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energy transition
7 Steps to What a Real Renewable Energy Transition Looks Like
Historically, an overhaul for humanity's energy system would take hundreds or many thousands of years. The rapid shift to cleaner, more sustainable sources of power generations will easily be the most ambitious enterprise our species has ever undertaken.
Aug 25, 2024
Humanity’s transition from relying overwhelmingly on fossil fuels to instead using alternative low-carbon energy sources is sometimes said to be unstoppable and exponential. A boosterish attitude on the part of many renewable energy advocates is understandable: overcoming people’s climate despair and sowing confidence could help muster the needed groundswell of motivation to end our collective fossil fuel dependency. But occasionally a reality check is in order.
The reality is that energy transitions are a big deal, and they typically take centuries to unfold. Historically, they’ve been transformative for societies—whether we’re speaking of humanity’s taming of fire hundreds of thousands of years ago, the agricultural revolution 10,000 years ago, or our adoption of fossil fuels starting roughly 200 years ago. Given (1) the current size of the human population (there are eight times as many of us alive today as there were in 1820, when the fossil fuel energy transition was getting underway), (2) the vast scale of the global economy, and (3) the unprecedented speed with which the transition will have to be made in order to avert catastrophic climate change, a rapid renewable energy transition is easily the most ambitious enterprise our species has ever undertaken.
As we’ll see, the evidence shows that the transition is still in its earliest stages, and at the current rate, it will fail to avert a climate catastrophe in which an unimaginable number of people will either die or be forced to migrate, with most ecosystems transformed beyond recognition.
Implementing these seven steps will change everything. The result will be a world that’s less crowded, one where nature is recovering rather than retreating, and one in which people are healthier (because they’re not soaked in pollution) and happier.
We’ll unpack the reasons why the transition is currently such an uphill slog. Then, crucially, we’ll explore what a real energy transition would look like, and how to make it happen.
Why This Is (So Far) Not a Real Transition
Despite trillions of dollars having been spent on renewable energy infrastructure, carbon emissions are still increasing, not decreasing, and the share of world energy coming from fossil fuels is only slightly less today than it was 20 years ago. In 2024, the world is using more oil, coal, and natural gas than it did in 2023.
While the U.S. and many European nations have seen a declining share of their electricity production coming from coal, the continuing global growth in fossil fuel usage and CO2 emissions overshadows any cause for celebration.
Why is the rapid deployment of renewable energy not resulting in declining fossil fuel usage? The main culprit is economic growth, which consumes more energy and materials. So far, the amount of annual growth in the world’s energy usage has exceeded the amount of energy added each year from new solar panels and wind turbines. Fossil fuels have supplied the difference.
So, for the time being at least, we are not experiencing a real energy transition. All that humanity is doing is adding energy from renewable sources to the growing amount of energy it derives from fossil fuels. The much-touted energy transition could, if somewhat cynically, be described as just an aspirational grail.
How long would it take for humanity to fully replace fossil fuels with renewable energy sources, accounting for both the current growth trajectory of solar and wind power, and also the continued expansion of the global economy at the recent rate of 3 percent per year? Economic models suggest the world could obtain most of its electricity from renewables by 2060 (though many nations are not on a path to reach even this modest marker). However, electricity represents only about 20 percent of the world’s final energy usage; transitioning the other 80 percent of energy usage would take longer—likely many decades.
However, to avert catastrophic climate change, the global scientific community says we need to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2050—i.e., in just 25 years. Since it seems physically impossible to get all of our energy from renewables that soon while still growing the economy at recent rates, the IPCC (the international agency tasked with studying climate change and its possible remedies) assumes that humanity will somehow adopt carbon capture and sequestration technologies at scale—including technologies that have been shown not to work—even though there is no existing way of paying for this vast industrial build-out. This wishful thinking on the part of the IPCC is surely proof that the energy transition is not happening at sufficient speed.
Why isn’t it? One reason is that governments, businesses, and an awful lot of regular folks are clinging to an unrealistic goal for the transition. Another reason is that there is insufficient tactical and strategic global management of the overall effort. We’ll address these problems separately, and in the process uncover what it would take to nurture a true energy transition.
The Core of the Transition is Using Less Energy
At the heart of most discussions about the energy transition lie two enormous assumptions: that the transition will leave us with a global industrial economy similar to today’s in terms of its scale and services, and that this future renewable-energy economy will continue to grow, as the fossil-fueled economy has done in recent decades. But both of these assumptions are unrealistic. They flow from a largely unstated goal: we want the energy transition to be completely painless, with no sacrifice of profit or convenience. That goal is understandable, since it would presumably be easier to enlist the public, governments, and businesses in an enormous new task if no cost is incurred (though the history of overwhelming societal effort and sacrifice during wartime might lead us to question that presumption).
But the energy transition will undoubtedly entail costs. Aside from tens of trillions of dollars in required monetary investment, the energy transition will itself require energy—lots of it. It will take energy to build solar panels, wind turbines, heat pumps, electric vehicles, electric farm machinery, zero-carbon aircraft, batteries, and the rest of the vast panoply of devices that would be required to operate an electrified global industrial economy at current scale.
In the early stages of the transition, most of that energy for building new low-carbon infrastructure will have to come from fossil fuels, since those fuels still supply over 80 percent of world energy (bootstrapping the transition—using only renewable energy to build transition-related machinery—would take far too long). So, the transition itself, especially if undertaken quickly, will entail a large pulse of carbon emissions. Teams of scientists have been seeking to estimate the size of that pulse; one group suggests that transition-related emissions will be substantial, ranging from 70 to 395 billion metric tons of CO2 “with a cross-scenario average of 195 GtCO2”—the equivalent of more than five years’ worth of global carbon CO2 emissions at current rates. The only ways to minimize these transition-related emissions would be, first, to aim to build a substantially smaller global energy system than the one we are trying to replace; and second, to significantly reduce energy usage for non-transition-related purposes—including transportation and manufacturing, cornerstones of our current economy—during the transition.
In addition to energy, the transition will require materials. While our current fossil-fuel energy regime extracts billions of tons of coal, oil, and gas, plus much smaller amounts of iron, bauxite, and other ores for making drills, pipelines, pumps, and other related equipment, the construction of renewable energy infrastructure at commensurate scale would require far larger quantities of non-fuel raw materials—including copper, iron, aluminum, lithium, iridium, gallium, sand, and rare earth elements.
While some estimates suggest that global reserves of these elements are sufficient for the initial build-out of renewable-energy infrastructure at scale, there are still two big challenges. First: obtaining these materials will require greatly expanding extractive industries along with their supply chains. These industries are inherently polluting, and they inevitably degrade land. For example, to produce one ton of copper ore, over 125 tons of rock and soil must be displaced. The rock-to-metal ratio is even worse for some other ores. Mining operations often take place on Indigenous peoples’ lands and the tailings from those operations often pollute rivers and streams. Non-human species and communities in the global South are already traumatized by land degradation and toxification; greatly expanding resource extraction—including deep-sea mining—would only deepen and multiply the wounds.
The second materials challenge: renewable energy infrastructure will have to be replaced periodically—every 25 to 50 years. Even if Earth’s minerals are sufficient for the first full-scale build-out of panels, turbines, and batteries, will limited mineral abundance permit continual replacements? Transition advocates say that we can avoid depleting the planet’s ores by recycling minerals and metals after constructing the first iteration of solar-and-wind technology. However, recycling is never complete, with some materials degraded in the process. One analysis suggests recycling would only buy a couple of centuries’ worth of time before depletion would bring an end to the regime of replaceable renewable-energy machines—and that’s assuming a widespread, coordinated implementation of recycling on an unprecedented scale. Again, the only real long-term solution is to aim for a much smaller global energy system.
The transition of society from fossil fuel dependency to reliance on low-carbon energy sources will be impossible to achieve without also reducing overall energy usage substantially and maintaining this lower rate of energy usage indefinitely. This transition isn’t just about building lots of solar panels, wind turbines, and batteries. It is about organizing society differently so that is uses much less energy and gets whatever energy it uses from sources that can be sustained over the long run.
How We Could Actually Do It, In Seven Concurrent Steps
Step one:Cap global fossil fuel extraction through global treaty, and annually lower the cap. We will not reduce carbon emissions until we reduce fossil fuel usage—it’s just that simple. Rather than trying to do this by adding renewable energy (which so far hasn’t resulted in a lessening of emissions), it makes far more sense simply to limit fossil fuel extraction. I wrote up the basics of a treaty along these lines several years ago in my book, The Oil Depletion Protocol.
Step two:Manage energy demand fairly.Reducing fossil fuel extraction presents a problem. Where will we get the energy required for transition purposes? Realistically, it can only be obtained by repurposing energy we’re currently using for non-transition purposes. That means most people, especially in highly industrialized countries, would have to use significantly less energy, both directly and also indirectly (in terms of energy embedded in products, and in services provided by society, such as road building). To accomplish this with the minimum of societal stress will require a social means of managing energy demand.
The fairest and most direct way to manage energy demand is via quota rationing. Tradable Energy Quotas (TEQs) is a system designed two decades ago by British economist David Fleming; it rewards energy savers and gently punishes energy guzzlers while ensuring that everyone gets energy they actually need. Every adult would be given an equal free entitlement of TEQs units each week. If you use less than your entitlement of units, you can sell your surplus. If you need more, you can buy them. All trading takes place at a single national price, which will rise and fall in line with demand.
Step three: Manage the public’s material expectations. Persuading people to accept using less energy will be hard, if everyone still wants to use more. Therefore, it will be necessary to manage the public’s expectations. This may sound technocratic and scary, but in fact society has already been managing the public’s expectations for over a century via advertising—which constantly delivers messages encouraging everyone to consume as much as they can. Now we need different messages to set different expectations.
What’s our objective in life? Is it to have as much stuff as possible, or to be happy and secure? Our current economic system assumes the former, and we have instituted an economic goal (constant growth) and an indicator (gross domestic product, or GDP) to help us achieve that goal. But ever-more people using ever-more stuff and energy leads to increased rates of depletion, pollution, and degradation, thereby imperiling the survival of humanity and the rest of the biosphere. In addition, the goal of happiness and security is more in line with cultural traditions and human psychology. If happiness and security are to be our goals, we should adopt indicators that help us achieve them. Instead of GDP, which simply measures the amount of money changing hands in a country annually, we should measure societal success by monitoring human well-being. The tiny country of Bhutan has been doing this for decades with its Gross National Happiness (GNH) indicator, which it has offered as a model for the rest of the world.
Step four:Aim for population decline. If population is always growing while available energy is capped, that means ever-less energy will be available per capita. Even if societies ditch GDP and adopt GNH, the prospect of continually declining energy availability will present adaptive challenges. How can energy scarcity impacts be minimized? The obvious solution: welcome population decline and plan accordingly.
Global population will start to decline sometime during this century. Fertility rates are falling worldwide, and China, Japan, Germany, and many other nations are already seeing population shrinkage. Rather than viewing this as a problem, we should see it as an opportunity. With fewer people, energy decline will be less of a burden on a per capita basis. There are also side benefits: a smaller population puts less pressure on wild nature, and often results in rising wages. We should stop pushing a pro-natalist agenda; ensure that women have the educational opportunities, social standing, security, and access to birth control to make their own childbearing choices; incentivize small families, and aim for the long-term goal of a stable global population closer to the number of people who were alive at the start of the fossil-fuel revolution (even though voluntary population shrinkage will be too slow to help us much in reaching immediate emissions reduction targets).
Step five:Target technological research and development to the transition. Today the main test of any new technology is simply its profitability. However, the transition will require new technologies to meet an entirely different set of criteria, including low-energy operation and minimization of exotic and toxic materials. Fortunately, there is already a subculture of engineers developing low-energy and intermediate technologies that could help run a right-sized circular economy.
Step six:Institute technological triage. Many of our existing technologies don’t meet these new criteria. So, during the transition, we will be letting go of familiar but ultimately destructive and unsustainable machines.
Some energy-guzzling machines—such as gasoline-powered leaf blowers—will be easy to say goodbye to. Commercial aircraft will be harder. Artificial intelligence is an energy guzzler we managed to live without until very recently; perhaps it’s best if we bid it a quick farewell. Cruise ships? Easy: downsize them, replace their engines with sails, and expect to take just one grand voyage during your lifetime. Weapons industries offer plenty of examples of machines we could live without. Of course, giving up some of our labor-saving devices will require us to learn useful skills—which could end up providing us with more exercise. For guidance along these lines, consult the rich literature of technology criticism.
Step seven:Help nature absorb excess carbon. The IPCC is right: if we’re to avert catastrophic climate change we need to capture carbon from the air and sequester it for a long time. But not with machines. Nature already removes and stores enormous amounts of carbon; we just need to help it do more (rather than reducing its carbon-capturing capabilities, which is what humanity is doing now). Reform agriculture to build soil rather than destroy it. Restore ecosystems, including grasslands, wetlands, forests, and coral reefs.
Implementing these seven steps will change everything. The result will be a world that’s less crowded, one where nature is recovering rather than retreating, and one in which people are healthier (because they’re not soaked in pollution) and happier.
Granted, this seven-step program appears politically unachievable today. But that’s largely because humanity hasn’t yet fully faced the failure of our current path of prioritizing immediate profits and comfort above long-term survival—and the consequences of that failure. Given better knowledge of where we’re currently headed, and the alternatives, what is politically impossible today could quickly become inevitable.
Social philosopher Roman Krznaric writes that profound social transformations are often tied to wars, natural disasters, or revolutions. But crisis alone is not positively transformative. There must also be ideas available for different ways to organize society, and social movements energized by those ideas. We have a crisis and (as we have just seen) some good ideas for how to do things differently. Now we need a movement.
Building a movement takes political and social organizing skills, time, and hard work. Even if you don’t have the skills for organizing, you can help the cause by learning what a real energy transition requires and then educating the people you know; by advocating for degrowth or related policies; and by reducing your own energy and materials consumption. Calculate your ecological footprint and shrink it over time, using goals and strategies, and tell your family and friends what you are doing and why.
Even with a new social movement advocating for a real energy transition, there is no guarantee that civilization will emerge from this century of unraveling in a recognizable form. But we all need to understand: this is a fight for survival in which cooperation and sacrifice are required, just as in total war. Until we feel that level of shared urgency, there will be no real energy transition, and little prospect for a desirable human future.
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It's Bloody Hot and Deadly—and We Still Have No Climate Action Plan
To make a rapid, far-reaching, and unrelenting break with our fossil-fuel dependency, a national mobilization would be needed, and it would have to be a genuine all-of-society effort.
Jun 19, 2024
While April and May are usually the hottest months in many countries in Southeast Asia, hundreds of millions of people are now suffering in South Asia from an exceptionally intense heatwave that has killed hundreds. One expert has already called it the most extreme heat event in history. Record-breaking temperatures above 122°F were reported in the Indian capital of New Delhi, and temperatures sizzled to an unheard of 127°F in parts of India and Pakistan.
Nor was the blazing heat limited to Asia. Heatwaves of exceptional severity and duration are now occurring simultaneously in many areas of the world. Mexico and parts of the United States, notably Miami and Phoenix, have recently been in the grip of intense heat events. In southern Mexico, endangered howler monkeys in several states have been falling dead from trees in their tropical forests due to heat stroke and dehydration. Below-average rainfall throughout Mexico has led to water shortages in Mexico City and elsewhere. In some places, birds and bats, not to speak of humans, are also dying from the heat.
All of this is no coincidence. The hot and heavy hand of climate change is now upon us. Last year was the hottest on Earth in 125,000 years, and the concentration of heat-trapping carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere was the highest in 4 million years and still climbing at an ever-increasing rate. Meanwhile, global sea surface temperatures also reached a peak, causing severe massive coral bleaching in all three major ocean basins.
Had a foreign enemy inflicted the kind of damage caused by such floods, or the firestorms that swept California and the Pacific Northwest in 2020, or the hurricanes and droughts the nation has begun experiencing with increased frequency, the U.S. would have immediately mobilized for war.
The World Bank is projecting that, by 2050, there will be more than 200 million climate refugees, 20 times the 10 million refugees that have already destabilized Europe. Climate change is also putting an increasingly heavy burden on our social safety net, which could ultimately cause social order to begin to break down, generating chaos.
Nobel Prize-winning former Energy Secretary Steven Chu now claims it’s no longer possible to keep the global temperature from rising more than 1.5°C above the historical average, as the 195-nation signatories to the 2015 Paris climate agreement had hoped. In fact, he projects that the target of 2°C will also be broken and that, by 2050 the global temperature will have risen above 3°C. Nor is his pessimism unique. Hundreds of other scientists have recently forecast a strong possibility of hitting 2.5°C, which should hardly be surprising since, for well over 30 years now, global leaders have failed to heed the warnings of climate scientists by moving decisively to phase out fossil fuels and their heat-trapping gases.
What to make of such dire forecasts?
It could hardly be clearer that the world is already in the throes of a climate catastrophe. That means it’s high time for the U.S. to declare a national climate emergency to help focus us all on the disaster at hand. (Or as famed English poet Samuel Johnson put it centuries ago, “When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.”)
Such a declaration of a climate emergency is long overdue. Some 40 other nations have already done so, including 2,356 jurisdictions and local governments representing more than a billion people. Of course, a declaration alone will hardly be enough. As the world’s wealthiest and most powerful nation, and the one that historically has contributed the most legacy greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, the U.S. needs to develop a coherent exit strategy from the stranglehold of fossil fuels, a strategy that could serve as an international example of a swift and thorough clean-energy transition. But at the moment, of course, this country remains the world’s largest producer and consumer of oil and natural gas and the third largest producer of coal—and should former President Donald Trump win in November, you can kiss any possible reductions in those figures goodbye for the foreseeable future. Sadly enough, however, though the Biden administration’s rhetoric of climate concern has been strong, in practice, this country has continued to cede true climate leadership to others.
Despite the laudable examples of smaller nations like Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Paraguay, and Costa Rica that are already at, or within a percentage point or two, of being 100% powered by clean, renewable energy, the world sorely needs the U.S. as a global role model. To make a rapid, far-reaching, and unrelenting break with our fossil-fuel dependency—79% of the nation’s energy is now drawn from fossil fuels—a national mobilization would be needed, and it would have to be a genuine all-of-society effort.
National Mobilization Amid Crisis
Fortunately, there is a historical precedent for just such a comprehensive mobilization of government and citizenry in dire circumstances: former President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s and the World War II years provide examples of the scale and intensity of the response needed today to reverse climate change. However, instead of gearing up to produce jobs for the unemployed or planes and tanks for a war, a concerted nationwide industrial effort is needed now to upgrade our electrical grid and produce millions of solar panels, wind turbines, batteries, carbon-capture machines, and zero-emission vehicles. All too sadly, this country and the world are now in a situation even more perilous than either the Great Depression or World War II.
Rising seas pose serious threats to major American cities, including Boston, Charleston, Miami, and New York, while, in recent years, millions of acres of the Midwest have been flooded by climate-related extreme weather events. Had a foreign enemy inflicted the kind of damage caused by such floods, or the firestorms that swept California and the Pacific Northwest in 2020, or the hurricanes and droughts the nation has begun experiencing with increased frequency, the U.S. would have immediately mobilized for war. Now, this country needs to do exactly that to face the climate crisis, but (even forgetting the horrifying possibility that Donald Trump could win the coming presidential election and sink any possibility of moving on climate change nationally for years to come) how to get our act together?
As French author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wrote in his classic 1943 novella, Le Petit Prince, “A goal without a plan is just a wish.” In other words, a national climate action plan is urgently needed.
Left to its own devices, without strong public pressure, Congress might basically ignore or fail to enact legislation to implement the results of a National Climate Action Plan, especially if Congress were still controlled by the fossil-fuel-loving Republican Party.
In the Trump years of climate-science denial, any progress in controlling emissions resulted from actions by states, cities, and businesses or institutions. Over the long term, however, climate policy is far too important to be left to a hodgepodge of laws and policies haphazardly applied across some of our 50 states and thousands of cities and businesses. What this country needs is a plan guided by scientific and technical analysis and based on an ambitious but attainable set of greenhouse-gas-reduction quotas. Its point would not be to override the climate agendas of any city, state, or group, or the aspirations of the Green New Deal (House Resolution HR 109). It would simply be to provide a reliable toolkit of measures and policies along with analyses of their costs and benefits—a compass for getting to negative carbon emission as quickly and cost-effectively as possible.
This country today has no comprehensive climate action plan that proposes clear, enforceable targets, timelines, and roadmaps for climate protection and restabilization—and it desperately needs one. Call it America’s Energy Transition: Achieving a Clean Energy Future and imagine that it would build on previous authoritative studies, analyzing renewable-energy-generating and distribution technologies in terms of their costs, commercial readiness, resource constraints, and potential efficiency. It would formulate and model competing scenarios with clusters of complementary technologies, each requiring different policies for its implementation.
From such an exercise, Americans would learn how to achieve the greatest greenhouse gas reductions with the most speed and cost-effectiveness, as well as the fewest unwanted impacts, while best meeting this country’s ongoing energy needs. Such a study would also reveal the demands on natural resources of each scenario along with its costs and the manufacturing capacity required.
To build trust and engagement in the final plan, regional advisory councils made up of scientists, engineers, businesspeople, and major stakeholder representatives should be created to offer recommendations on how best to adapt such a plan to conditions in each part of the country. The final policy roadmap would then be designated as the “optimal energy path scenario” for the nation and provided to Congress, so that it could use the findings as a basis for funding and implementing new climate legislation.
Without Political Action, Don’t Hold Your Breath for a Bold Climate Plan
Left to its own devices, without strong public pressure, Congress might basically ignore or fail to enact legislation to implement the results of a National Climate Action Plan, especially if Congress were still controlled by the fossil-fuel-loving Republican Party. A Republican stranglehold on Congress and/or the White House would undoubtedly stymie both the creation of a national climate plan and the implementation of its findings, as well as the clean-energy transition it would facilitate.
To prevent such a setback from occurring, a strong popular constituency must be built nationwide capable of exerting powerful pressure on Congress to ensure the creation of a climate plan and the appropriate legislation to make it functional. Otherwise, no matter how sound the PR campaign on its behalf, serious political obstacles would stand in the way of its adoption, even by a Democratic Congress.
Through its lobbying, think tanks, public relations arms, and advertising, the politically and economically powerful fossil-fuel industry has, for decades, blocked meaningful climate legislation in both Democratic and Republican congresses. The creation of a powerful, broad coalition of constituencies—environmental, labor, public health, faith-based, and even progressive elements of the business community—could serve as a popular countervailing force against the mighty fossil-fuel industry. But as a first step, that coalition would need support, guidance, and a common accepted platform both to stand behind and to mobilize the public. The American environmental community could produce that platform. Yet this would not be a simple matter, due to the way that community is siloed, with each major organization catering to its own constituency, interests, and funders.
To create a common consensual vision around which the national climate movement could mobilize, a broad civil society gathering should be convened to attract the leadership of all environmental and climate action groups and set the stage for the National Climate Action Plan. That gathering would, of course, focus on the roadblocks to implementing such a plan and to a swift, national clean-energy transition—and how those roadblocks could be dismantled.
Put all of this together and you would have a nation mobilized against the fossil-fuel industry, ready to create a climate action plan and mobilize Americans in an all-of-society effort on behalf of slashing national carbon emissions in a radical fashion, accelerating a clean-energy transition, and protecting our endangered world. What more could you ask for?
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A Full-Court Press for Renewables Will Save Money and the Planet
Although there are up front costs of building solar and wind farms, these new energy plants will pay for themselves over time, and by the 2040s energy will be much cheaper.
Jun 14, 2024
Last week, the International Energy Agency put out a new report that turns conventional wisdom regarding the clean energy transition on its head.
It is cheaper for everyone to adopt solar, wind, batteries, and other renewables as soon as possible than to go on depending on coal, fossil gas, and petroleum. And we’re just talking about energy costs in a vacuum here, not factoring in the climate change damage that fossil fuels do to the planet, which costs billions of dollars a year and will cost ever more as time goes on.
The report’s authors write that in China in 2023, “more than 95% of new utility-scale solar photovoltaic (PV) installations and new onshore wind capacity had lower generation costs than new coal and natural gas plants. Where electric cars and two- and three-wheelers have higher upfront costs, which is not always the case, they typically result in substantial savings because of lower operating expenses.”
Since the cost of producing electricity by solar is falling so fast, whereas petroleum prices are either stable or slated to rise, if we shift from oil to electricity we obviously are saving a lot of money.
I repeat, solar and wind had lower generation costs. And no wonder, since the cost of solar panels plummeted an astonishing 30% in 2023. And we’re only at the beginning of the transition. Between 2009 and 2019, the price of solar electricity dropped 89%. Think about the last 10 years of gasoline prices in the U.S. The average price of gasoline in 2014 was about $3 per gallon. In 2023 it was $3.52. In real terms, accounting for inflation, the price was probably about flat or down just a wee bit. Fossil fuels are remaining just as expensive as they always were, but renewables are rapidly declining in price. These declines will continue as new technologies are invented and implemented.
Although there are up front costs of building solar and wind farms, these new energy plants will pay for themselves over time, and by the 2040s energy will be much cheaper. The IEA says, “Today, around 50% of total consumer energy expenditure is on oil products, and another 35% is on electricity. In rapid energy transitions these swap places, making the price of electricity the key measure of affordability for most consumers.”
Since the cost of producing electricity by solar is falling so fast, whereas petroleum prices are either stable or slated to rise, if we shift from oil to electricity we obviously are saving a lot of money.
But, we’re going to need some major investments up front to unlock these lower prices. The report says: “As things stand, around $3 trillion is invested each year into the energy sector, of which $1.9 trillion is in a range of clean energy technologies and infrastructure. By 2035, total investments need to rise to $5.3 trillion in the NZE Scenario, with $5 trillion going to clean energy.”
The bottom line is the bill you get from your energy utility every month, and your monthly cost for transpiration fuel. The IEA observes, “Our projections highlight that rapid clean energy transitions result in lower consumer bills compared with a trajectory based on today’s policy settings.”
If we stop subsidizing fossil fuels and put the money instead into a Manhattan Project-style full-court press for renewables, in 11 years consumers could be paying 20% less for their energy, especially in the developing world.
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