https://archive.md/JQ8OV
"People have been telling stories about renewable energy since the
nineteen-seventies, when the first all-solar-powered house opened on the campus
of the University of Delaware, drawing a hundred thousand visitors in 1973, its
first year, to marvel at its early photovoltaic panels and its solar hot-water
system, complete with salt tubs in the basement to store heat overnight. But,
even though we’ve got used to seeing solar panels and wind turbines across the
landscape in the intervening fifty years, we continue to think of what they
produce as “alternative energy,” a supplement to the fossil-fuelled power that
has run Western economies for more than two centuries. In the past two years,
however, with surprisingly little notice, renewable energy has suddenly become
the obvious, mainstream, cost-efficient choice around the world. Against all
the big bad things happening on the planet (and despite all the best efforts of
the Republican-led Congress in recent weeks), this is a very big and hopeful
thing, which a short catalogue of recent numbers demonstrates:
* It took from the invention of the photovoltaic solar cell, in 1954, until
2022 for the world to install a terawatt of solar power; the second terawatt
came just two years later, and the third will arrive either later this year or
early next.
* That’s because people are now putting up a gigawatt’s worth of solar panels,
the rough equivalent of the power generated by one coal-fired plant, every
fifteen hours. Solar power is now growing faster than any power source in
history, and it is closely followed by wind power—which is really another form
of energy from the sun, since it is differential heating of the earth that
produces the wind that turns the turbines.
* Last year, ninety-six per cent of the global demand for new electricity was
met by renewables, and in the United States ninety-three per cent of new
generating capacity came from solar, wind, and an ever-increasing variety of
batteries to store that power.
* In March, for the first time, fossil fuels generated less than half the
electricity in the U.S. In California, at one point on May 25th, renewables
were producing a record hundred and fifty-eight per cent of the state’s power
demand. Over the course of the entire day, they produced eighty-two per cent of
the power in California, which, this spring, surpassed Japan to become the
world’s fourth-largest economy.
* Meanwhile, battery-storage capability has increased seventy-six per cent,
based on this year’s projected estimates; at night, those batteries are often
the main supplier of California’s electricity. As the director of reliability
analysis at the North American Electric Reliability Corporation put it, in the
CleanTechnica newsletter, “batteries can smooth out some of that variability
from those times when the wind isn’t blowing or the sun isn’t shining.” As a
result, California is so far using forty per cent less natural gas to generate
electricity than it did in 2023, which is the single most hopeful statistic
I’ve seen in four decades of writing about the climate crisis."
Via
Reasons to be Cheerful:
<
https://reasonstobecheerful.world/what-were-reading-wimbledon-balls-mouse-houses/>
Share and enjoy,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
