Despite America’s continued reliance on fossil fuels as its primary source of energy, the plummeting costs of alternative energy sources — like power harnessed from the sun or wind — is making them an increasingly viable choice on the competitive market.
Despite America’s continued reliance on fossil fuels as its primary source of energy, the plummeting costs of alternative energy sources — like power harnessed from the sun or wind — is making them an increasingly viable choice on the competitive market. So much so, that a University of California, Berkeley report released on Tuesday argues that by 2035, 90 percent of the United States could be powered by renewables.
“Technically, it’s feasible,” says Billy Pizer, an expert in climate change who teaches at Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy and was not involved in the Berkeley research. “I think people have thought about this for awhile and, with a combination of renewables and storage, you can certainly reach those sorts of targets.”
Researchers took the available data on renewable energy and created two scenarios for the next 15 years. In one, energy policy remains the way it is now, without ambitious policy changes to encourage the growth of renewable energy. The other imagines what ambitious policy changes implemented over that time could yield. In the first forecast, 55 percent of U.S. energy infrastructure would come from renewables. That falls short of the change necessary to meet the Paris Climate Agreement goals, but does reflect the dramatically lowering costs in the renewable energy sector. “Cost reductions in clean technology have occurred much faster than anticipated just a few years ago,” said Amol Phadke, a senior scientist at UC Berkeley’s Center for Environmental Public Policy in a press release. “It is technically and economically feasible to deliver 90 percent carbon-free electricity on the U.S. power grid by 2035.”
Read more at Yale Environment 360
Photo: Solar panels on a senior housing facility in Boulder, Colorado. DENNIS SCHROEDER / NREL
