It’s a key green goal—100% of electricity from clean energy—that is, carbon-free—sources. Or, for those who are more purist, 100% from renewable sources, without nuclear. Hundreds of cities around the planet have pledged to reach that goal, whichever definition they choose, by or before 2050. Several nation-states—Sweden, The Netherlands, Portugal, Austria, Denmark, New Zealand—have set such goals. And some nations are already getting all or most of their electricity from carbon-free sources. Volcanic Iceland gets its power from geothermal. Uruguay gets two-thirds of its power from hydropower, with wind and solar providing all but about 5% of the remainder. Bhutan, Ethiopia, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo meet almost all of their electricity demand with clean sources.
In the United States, we’ve got a long, long way to go. Twenty-three states, along with the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, have set goals to achieve 100% clean, carbon-free, or renewable energy by 2050 or sooner. But most of them are not yet on a trajectory to make their deadlines, and climate hawks want them to accelerate the transition to hit their goals even sooner. Here are the respective deadlines:
- Vermont: 100% renewable energy by 2030 (unofficial goal)
- District of Columbia: 100% renewable energy by 2032
- Rhode Island: 100% renewable energy by 2033
- Colorado: 100% renewable energy by 2040
- Connecticut: 100% zero-carbon electricity by 2040
- Maryland: 100% clean electricity by 2040
- Minnesota: 100% clean energy by 2040
- New York: 100% zero-emission electricity by 2040
- Oregon: 100% clean energy by 2040
- California: 100% clean energy by 2045
- Hawaii: 100% renewable energy by 2045
- New Mexico: 100% zero-carbon electricity by 2045
- Washington: 100% clean energy by 2045
- Delaware: 100% renewable energy by 2050
- Illinois: 100% clean energy by 2050
- Maine: 100% renewable energy by 2050
- Massachusetts: 100% clean energy by 2050
- Nevada: 100% carbon-free energy by 2050
- New Jersey: 100% clean energy by 2050
- North Carolina: 100% carbon neutrality by 2050
- Puerto Rico: 100% renewable energy by 2050
- Virginia: 100% carbon-free energy by 2050
- Wisconsin: 100% carbon-free energy by 2050
If that sounds too far in the future to even think about now, California’s experience this spring gives reason for maintaining the cautious optimism some of us climate hawks hope is not misplaced. As of May 21, for 69 of the past 75 days (45 of them consecutive), generation from wind, water, and solar have exceeded 100% of California’s electricity demand. A sincere wow to that. It was only two years ago in May that California first exceeded 100% of that demand on just one day, and last year it only did so for seven days.
Now there’s a bit of a catch. This wasn’t meeting 24 hours of demand for 69 days. The 100%+ generation happened for as many as six hours a day or as little as 15 minutes. Over the 75 days, renewables met 100% of demand on an average of 5.3 hours a day. This happened at a good time of year, when temperatures aren’t yet high enough for everyone to crank up demand by flipping on the A/C. Rainstorms amplified by El Niño meant more available hydropower after years of drought. Plus, the state is still running a lot of natural gas power plants because they’re needed when the sun goes down and the big ones take hours to warm up and so must be ignited well before evening when they’re actually needed.
But all these on-the-other-hand caveats don’t make this achievement of consistently meeting 100% demand any less impressive. Mark Z. Jacobson, whose book No Miracles Needed: How Today’s Technology Can Save Our Climate and Clean Our Air is a must-read can be seen gleefully jumping up and down at Twitter.
When renewables generate more electricity than needed to meet California demand, utilities can sell it elsewhere, or they can curtail it. But instead of curtailing this excess output, it can be sent to energy storage facilities for use after the sun goes down or the wind stops blowing. Releasing electricity from these facilities deals with a temporary, short-term but important problem, providing electricity during the evening surge of demand without resorting to carbon-spewing natural gas.
Getting to the goal of wind, water, and sun meeting 100% of electricity demand 24/7 is going to require a lot of that energy storage, whether it’s in batteries, pumped storage, or other more exotic means like compressed air. “A lot” means a whole lot. The California Department of Energy puts the need by 2045 at 52,000 megawatts of storage capacity, with a significant portion of that being long duration storage. Five years ago, the state had just 770 megawatts of battery storage. Currently, it has more than 10,000 megawatts.
Despite the daunting amount yet to be installed, on April 4, Jacobson predicted that “California will be 100% #WindWaterSolar 24/7 by 2035.” Given that the state would economically rank fifth in the world if it were counted as a nation-state, such a shift in just a decade would be hugely important. Every city, state, and nation should put themselves on a similar trajectory.
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HALF A DOZEN OTHER THINGS TO READ (OR LISTEN TO)
Undercover in a shark fin trafficking ring: Interview with wildlife crime fighter Andrea Crosta conducted by Philip Jacobson at Mongabay. Worldwide, many of the key players in wildlife trafficking are also involved in other criminal enterprises, from drug smuggling to human trafficking and money laundering. In an interview, Andrea Crosta, founder of Earth League International, talks about the group’s new report on shark fin trafficking from Latin America to East Asia and the concept of “crime convergence.” Four years of investigating jaguar parts trafficking rings in Latin America led Andrea Crosta to a grim realization: The same smugglers were often involved in a variety of illegal enterprises, including moving different kinds of wildlife products across national borders. Especially shark fins. “We kept stumbling upon shark fin trafficking — it was the same people,” Crosta told Mongabay. “And it happened everywhere: It happened in Bolivia, in Peru, in Ecuador, in Suriname.” The Italian-born, Los Angeles-based Crosta is the founder of Earth League International, a small conservation NGO that operates like a mini-FBI, using undercover operatives to infiltrate wildlife trafficking networks while feeding information to law enforcement about the key players and their modi operandi. The job is easier said than done: the smugglers tend to be better organized than their adversaries in government, who fail to collaborate with their counterparts overseas as effectively as the traffickers do, according to Crosta.
China has a huge lead in building the technologies of the energy transition. Can the U.S. and Europe catch up? by Maria Virginia Olano at Canary Media. The overwhelming majority of the world’s clean energy technologies—from solar panels to heat pumps—are manufactured in China. The Biden administration, as well as several European countries, are trying to change that. These efforts will likely pay off more with some technologies than others, according to a new report by the International Energy Agency. Around $200 billion was invested in clean technology manufacturing worldwide in 2023 — a 70% increase from 2022. But despite a flurry of new public and private spending on domestic production in the U.S. and European countries over the past few years, China alone accounted for three-quarters of this investment. That lead in spending translates to an equivalently impressive lead in output: As of last year, Chinese factories churned out more than 80 percent of the world’s solar modules and battery cells, as well as nearly 65 percent of wind nacelles and 56 percent of electrolyzers, per IEA data.
Gas stoves could be responsible for 19,000 premature deaths, study finds. Health impacts of gas stoves may also fall disproportionately on low-income households by Krystal Vazquez at Chemical & Engineering. A new study has found that gas and propane stoves emit unhealthy amounts of nitrogen dioxide. Regular use of these stoves can increase a household’s annual exposure to NO2 by 4 part per billion, or 75% of the World Health Association’s long-term exposure limit set by the World Health Organization. The federal Energy Information Administration estimates that around 38% of U.S. households have gas stoves. Chronic exposure to NO2 has been tied in numerous studies to the development and worsening of respiratory diseases, with children being at high risk. Long-term exposure to NO2 emissions the stoves could cause as many as 50,000 pediatric annual asthma cases in the U.S. Kari Nadeau, chair of the department of environmental health at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and one of the coauthors of the study, said: “We have calculated that up to 19,000 premature deaths annually may also be attributed to long-term exposure [to NO2] from gas stoves. That is also probably a conservative number.” Said Rob Jackson, a professor of Earth system science at Stanford’s Doerr School and the study’s principal investigator, “The pollution doesn’t stay in the kitchen. The pollution we measured travels from the kitchen to distant bedrooms and travels far and fast.” People living in residences less than 800 square feet in size incur four times more long-term NO2 exposure than people in residences greater than 3000 square feet in size. American Indian/Alaska Native and Black and Hispanic/Latino households incur 60% and 20% more NO2 exposure, respectively, than the national average.
Strong state solar policies boost adoption of distributed energy by Anne Fischer at PV Magazine. The state(s) of distributed solar—2023 update study conducted by the Institute of Local Self Reliance, estimates that of 29 gigawatts of solar capacity was installed in the United States 2023, 31% was “distributed solar.” This is comparatively small solar installations whose capacity is rated in the kilowatts and owned by individuals, small businesses, and public entities. Distributed solar is generated at or very near the site where it is used as opposed to large utility-scale installations with capacity rated in megawatts. Utility-scale solar is centralized as opposed to distributed and often requires new transmission lines before the electricity it generates can be connected to the grid. California, Texas, Florida, and North Carolina have the largest overall capacity (both distributed and centralized). Hawaii, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and California have the greatest distributed solar saturation per capita. Several state solar markets have grown significatnly since the ILSR’s 2022 update. Installed distributed capacity grew by more than 1gigawatt in Texas (6 GW), California (4.7 GW), Florida (2.5 GW), Ohio (1.8 GW), Virginia (1.2 GW), and Colorado (1.1 GW).
L.A. County captured 11 times as much stormwater in 2023 as usual from the L.A. County Public Works office. During the heavy, lasting rain that fell In the period from October 2023 through April 2024, officials estimate that Los Angeles County captured 96.3 billion gallons of stormwater, enough to meet water demands of about 2.4 million people, or about a fourth of the county’s population. In an average year the city captures 8.8 billion gallons of stormwater, acccording to the Los Angeles Department of Water & Power. Over the past 12 months, stormwater capture in the county has reached about 204 billion gallons, enough to provide water to 5 million people. It was especially rainy in the winter and early spring, with the wettest day in more than 20 years occurring on February 4. In the past, more stormwater flowed away through the storm drains, taking with it and its load of pollution into the Pacific Ocean without treatment. Since 2001, the county has invested around $1 billion into 126 infrastructure projects designed to capture and store stormwater, according to NBC4.
New Global Wildlife Crime Report Finds 4,000 Species Being Targeted in 162 Countries by Paige Bennett at Ecowatch. A new report from the United Nations’ Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) has found that more than 4,000 wildlife species are targeted worldwide for illegal trade, and about 162 countries have active illegal wildlife trading. According to the latest edition of the UNODC’s World Wildlife Crime Report, the third of its kind, more than 4,000 plant and animal species are illegally traded, often for medicinal, food, pet or ornamental purposes. For example, shark fins, eels and pangolins are often sought out in bulk for consumption as food, the report noted, while rare reptiles and amphibians are in demand as pets. Further, some parts of species are in demand as ornamental goods, such as ivory from elephant tusks or horns of rhinoceroses. The report found 1,652 mammal, bird, reptile and amphibian species that were seized by authorities from 2015 to 2021. Of those seized species, 40% were considered threatened or near threatened by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List.
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“I like to envision the whole world as a jigsaw puzzle … If you look at the whole picture, it is overwhelming and terrifying, but if you work on your little part of the jigsaw and know that people all over the world are working on their little bits, that’s what will give you hope.”—Jane Goodall
ECOPINION
Will offshore wind be good for Humboldt County, California? Discussion conducted by Tony Pipa at Brookings. In late 2022, the federal government auctioned off ocean access near the coast of Humboldt County, California to develop an offshore wind installation. This major industrial project could produce 6% of the state’s current energy needs just in its initial stage. In this episode, Tony Pipa visits Humboldt County to understand the scale and ambition of the project and learn how key stakeholders, including leaders of local tribes, are coming together to ensure the benefits are shared and avoid the exploitation that occurred with past economic development. Pipa first quotes Scot Adair, the county’s director of Economic Development, Humboldt County, who says: “I hope this is a project that happens with us and not necessarily to us.” Then Natalie Arroyo, the county’s 4th District Supervisor, who says: “These projects are happening at us and hopefully with us, and I’m going to do my darndest to make sure they happen with us.” And then, Lonyx Landry, the Native Coordinator/STEM Adviser, Indian Natural Resources, Science and Engineering Program, Cal Poly Humboldt: “I don’t want to see another raw deal. I don’t want to see this next manifestation of Manifest Destiny happen to us again. If this is to happen, this needs to happen with us.”
Microtranist Is Taxpayer Funded Uber, Advocates Warn — And It’s a Threat to Real Transit by Kea Wilson at Streetsblog. Advocates are sounding the alarm that America's much-hyped "microtransit" services are essentially just app-taxis by another name — and they worry the harm they cause to drivers, passengers, and our communities could be even worse than Uber and Lyft over time. According to a new report from the Amalgamated Transit Union, app-based, on-demand "microtransit" services are exploding across America, with at least 100 regions either complementing or outright replacing their traditional fixed-route vehicles with sedans, vans, or cutaway bus shuttles. And much like the early days of Uber, these services offer a tantalizing promise: taxi-like, door-to-door service, give or a take a few detours to pick up other passengers going in the same direction, in dense city neighborhoods and far-flung rural areas alike — and all for a price on par with a traditional bus ticket. If that sounds too good to be true, the union argues, it is. Microtransit costs already cash-strapped agencies two to three times more per passenger than even their worst-performing bus routes, the report said. And some regions, like Los Angeles, pony up eight times more than on their traditional lines. That's in part because, despite microtransit companies' big ride-sharing promises, few passengers are actually going anywhere near one another at the exact same time — leaving some agencies, like Maryland's Montgomery County, delivering single-person rides 90 percent of the time, essentially eliminating the emissions, congestion, and other VMT-reduction benefits of public transportation.