KING COAL DETHRONED

Coal has been a primary source of energy in the US since the 1880s and the source of most of the electricity generated in the United States since the early 1960s. Here in the US, it's been a relatively cheap, abundant and reliable source of energy. It's also the source of an enormous amount of greenhouse gases and toxic pollution.

It's now clear that coal is on its way out. According to the US Energy Information Administration, this year renewable energy sources such as wind, water and geothermal generated more electricity than coal for the first time in US history. Coal's share of the energy market has been declining for the past decade while renewables have been claiming a bigger and bigger share each year. This year the curves crossed for the first time.

Coal-fired power plant near Price, Utah

Credit: arbyreed

Despite President's Trump's repeated promises to bring back "beautiful, clean coal," and his rollback of key environmental protections, including the brain-damaging mercury emitted when coal is burned, King coal's throne has been on increasingly shaky ground due to simple economics--renewables are now both cheaper and far cleaner than coal. Trying to resuscitate this dying industry truly is tilting at windmills.

Windpower, growing rapidly in US

Credit: Winchell Joshua, US Fish and Wildlife Service

Nor do experts see much chance for coal to stage a counter-revolution.“Coal is on the way out, we are seeing the end of coal,” says Dennis Wamsted, analyst at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis. "The trend is pretty clear."

With King coal on his way out, we can all breathe a bit easier. But,  as climate scientists have been telling us for decades now, replacing coal and other fossil fuels with renewables can't happen soon enough.

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REA

RENEWABLES BEAT COAL IN US FOR THE FIRST TIME

Every so often there's a bit of good news about the race to replace fossil fuels with renewables before time runs out for a habitable planet Earth. Today's ray of light is the news that renewable energy capacity--the amount of power that can be generated from solar, wind and water--beat out the combined capacity of all the coal-fired power plants in the US for the first time.

We need more windmills and less CO2!

This milestone appears in the latest Energy Infrastructure Update from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. It was a photo finish, with renewable generating capacity now 21.56 percent of the total while coal dropped to 21.55 percent. Not a huge difference, but with renewables rapidly growing and coal shrinking, it's a moment worth noting.

Of course, if we are to maintain a livable climate, we need a lot more of such wins, and soon, and not just in the US, but worldwide.

CALIFORNIA'S ECONOMY BOOMS WHILE ITS CARBON FOOTPRINT SHRINKS

As reported in Grist earlier this month, California's carbon emissions are down to the levels they were way back in the 1990s, while at the same time its economic productivity has soared. According to the state's Air Resources Board, “California now produces twice as many goods and services for the same amount of greenhouse gas emissions as the rest of the nation."

California windfarm--part of the state's energy success story

Credit: Creative Commons Zero--CC0 

If one believes economists and politicians who, like Donald Trump, are still pushing coal or other greenhouse-gas-spewing energy sources, California, which is leading the nation in the transition to renewable energy, should be failing. For those still interested in facts, nothing could be further from the truth. California's per capita greenhouse gas emissions are roughly one-half the US average, yet it produces twice as many goods and services for every unit of energy use.

Kudos to California for leading the way. However, there's still lots of room for improvement. Transportation still relies far too heavily on fossil fuels, and accounts for 41 percent of California's carbon emissions. To tackle this, the state has plans in place to multiply the number of electric vehicles on California's roads 12 times within the next 12 years.

If the state has the same success with that plan as it has had on its overall carbon emissions, it's likely to beat that deadline and still lead the country in terms of economic productivity, not to mention improved quality of life.

What are the rest of the states waiting for?

REA

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COSTA RICA'S ELECTRIFYING PLEDGE--A CARBON-FREE TRANSPORT SECTOR BY 2021

Costa Rica is remarkable in many ways. It's a stable democracy in an unstable region. It abolished its army in 1949. It protects 25 percent of the country as national parks or other conservation areas--the highest percentage in the world. It has a 98 percent literacy rate, a universal healthcare system, and a thriving high-tech economic sector. Renewable energy, mostly from hydropower, meets close to 100 percent of the country's electricity needs.

 La Fortuna waterfall, Costa Rica

Credit: Boris G

Now, to put the icing on the cake, Costa Rica is determined to be the first country to achieve total freedom from fossil fuels by powering its transportation sector with renewables within a few years.

Recently elected president Carlos Alvarado ran on a platform that set the goal of decarbonizing transport by 2021, the country's 200th anniversary of independence. “When we reach 200 years of independent life," he proclaimed, "we will take Costa Rica forward and celebrate … that we’ve removed gasoline and diesel from our transportation.”

It may not be possible to reach that lofty goal in just three years. However, even setting that as a national goal is an impressive step, and given Costa Rica's stellar history with respect to the environment and the quality of life of its citizens, it may well be the first country to achieve it. Hopefully, given that from 15 to 30 percent of climate destabilizing greenhouse gas emissions worldwide come from transportation, it will not be the last.

 

WHATEVER TRUMP DOES, COAL'S FUTURE IS DARK

At its peak, in 1923, the US coal industry employed 863,000 people, just over two percent of US workers at that time. Today, coal employs just 50,000 workers, less than .04 percent of the current workforce. Despite Trump's claim that his administration has "ended the war on beautiful, clean coal," and will ". . . put our miners back to work," those jobs are no more likely to come back than those of the blacksmiths and farriers who shod the 25 million horses that plowed furrows and pulled wagons in the US a century ago.

The reason is simple: coal is not only dirty, dangerous and a huge source of climate-disrupting greenhouse gases, it can no longer compete economically with oil, natural gas or renewables. Forbes reports that by 2020, power generated by wind farms and large-scale solar installations will market at an incredibly low price of three cents per kilowatt-hour (kWh). Compare that to the 10 to 14 cents per kWh for coal-generated electricity. You don't need an economics degree to foresee the results.

The prediction by Forbes may already be out of date. In early June, 2018, the Central Arizona Project, the agency responsible for pumping water from the Colorado River throughout Arizona, signed an agreement with Origis Energy USA to buy solar power at the incredibly low rate of 2.49 cents per kilowatt-hour, less than one-quarter the going rate for electricity from coal. Seeing the handwriting on the wall, Northern Indiana Public Service Company, which currently generates 65 percent of its electricity from coal, plans to phase coal out completely within ten years. It will replace coal with a mix of solar, wind, energy storage and demand management. Expected savings to consumers--$4 billion over the next three decades.

  
 Four Corners coal generating plant, San Juan, New Mexico

Credit: Lyntha Scott Eiler/National Archives and Records Administration

This isn't the case just in the US. According to CleanTechNews, the renewable energy sector employed 10.3 million people worldwide in 2017, adding 500,000 new jobs in the previous year. Large renewable energy projects are currently being bid and contracted at three cents per kWh or less in Dubai, Chile, Abu Dhabi, Mexico and Saudi Arabia. Meanwhile, utilities closed 30 coal-fired plants in 2017 in the US alone, and more in the first months of this year--more than 270 since 2010.

High desert wind farm

Credit: Winchell Joshua, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

Hammering one more nail in coal's coffin, on June 13, FERC, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, voted unanimously not to approve Trump's attempt to use a law dealing with energy distribution in a national emergency to keep coal and nuclear generating plants on life support.

Sorry, Donald, neither the US nor the rest of the world is going back to "beautiful, clean" coal, no matter how many clean air and clean water regulations you remove.

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Update: Here's a link to an article pointing out that in many areas it's now cheaper to get energy from a brand-new wind or solar installation than from an existing coal-powered plant.

And here's another report that 75 percent of existing coal-fired generating plants can no longer compete with renewable power sources.

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PORTUGAL GENERATES A SURPLUS OF RENEWABLE ENERGY -- WHAT ARE WE WAITING FOR?

Portugal, home to 10 million people, surged to the front of the pack in terms of renewable energy in March of this year. Using a combination of hydro, wind and solar generation, it produced more than enough electricity to power its 3.6 million households, plus businesses, industry and transport. It exported a surplus of 4.8 percent of its electricity--878 gigawatt-hours--to other European countries.

Portugal's use of renewable energy in March kept 1.8 million tons of climate-destabilizing CO2 out of the atmosphere.

Many other countries, including Sweden, Costa Rica and Germany, are moving rapidly towards meeting all or most of their power needs with renewables. You can read about Scotland's successes here.

Portugal's Alto Minho Wind Farm Under Construction

Credit: BBC News

Portugal's per capita Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is $30,300 per year, just about half that of the United States ($59,500). If they can do it, why can't we?

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NO NUKES IS GOOD NUKES--RENEWABLE POWER TOPS NUCLEAR IN THE US FOR THE FIRST TIME

Growing up in the '50s, I remember reading about the great promise of atomic energy. Nuclear reactors, we were told, would produce so much energy so efficiently that electricity would essentially be free--"too cheap to meter," as Lewis Strauss, Chairman of the United States Atomic Energy Commission, said in 1954.

As we know, reality didn't turn out to be quite so rosy. Between cost overruns and delays, opposition supercharged by the 1979 Three Mile Island meltdown, reliability issues, and the still-unsolved problem of what to do with nuclear waste, nuclear power came to be seen as far more problematic than promising. Currently, nuclear plants generate just 20 percent of all electric power in the US, and their share is gradually falling.

Solar power plant
License: CCO Public Domain

In the meantime, clean, renewable sources of energy--especially wind and solar--have been burgeoning. With renewables surging and nuclear flagging, it was inevitable that renewables would eventually win out. The only question was when.

That question has now been answered. According to the US Energy Information Administration, in March and April of this year renewable energy sources produced more energy for the US than nuclear plants--21.6 vs 20.34 percent in March and 22.98 vs 19.19 percent in April.

"Renewable energy is now surpassing nuclear power, a major milestone in the transformation of the US energy sector," says Tim Judson, Executive Director of the Nuclear Information and Resource Service.

And with solar energy growing by 38 percent and wind energy by 14 percent in the last year alone, this extremely positive trend has nowhere to go but up. I, for one, will be delighted when the only signs of out nuclear power misadventure are the silent silos of decommissioned plants.

Signpost memorializing the nuclear accident at Three Mile Island
Credit: The Baltimore Sun

With the cancellation of two planned reactors in South Carolina, just two new nuclear power plants are in the works in the US.  Nuclear energy can no longer compete with wind and solar. The end is in sight.

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A 100% RENEWABLE WORLDWIDE ENERGY SYSTEM IS POSSIBLE--SEE IT IN ACTION HERE

If you've had a chance to drive or ride in a Prius, you know how you can watch the flow of energy to and from the battery, motor and brakes. it's a great feeling, for example, to see the battery being charged by the regenerative braking system--free energy!

Prius energy display/Credit: Kmf164 (at) en.wikimedia.org

Now imagine watching a similar visualization for the entire world, and a 100% sustainable one at that. Its designers call it the internet of energy. You can view it in action right here. It's great fun to play around with. 

Screenshot of renewable energy flows in European region/Credit: Neo Carbon Energy

You might think this is just a lovely fantasy, but it's not. The worldwide and region-by-region visualizations are the result of extensive and detailed research. Christian Breyer and colleagues at Lappeenranta University of Technology (LUT), in Finland, analyzed exactly what it would take to provide 100% renewable electricity worldwide using the most appropriate and efficient regional mix of solar, wind, hydro, biomass and other sources of renewable energy, along with the needed resources for transmission and storage. 

Contrary to those who argue that we must continue to depend on fossil fuels, the researchers found that renewables can provide ample energy anywhere on Earth, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, conceivably by 2030.

The model was presented for the first time on November 4 at the World Clean Energy Conference in Geneva, Switzerland.

'The visualization shows exactly how a fully renewable electricity system operates. So let’s just build it,” urges chemical engineer Pasi Vainikka, a member of the research consortium. 

So far the group has only modeled a 100% renewable electrical system. Their next goal is to expand their work to include the entire energy system including heating, cooling and transportation. They also plan to map a feasible transition from our current unsustainable situation to a 100% sustainable future.

“Every country in the world has to find pathways to achieve the Paris agreement targets and to avoid stranded assets," says Breyer. "This model can provide the help for policy-makers, industrial decision-makers and societal stakeholders to do that."

It's do-able. Let's do it!