Is a US “renewables revolution” really “toppling” fossil fuels?
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.8163
“It is turning out to be less challenging than expected to incorporate more and more renewables into the electric grid—and to handle periods of time when demand is high but the wind isn’t blowing and/or the sun isn’t shining.” So declared
In apparently unrelated coverage three days later, under the headline “A renewables revolution is toppling the dominance of fossil fuels in US power,” Bloomberg.com
Part of the enthused skewing lies in a blurred conflation in assessing contributions to decarbonization. The effective contribution of a comparatively low-carbon fossil fuel—natural gas—is being mixed with the outright contribution of renewables. Natural gas use is rising and coal use is declining, but that doesn’t mean that renewables are reaching the power-output scale of the major sources.
Nevertheless, at Mashable the headline
But consider the BNEF report bar graph reproduced in the article, similar to one reproduced
Coal-fired power plants emit more greenhouse gases than natural gas, wind and solar plants do.
“We’re seeing what we’re calling the decarbonization of the U.S. power sector,” said Colleen Regan, a BNEF senior analyst.
A similar spin appears in the Huffington Post article
Stronger case? No doubt that’s true. Nevertheless, notably sober coverage of the BNEF report appeared in Mooney’s Washington Post piece
Still, whatever is to be said about media coverage of the BNEF report, Romm’s kind of optimism for renewables had already spread to New York Times columnist Paul Krugman before Romm’s post appeared. In his own blog, Krugman called
“The numbers are really stunning,” that column declares. They “show progress at rates we normally only expect to see for information technology. And they put the cost of renewable energy into a range where it’s competitive with fossil fuels.” Krugman dismisses renewables’ intermittency challenges as mostly solved. And he asks, “So what will it take to achieve a large-scale shift from fossil fuels to renewables, a shift to sun and wind instead of fire? Financial incentives, and they don’t have to be all that huge.”
His conclusion merits quoting:
Now, skeptics may point out that even if all these good things happen, they won’t be enough on their own to save the planet. For one thing, we’re only talking about electricity generation, which is a big part of the climate change problem but not the whole thing. For another, we’re only talking about one country when the problem is global.
But I’d argue that the kind of progress now within reach could produce a tipping point, in the right direction. Once renewable energy becomes an obvious success and, yes, a powerful interest group, anti-environmentalism will start to lose its political grip. And an energy revolution in America would let us take the lead in global action.
Salvation from climate catastrophe is, in short, something we can realistically hope to see happen, with no political miracle necessary. But failure is also a very real possibility. Everything is hanging in the balance.
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Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and was a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.