We Need to Reduce Barriers to Get to 100 Percent Renewable Energy Globally, says Dale Bryk
Part 3 of “Powering Earth 2050” Debate
California’s renewable energy march is on: State-regulated utilities must now get 50 percent of their electricity from wind, water, and the sun by 2050 — no fossil fuels or biofuels, no nuclear power. But even if the Golden State can achieve these goals, are they a roadmap for the rest of the United States — or the world?
Four experts debate. You decide.
On the pro side: Dale Bryk, director of programs at the Natural Resources Defense Council. To read other positions, click here.
Dale Bryk: I’m focusing on the pathway to world peace, where everyone is going to put their weapons down and start building wind turbines and solar panels. So how do we get from here to there? And, I’m not sure I’m supposed to do this, but I actually agree, I think, with everything that [Ken Caldeira] said, because the way that I think of this is not how do we get to 100 percent renewables, but how do we reduce all the environmental impacts associated with power generation and use worldwide? So, from a climate perspective, how do we reduce global warming pollution on the scale and timeframe needed to avoid catastrophic impacts in the smartest, quickest, cheapest way? And I would say you put a cap on pollution. You can translate that into a carbon tax, but what we want is pollution down, not cost up. So pollution down, and then you allow all the technologies to compete against one another.
I agree with a lot of [Mark Jacobson’s] numbers. So, if you look at an even playing field and you look at cost, then I think energy efficiency, number one, and renewables will win in that game. And the challenge is to keep your thumb off the scale of your favorite technology, which could be nuclear power for some, and to make sure that you’re looking not just at cost, but the host of barriers that prevent investment in the best solutions that we have available to us. So, you want to internalize cost with a cap. You want to have a level playing field. And then you want to think about what are the barriers. And in this country and a lot of countries, one of the biggest barriers we have is the way that we regulate the utility industry, which is one of the primary investors in all of our energy resources. So, if we have perverse regulatory structures that make it a money loser for utilities, if customers are investing in energy efficiency — and that’s improving all of our equipment, appliances, buildings, vehicles — if that’s a money loser, then there are going to be opponents to all of the policies and programs that would get you those benefits. And same on the renewable side, if every time customers put solar panels on their side of the meter, that’s a money loser for the utility. Then they’re not going to be supporting it. And there are going to be all these barriers thrown up in the way. There are other barriers: access to capital and financing, transmission planning. We have a hundred years of history of planning around large centralized power plants. If we’re going to have a more modular resilient system and a cleaner system, how do we change the way that we do that planning, so that efficiency and renewables can really compete on a level playing field?
So, in order to get those least-cost solutions, those are the kinds of policy levers that we need to be able to design. And we’re not all the way there yet. But what gives me hope, you know, we just had Paris, so the whole world is in this game now and committed. And they’re not even just talking about 2 percent. They realize that we have to not even go to 1.5 degrees change. And including China and India with, I think, more substantial commitments. [It’s] not everything we had hoped for, but more than people expected.
We have the Clean Power Plan. And we did just have a major hiccup with the stay with the Supreme Court. But that plan is going to move forward. And the utility industry, which has gotten the memo on this, kind of gave a collective shrug to that stay because their industry is moving in this direction under any circumstances.
And then you have the states, and California, of course, is a great leader. but there’s also all the northeastern states. So you’ve got the regional greenhouse gas initiative, with a cap on carbon pollution in the Northeast. We have a cap here in California. We’ve got 50 percent renewable commitments in New York and California and growing commitments in 29 other states. And these policies have momentum and popularity that even the Koch brothers with all their money can’t kill, even in places like Kansas. You have got Texas. You’ve got so much wind. They’ve got to give power away for free at night. So these things are really coming into the mainstream to a point where renewables will be the mainstream technology and not the alternative technology, and we are approaching that turning point, I think.
This debate took place as part of the Oppenheim Lecture Series at UCLA’s Institute of the Environment and Sustainability. To watch the whole debate, click here.
