Clean Energy Is Surging, but Not Fast Enough to Solve Global Warming

The article concludes by stressing what a large percentage of energy infrastructure is controlled and regulated by government. I'd like to acknowledge the surging contribution of the major corporations --many of them Tech companies -- that are NOT waiting for government. Companies like Google, Facebook and Microsoft "get it" and are in may cases committing to 100% renewable energy.

For the U.S. to achieve zero carbon electricity by 2030, we need only triple the 2017 rate of new wind, solar and increase the rate of efficiency by about 25%. Or any combination of the three. For the first time in sixty years the world has two generation technologies which lower the cost of electricity. We will invest a half trillion dollars in this, and then continue investing for the next decade to have enough clean electricity to replace petroleum and non-electric natural gas, and replace retiring nuclear plants. The question is not whether it can be done. It is whether the U.S. is going to sell this technology to other countries, or buy it from them. The former is far preferable.

Adding intermittent renewables - without electricity storage - only works up to a point. When the renewables have a small or modest percentage of total power generation, they can usually be added efficiently. At too high a percentage, the variability in their output requires other changes to the power grid - so the net marginal return on nominal (intermittent) capacity declines, often rapidly. Nuclear energy does not have this problem, and should be a big part of the short- to medium-term solution in many countries.

The stop-global-warming agenda is itself flawed because it rests on the assumption that if we just fix CO2 then we can continue despoiling, expropriating and exploiting the planet the way are doing and everything will be fine. Global warming is in fact just a part (albeit an important one) of the project of human overreach and the subjugation of the rest of Nature to our wishes. Advocates of global warming action flay climate change deniers but are themselves hypocritical deniers of the fact that 7,000,000,000 people (soon to be 10,000,0000,000), perpetrating a Sixth Extinction, is too many.

There are a lot of reports out there, a lot of talk, I think no-one really knows the state of climate change at the moment, but the description I find most persuasive is here: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/610457/at-this-rate-its-going-to-take-nearly-400-years-to-transform-the-energy-system/ This shows that inputs from many disciplines are needed to get a true picture of the scope of the challenge: science, engineering, the state of technology and the gaps, project management, construction, availability of labor and materials, economics and finance, politics, geopolitics. Everyone should read that article.

Please explain hydrogen power and storage. The link to the IEA piece assumes you already know all this. Also, what is the cost of hydrogen compared to the other sources of power today.

Clean energy still isn’t happening fast enough int the USA because one of our two major political parties has become a cult. The Republican party 1st became a cult of ignorance, now it has become a cult of personality; Trump's personality. We have lost so much time because of the intransigence of the Republican cult, and the consequences of this are so dire, that when the Democrats do take control of all the levers of power, their top priority will have to be holding onto to power, rather then addressing climate change, and so many other issues that scream out for attention.

1. It's not in the future, it's now. Rising temp. and sea level destroy habitat and species. They've got no voice. Many human victims don't either. Get serious about global cooling - stratospheric reflective particles, near the poles, for a Pinatubo effect. 2. Research coal! Strip the gas with new materials, solidify carbon, don't forget R&D. 3. Membranes are key tech to many global issues, like water, and especially batteries. We need special effort on membranes. Stop being guided by what's sexy, and start getting serious about what works.

From the article: “The global march toward clean energy still isn’t happening fast enough to avoid dangerous global warming,” If you are a rancher who has lost their cattle to drought, or a homeowner who has lost their home to wildfire or flood, or an island nation going under the waves, then dangerous climate change has already arrived. When will it arrive for you?

In the mid 1980's the Corps of Engineers did a study of hydroelectric power in the US. They concluded that by retrofitting most small existing dams with hydroelectric power generators the energy equivalent of 8 million barrels of oil a day would be produced. These are existing dams. There is no nuclear waste to get rid of. An update to the report was supposed to be released several years ago but was suppressed by the Obama administration. They promoted solar and Solyndra instead.

It seems many comments here recognize the need to reduce the population size to get in balance with the lifestyle we seemingly can't give up in the U.S. We either get to have a comfortable lifestyle with lesser population, or a higher population with much simpler lifestyles. You don't get both. In order to humanely and gradually decline the human population, it is possible through reducing the food supply gradually. Sustainable agriculture can not feed the current U.S. population much less a never ending global population. We are seeing the desperate choices of cutting down the Amazon forest to produce more food....which will only result in producing more people while irreversibly destroying our last greatest forest that turns CO2 into O2. Our species is no different than any other species on this planet: the population is determined by its food supply primarily. Yet we continue to operate under the delusion that we need to grow more food to "keep up" with our growing population. That choice will end badly when climate change wipes out the marginal food producing lands first and lack of water will cut the production of our high producing lands. The choices is ours: reduce our numbers through food supply or climate change will do it in large and violent reductions.

Question for the usual suspects on nuclear, who may be serious or may be playing the usual games from the fossil fuel side: What's your plan!? I've been asking this for decades, or at least it seems that way, and never gotten even an attempt at a response. Give us an explicit, concrete scenario of what the government is supposed to do in order to achieve this nuclear nirvana. I stipulate that nuclear plants are safe as currently constructed, and I stipulate that waste can be sequestered safely, OK? Now what? What's your plan?

End the monopolies on energy and make it illegal to buy a patent and shelf amazing energy technologies. Put limits on human population and focus on quality of life for humans here, not quantity of life for humans not yet here. I know, bad for business. But the death of our planet is bad for business too. I'd rather have business focus on saving the planet from us destroying it rather than saving us (cancer industry)from our destruction of it.

This article does not address the two over-arching imperatives, without which we won't make enough progress: (1) Discouraging a high-consumption lifestyle. Our economic and tax policies do the exact opposite: they encourage growth in production and consumption rather than encouraging economy and investment. (2) Over-population: there is no viable environmental sustainability scenario without population reduction. Thankfully, the life-affirming solution exists and is proven: women in countries with gender equality, health security, education and economic opportunities for all are choosing to have fewer babies. Gender equality is a key component of the solution to our environmental crisis.

Thanks for this article. I want to introduce the IEA to the work of Dr. James Powell, the inventor of Superconducting Maglev Transport and winner of the Franklin Medal in the year 2000 for his Maglev invention. Japan developed Dr. Powell’s system and it is now proposed as a 300 mph passenger only system. The U.S. failed to develop and test this system as proposed by the late Senator Patrick Moynihan because of strong opposition of existing high-speed carriers. Powell has concluded that the very energy efficient, all-electric, transport system should be developed and tested to become the international standard for guided surface transport because his new transport is capable of carrying loaded highway freight trucks and vans to meet the modern distribution requirements of advanced economies. See www.magneticglide.com for the Moynihan concept for using the rights-of-way to create an Interstate Maglev Network to haul freight and passengers in the U.S. Dr. Powell Maglev has also proposed a Maglev Space Launch System, named StarTram, which can transport photovoltaic satellites to geosynchronous orbit to meet by beaming low-energy microwaves to fields of antennae on Earth. By beaming energy from space 24/7, for about 2 cents per kilowatt hour, space solar is probably a good source of electric energy. This new source of very cheap electricity would make it possible to build an electric powered system on Earth of “scrubbers” to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

Within months of entering WWII the United States was producing massive war supplies. In the war against climate change it should be possible to increase solar and wind power elements by a factor of 10.

Good news, but too late in coming. We needed to start doing this in the year 1990 BC. Before Cheney. Actually had Americans stuck with Jimmy Carter instead of stabbing him in the back in 1980 for a clown actor, the US would already be near 100% sustainable energy. Carter and his policies and emphasis on energy were visionary in the late 1970's. As we are all too aware now. Our chance to stave off planetary destruction fell as easily and quickly as Reagan taking the solar panels off the roof of the White House. The 1990's, perhaps the 2000's, were our last chance to do something while there was still time to offset the worst impact of climate change. It's too late now. Like so much else, the loss of the planet will fall on the Baby Boom generation - the ones who voted Carter into office, and the same ones who voted him out. The Baby Boomers gave up on the future in the 1980's and never looked back. We will have a burned out cinder, where Earth used to be, as a result.

Anthropogenic climate change is just one symptom of a human-plundered planet. Solve the energy problem and you still have human-induced ecological overshoot of most every other kind to deal with. Too many people consuming too much of our biosphere at one time is the problem we must solve. We are setting humanity up for the most misery of the greatest number of humans at one time instead aiming for a population and material consumption rate that will give the most humans a decent life over time. Reining in human population and human material consumption (in the western world fashion) does not mean that over time more humans cannot live a decent life. Indeed it likely means more people can have a decent life over time than in the ruinous direction we are now decidedly headed. Human civilization from the beginnings of organized agriculture is roughly 9,000 years old. Do you really envision our current civilization being around 9,000 years from now? If so, then exactly how? If not, then exactly why? MB

Look over there in the living room. Is that an elephant I see, or is it two elephants? First, in the developed world, we need to develop and adapt what I call a low-footprint, high-quality lifestyle. We need to live well but use less of everything, starting with plastics and energy. The rest of the world can't live like we do now, and they aren't going to tolerate us doing it while leaving them behind for long. Alternate, sustainable sources of energy are a key element of this strategy, but they are just the first step. Second: There are too many of us for sustainability. We need to reduce our population, and we need to do so without collapsing the economy. That doesn't mean importing workers from overpopulated countries to places where the population is decreasing; that saves the economy but exacerbates the population problem. The low-footprint lifestyle will hopefully give the residents of the underdeveloped world a reasonable stake in a the future. Add in access to birth control and they will reduce their population on their own, like virtually every society where that has ever happened. It's a tall order, but in my humble opinion, it's the only way that can lead to a sustainable future for humanity on this planet.

An article like this should set off alarm bells and flashing red lights throughout the halls of Congress, the Pentagon, and every state and local government. The plain conclusion of the article is that global warming will be more than the 2 degrees Celsius that the Paris Agreements were intended to avoid. Probably much more than 2 degrees, and that much worse in consequences. While your local habitat may remain tolerable, the overall world-wide impact will be widespread droughts and crop failures, water shortages, and human suffering, including famine, the most cruel of the four horsemen. As the article mentions, petroleum consumption will continue to increase, but the article does not mention that we have already passed the point of peak oil. Oil production will decline and prices will increase. And oil is not only used for fuel, heating, and plastics, it is also the source of our cheap nitrogen fertilizer for agriculture. Add into that our still-growing human population, and we are heading into a perfect storm of trouble: climate changing for the worse, food production in decline, and population on the increase. Meanwhile, Congress is deciding how to arrange the deck chairs, and what music the orchestra should play... Bon voyage!

The author states that many countries will have to retool their grids to manage the output from wind and solar plants. But if they look at distributed energy where many rooftops generate solar, and use battery storage, the additional grid capacity may be minimized in some areas as solar energy generated at one roof is sold to adjacent neighbors. Maybe what needs to be retooled should be some of our thinking about power grids and centralized vs decentralized power generation.

Overpopulation will overwhelm any gains from "clean energy". All energy sources have environmental costs. If the "dominant" sources of energy for 10 billion people (projected mid century) were solar and wind, we would quickly find out how environmentally unfriendly these "clean" sources would be. Neither incremental advances in per capita energy efficiency nor any government rules will be sufficient to stop our ongoing environmental disaster. Humans have chosen quantity over quality; the results are just emerging.

"The report warns, however, that many countries will need to retool their grids to manage the output from wind and solar plants, which run intermittently. " Would be good to report on or at least mention how intermittently coal plants run. Context is in order.

“In the past, the agency has underestimated the speed at which wind and solar power proliferate.” The IAEA has year-after-year consistently and significantly underestimated implementation of wind and solar. Their underestimates has been so persistent and blatant, that one has to take their projections with a grain of salt.

You want to speed things up a bit? How about we do what nations such as Canada have done and heavily subsidize homeowners to seal up their houses, replace their windows, get more efficient or even environmental friendly with their heating and cooling? How about we take the almost $20 billion in annual oil and gas subsidies and spend them to encourage our own solar and wind industries (creating huge numbers of jobs and significant tax revenues in the process. Oh, and keeping some slim hope of continued life on this dried-up baking Earth.)? Maybe create a viable energy infrastructure. How about we finally shutter our woebegone coal industry, at least for the time being, and set all those hearty souls to doing something useful? That alone would solve the damning problem of polluting power plants and the greedy investors who pay heavily to keep them puffing away.

Why does the writer deceptively conflate "wind and solar" with "renewable energy", referencing them interchangably? Most of the 25% contribution attributed to "renewable energy" is from burning trees and other plants, burning garbage and hydroelectric plants. Better to focus on GHG concentrations, which have continued their upward spiral. Hire someone who understands energy to write about it honestly and informatively, or get out of the business of writing about it, NYT.

Mark Stone Retired Engineer, Physicist. Concerned Citizen. This article in the November 13th issue, "Clean Energy Is Surging, but Not Fast Enough to Solve Global Warming", only mentions solar and wind power as sources of non-polluting energy. The writers have not once considered or even mentioned nuclear power. Why? I find this inexplicable! The politicians and scientists do not mention nuclear as the only reliable, and efficient source of clean, non-polluting energy that is available twenty four hours a day, every day of the year, and is being used in over 30 countries around the world and powering 140 military ships and submarines. While solar is advancing it cannot heat our northern cities in the winter, power the over 50,000 merchants ships at sea, keep our railroads running, and cannot supply the energy needs of our biggest consumers of electricity; the chemical, mining and refining industries. Nuclear can and does! The writers do not even mention that over three million deaths occur each year from air pollution in China and India alone and ignores the fact that in the last 20 years less than 100 people have died in nuclear power plant accidents. Nuclear power is by far the safest and cleanest way to power our earth.