowth’ or even a steady state economy (including myself if I’m honest), and even a slight decrease in economic growth in a country can lead to widespread suffering, especially amongst the poorer classes, and 2) why it’s so unpopular here is the notion that well, you just replace all the fossil fuel use with renewables (but this completely discounts how much longer in reality it will take to replace all fossil fuel use in a growing economy and population, how many more resources and industrial processes that will take in doing so, and how even ‘when’ (I believe we can, so I don’t say ‘if’) we get there, we’ll still have all the other environmental issues caused by other forms of human activity (and probably worsened because of, you guessed it, growth).
None of that is to say I disagree in any way with replacing all fossil fuels with renewables. I absolutely do. I’m just calling a spade a spade – growth is a real problem for us as humans.
(I won’t comment much on future population growth itself, other than to say there will be, and already are, widespread calls to increase populations in order to prop up economic growth.)
Not a word about AI and Data Centers sucking down huge amounts of power with projected growth going from 2% of national power demand to 10% over next decade. It’s not ‘new appliances and electric vehicles’ as the WS Journal tries to get us to think.
Sorry, but that’s an awful graphic. It depicts each state as the same size, rather than by either population or total energy use. Compare California (~39m) to Wyoming (0.6m) by population, for example, and realize that California is higher population.
Also ignores nuclear, the largest power source in some states, second to gas in a lot more, and overall nearly equal to solar and wind combined.
“With greenhouse-gas emissions continuing at record levels, scientists expect floods and heat waves to get worse. This year is on track to be the hottest on record.
“The pace of our response is obviously totally insufficient,” said Sonia Seneviratne, a climate scientist at Swiss university ETH Zurich. On this trajectory, “it will become increasingly impossible to face the changing climate we are going to experience,” she said.”
Impossible and insufficient mean that the period of partial adaption to climate change will be brief.