The US electric power sector is halfway to zero carbon emissions | Hacker News Reader

The US electric power sector is halfway to zero carbon emissions

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39 pointsoblib10 comments

Some people seem dead-set on expecting failure, but I've always been optimistic that market forces will shift towards renewables and mass storage as their costs and efficacy improve.

It feels amazing to be proven right. When you continually refine a class of technologies like these, 'the market' latches on and fervently optimizes. We are all part of this movement. It will only accelerate from here; my first car was a hybrid, and my next will be battery electric. There are many like me in my generation.

Of course, governments across the nation have taken many great steps to incentivize as well. But why does it feel like everyone has abandoned these fundamental concepts? I suppose it is preferred to narrate market changes with political tones these days.

This isn't just market forces. There has been a heavy government hand in creating tax incentives. The government is using the market, but the market would likely not have produced it on its own.

And in fact much of this good news isn't about renewables. It's about a shift from coal to natural gas -- again, with government nudges (e.g. https://www.texastribune.org/2018/12/12/us-helping-private-n...). That does reduce carbon dioxide, but it's not a path towards zero carbon. If anything it's the opposite, creating a large new industry for fossil fuel extraction.

The utility company I work for just announced today they're bringing 16 GW (16,000 megawatts) of solar and wind power generation online by 2030. They also announced their C02 emissions in 2030 will be 80% less than what they were in 2000, which is their baseline for when they first began actively reducing their carbon footprint.

I first started working for the company in 2002 and since then their coal-fired generation has fallen over 50%. That's not just CO2 emissions being reduced: it's a reduction in acid rain, it's a reduction in mercury entering our waterways, it's a reduction in NOx and SOx flume gasses finding their way into our lungs. This is for the betterment of all our health.

My company operates in 11 states in the US and I can tell you in the markets where consumers have a choice in their utility provider they overwhelmingly choose green/renewable resources. Public Utility Commissions are also very amenable to utilities demonstrably making progress in reducing emissions.

Green/renewable power is consumer-friendly and business-friendly. The coal industry is simply screwed.

The headline is pretty misleading... there has definitely been progress, but even the raw numbers don't indicate "halfway to zero". Emissions went from about 2.5 million tons per year to 1.5.

More importantly, most of these emissions reductions came from replacing coal with natural gas. That's great, but normally when a problem is half solved you can kind of just keep doing what you've been doing, and that isn't the case here. If you measure by "% of energy coming from renewables" we aren't anywhere near halfway to 100%.

One of the big incentives for installing rooftop solar panels is that you can sell any surplus electricity generated back to the power company, shrinking the time required for the panels to pay for themselves. However, I'd be really interested to know if it would be feasible for a home solar kit to use surplus electricity to drive a carbon capture rig instead. (Of course, then I'd need to know what to do with the collected carbon...)

>Fortunately, much of the generation and storage needed to hit a zero-carbon target is already in development. Developers have requested access to the transmission grid for 660 gigawatts of new wind and solar generating capacity and 200 gigawatts of storage. That represents more than half of what could be required.

This is amazing.

This would have been amazing 30 years ago. Now, it will be 2050 or later before that target is hit, and we all better find a good way to remove all these GHG from atmosphere.

And that good news is not counting imports and offshore manufacturing.

The largest source of carbon-free energy in the US is nuclear:

> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MlMDDhQ9-pE

It's weird when something so fundamentally "hi-tech" becomes old news. This reminds me of Blackberry and Nokia when the iPhone arrived where they suddenly had an intense focus on the market share and installed base, a fundamentally backwards-looking view. They wanted to focus there because they knew they'd lost the future but it was weird to see tech companies basically hoping for stasis rather than saying "everyone will use our stuff in the future because it's better" and instead bragging about the current market share they were about to throw away by not adapting to the new reality.

Let me know when I can put nuclear energy on my roof for under $20k.

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