Rapid energy progress

To understand the very exciting possibility for rapid progress in the climate fight, a new set of numbers is extremely useful.

They come courtesy of Electrek’s Michelle Lewis, reporting on the longtime renewable researcher Ken Bossong’s analysis of the data on electric generation provided each month by the Energy Information Administration. And what they show is the remarkable transformation over the last decade. In 2014, solar power “utility-scale solar provided a mere 9.25 GW (0.75%) of total installed US generating capacity.” Which is to say, less than one percent. But “by the middle of 2024, installed solar capacity had risen to 8.99% of total utility-scale capacity.” (Add another few percent for rooftop distributed solar).

That still sounds like a relatively small percentage – under ten percent. But in fact what it means is that we’ve finally moved on to the steep part of an S curve, and if we can keep up anything like that pace of expansion it won’t be long before the numbers are truly incredible. Indeed, as Bossong pointed out on Twitter, “the combination of utility-scale and “estimated” small-scale (e.g., rooftop) solar increased by 26.3% in the first six months of 2024 compared to the same period in 2023.” Statistics numb the brain so let me say it another way: we are on the cusp of a true explosion that could change the world. We are starting to put out the fires that humans have always relied on, and replace them with the power of the sun.

Pretty much the same thing is happening with wind, and pretty much the same thing is happening around the world. Bloomberg predicted last week that global installations of new solar modules would hit 592 gigawatts this year – up 33 percent from last year. The point is, when you’re doing this a few years in a row the totals start to grow very very fast. When something that provides one percent of your electricity doubles to two percent, that doesn’t mean much – but when something that supplies ten or twenty percent goes up by a third that’s actually quite a lot. And more the next year.

For a long while, you could see this growth coming, but it hadn’t yet added up to enough to materially dent the use of coal and gas and oil. But that is starting to change. Here’s the most important number I can give you, supplied to me this afternoon by Stanford professor Mark Jacobson, who has been keeping careful track of the California electric grid. As I wrote earlier, it’s been moving to renewable energy faster than almost anywhere in the country. The result: “For the (almost) 6-month period from March 7 to September 4, fossil gas use on the grid was 29% lower in 2024 than in 2023.” I’m going to repeat that. “For the (almost) 6-month period from March 7 to September 4, fossil gas use on the grid was 29% lower in 2024 than in 2023.” That is, the use of natural gas to generate electricity has dropped by almost a third in one year in the fifth largest economy in the world. In 2023, fossil gas provided 23% more electricity to the grid than solar in that six month period. In 2024, those numbers were almost perfectly reversed: solar provided 24 percent more electricity than fossil gas.

That’s how this kind of s-curve exponential growth works, and how it could work everywhere on earth. All this is the premise for understanding why the fossil fuel industry is so freaked out about this year’s election. They can read these charts as easily as anyone, and they know what’s coming.

Excerpted: ‘Solar Power vs. The Darkness of Trump’. Courtesy: Commondreams.org