Renewable energy: it’s time for a grown-up conversation
Last Sunday, something very unusual happened in central Europe. After a number of unusually sunny and windy days, Germany produced so much electricity from renewable sources that the price, which is automatically adjusted in proportion to supply and demand, was negative for a number of hours, meaning that customers were being paid to consume energy.
Along with Germany, which has committed itself to producing all its electricity from renewable sources by 2050, Denmark has also been highly successful in non-fossil fuel electricity generation, and last week generated 140 percent of its energy from wind turbines, allowing it to export to neighbors Germany, Norway, and Sweden.
Most of the time, three quarters of Denmark’s electricity comes from wind turbines. Costa Rica, southern Austria, Norway, Iceland, and a few small island states, are among the countries that have also managed at varying times to generate all their electricity from non-fossil fuels. It’s pretty clear that one of the variables that will separate the advanced countries from the rest of the planet will be their capacity to meet their energy needs from clean and renewable sources.
And yet many people still believe, erroneously, that renewables are either not reliable or too expensive to make a major contribution to energy generation, despite an abundance of evidence to the contrary. Renewables won’t mean an end to burning fossil fuels entirely, at least not overnight. For that to happen, governments need to make major investments in infrastructure. What’s more, renewables probably aren’t going to generate many jobs, but their impact is growing, despite the tall tales one hears to the contrary.
And just because in some countries with lots of sun, such as Spain, government subsidies were badly designed and led to some irresponsible solar plants making money by burning fuel in generators overnight, doesn’t mean we should abandon developing what are going to be tomorrow’s energy supplies.
Thanks to Swanson’s law, generating energy through solar panels is now cheaper than by burning coal. In one year, the cost of producing solar energy has fallen by half, an unparalleled feat in the history of electricity generation. The sun is now the cheapest source of energy on the planet, and costs are set to fall further.
We are living through a solar energy revolution that is beginning in the sunnier countries, but that will soon spread to the rest of the planet. Along with wider and easier access to information about consumption patterns, we can expect major disruption in the energy market in the short to medium term.
And we need to add another, fundamental, variable: distributed generation, which uses small-scale technologies to produce electricity close to the end users of power. Tesla’s Solar City will install more storage capacity this year in American homes than the entire country combined did last year. Electrically-powered cars should also be added to that storage capacity: after the huge success of the Tesla Model 3, the company intends to produce more than half a million of its Model 3 in 2018.
Meanwhile, countries such as the Netherlands are to ban the sale of petrol and diesel vehicles by 2025. As Elon Musk has said, we have now reached the point where we need to launch a revolution against the fossil fuel industry, which still has excessive influence over the decisions made in too many countries.
The time has come for a serious conversation about renewables, one that leaves behind the anecdotes of the past, beyond the outrageous statements made on the basis of ignorance, and to start talking on the basis of technological development and the proven track record of renewables to become the energy source of the future. The technological variables we need to totally overhaul the energy market are already here. No more excuses, what is needed now is the will to put long-overdue policies into practice.
(En español, aquí)
