The Energy Transition Will Be Public 

By now it has been widely reported that we just lived through the hottest summer on record. Of course, the same thing was said a year ago about the previous summer. According to the Energy Institute’s Statistical Review of World Energy, greenhouse gas emissions hit a record high in 2023, increasing by 2 percent to exceed 40 gigatones of CO2 equivalent for the first time (a gigatone is one billion tons). Again, another record that was also set the previous year. 

Other dreary markers have come to the fore. According to a study published in June in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution, the years since 2018 have been six of the worst seven years since 2003 for wildfire events. A 2022 study in the journal Reviews of Geophysics revealed that, globally, fire seasons lengthened by 14 days (or 27 percent) between 1979 and 2019 with the number of days when extreme fire conditions prevailed by 54 percent over that same period.  Coal usage continues to set new highs on a yearly basis. 

There is some better news to find if one seeks it out. Renewables are also setting all-time highs. The U.S. Information Agency (EIA) has run the numbers on the first half of the year and found that wind, solar, and batteries were each installed at a pace that dwarfs new natural gas generators. About 20 gigawatts of new capacity has been added so far this year, and solar accounts for 60 percent of it. Another 20 percent was battery capacity (batteries are treated as the equivalent of a generating source by the EIA since they can dispatch electricity to the grid on demand, even if they can’t do it continuously). Battery installation has been concentrated in California, Texas, Arizona, and Nevada- obviously it is going where solar is to allow the power generated during the peak of the day (when the sun shines the most) to meet demand after the sun sets. 

Globally, in 2023 444 gigawatts of new solar capacity was installed, according to BloombergNEF. This is nearly an 80 percent year-on-year jump and actually more than was cumulatively installed between the invention of the solar cell in 1954 and 2017. While solar still provides only 6 percent of global electricity, its share as quadrupled since 2018. At this rate, solar will likely be the largest source of electricity on the planet by 2030s. 

Hannah Ritchie, deputy editor at Our World in Data and author of Not the End of the World: How We Can Be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet, shows a number of countries have succeeded in decoupling economic growth from carbon emissions. Countries that have achieved a high level of decarbonization, from high-income countries such as Norway, Sweden, France, and Iceland, to countries lower on the Human-Development Index (HDI) such as Costa Rica and Paraguay, have done so through hydro, nuclear, and where available, geothermal energy. Meanwhile, Britain just enjoyed its greenest summer ever as reliance on gas generation fell in August to less than one-fifth of all electricity, 40 percent lower than last year. 

The problem, of course, is there is much that needs to be done and faster. Global electricity demand figures to double in the next 15-20 years if not sooner. The bulk of carbon emissions are now emitted by developing countries. In late July, the International Energy Agency’s ‘Electricity Mid-Year Update’ projected global power demand to grow 4 percent this year. According to the report: ‘India, the fastest growing major economy in the world, is forecast to post an 8% rise in electricity consumption in 2024, matching the rapid growth it saw in 2023.’ What fuel will power that rising demand? The IEA expected India’s coal-fired generation to increase by 7 percent this year. China may have reached peak emissions but is still burning mountains of coal. 

Here in the U.S., the IEA expects electricity to increase by 3 percent this year. No doubt a decent amount of this increase is due to data centers for redundant AI programs. Google’s electricity use has doubled since 2019; a ChatGPT query needs nearly 10 times as much electricity as a regular internet search. Goldman Sachs Research estimates that data center power demand will grow by 160 percent by 2030. Yet the largest source of U.S. emissions is transportation. The challenge is vast. For example, Amazon is another corporation seemingly blowing through its climate pledge. A recent report by corporate campaigners Stand.Earth shows Amazon’s vehicle emissions up potentially 194 percent since its 2019 emissions pledge. 

Electric Vehicles (EV) growth has stagnated enough that many car companies are cutting back on production. Volvo has scrapped plans to sell only electric cars by 2030. Ford recently put its plans for an electric three-row SUV on indefinite hold and announced the company would be slashing its E.V. budget to roughly $12 billion. Stellantis announced this week that production of its all-electric Fiat 500 is suspended. Mercedes and Volkswagen have also slowed down their electrification plans. 

Part of the problem is charge anxiety, i.e. the availability of charging stations. At this point 90 percent of EV owners have access to charging at home in garages, driveways, etc. This enables these owners to charge their cars overnight. If the rest of drivers in the country are to transition to EVs, many will need outside chargers. While the number of EV charges has doubled the past four years, only a few states at this point (Delaware, Connecticut, Massachusetts Nevada) seem to have adequate EV-to-EV charger ratios. In the past year, some major companies made deals with Tesla to access its chargers but this isn’t enough. Some 30,000 of the company’s fast-charging plugs in the U.S. and Canada remain inaccessible to non-Tesla owners due to delays in adapter production and software alignment (Musk firing the entire Supercharger team for a while this past spring likely did not help the effort). Clearly, more public charges are needed (not to mention more public transit). The 2021 Infrusturture Investment and Jobs Act allocated $7.5 billion over five years for charging stations. As of this past spring apparently only 8 stations were up and running due to a mix of inertia, red tape, and a sprawling clash of different state and federal regulations. 

Compare this to Norway, the world leader in electric vehicles, reaching around 91 percent of new car sales. Norway is blessed with abundant hydroelectric power, which provides 96 percent of the country’s electricity (electricity prices in Norway are among the cheapest in the world), yet it was the government’s buildout of a wide network of charging stations throughout the country, usually with input from local populations, not just in places where stations are most profitable, along with other steps such as free parking, that accomplished the transition. 

This same kind of public effort is necessary to decarbonize and scale up essential sectors like steel, concrete, and plastic. It is vital to not lose sight of the fact that a large majority of carbon emissions aren’t made by electricity but by these other sectors. Public investment and planning is again critical. These are exactly the sort of public moonshots that the Left can get behind. Such public investment can be tied to required union jobs and publically-owned utilities. Some 45 percent of the world’s solar-grade polysilicon is produced in Xinjiang where the Chinese government commits massive human-rights abuses against the Uyghurs. 

On June 21, the headline of New York Times business page blared ‘Even as Climate Risks Short-term Thinking Prevails.’ To sum up the point the article reads ‘The Financial industry is staying where the biggest profits are, and that’s not yet green investments.’ The expansion of solar power and its lowering price may have the likes of David Wallace-Wells dreaming of ‘electricity too cheap to meter’; however, as Christopher Wallace shows in his book Capitalism Won’t Save the Planet, there is still the problem of profitability. Markets inevitably put profit far above all else meaning the transition will have to be largely a public venture both in terms of industrial policy, innovation and technology transfer to poorer countries. California, a state with 39 million people, is generating twice as much electricity from solar as all of Africa with a population 36 times larger. 

The fight is ongoing and it is the most important one we face.

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