‘Expensive’ renewable sources aren’t looking like such a bad bet anymore
ENERGY
“You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that is an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before,” said Rahm Emanuel, referring to the financial crisis in 2008.
This refrain is now often derided on the political right, as the prototypical instance of saying the quiet part out loud: opportunism rendered transparent. But it’s worth pointing out that Winston Churchill allegedly said much the same on the eve of the Yalta Conference, when he convened with Roosevelt and Stalin to consider the post-war governance of Germany.
As the war in Ukraine spirals out of control and the economic reprisals against Russia seed chaos in an economy already roiled by consumption shifts resulting from the pandemic, there are a lot of folks in the energy space trying to not let this crisis go to waste.
Fossil fuel advocates have taken up the talking point that American “energy independence” demands we ramp up domestic oil production in response. Nevermind that such increased production would take a minimum of seven months even to reach the market, and would likely be insufficient to move global oil markets appreciably.
Meanwhile, clean energy advocates have seized the moment in more or less the exact same way, arguing that the only way to be free of “petrostate autocrats” is to dramatically accelerate the clean energy transition. But it’s important to remember that many of the world’s top solar panel manufacturers, as well as a huge percentage of the planet’s reserves of rare earth elements, are in China.
The truth is that there is opportunism happening on all sides of this debate, and we are headed towards a messy period of transition in which the global geopolitics of the fossil-fueled century is replaced by a new geopolitics of the clean energy future. Between then and now lies a period in which the two geopolitics overlay one another in ways that will be difficult to predict.
“Talk of a smooth transition to clean energy is fanciful: There is no way that the world can avoid major upheavals as it remakes the entire energy system, which is the lifeblood of the global economy and underpins the geopolitical order,” wrote Jason Bordoff, co-founder of the Columbia Climate School in a recent piece in Foreign Affairs.
But all of this is not to simply throw up our hands as if nothing can be done. I personally take great hope in the energy-saving publicity campaign that followed the disastrous meltdown of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactor, which prompted the shuttering of dozens of nuclear reactors to verify their safety.
The following summer of 2011, the island was concerned that it wouldn’t have enough generation to meet peak demand, and so a nationwide campaign about “setsuden” educated citizens about energy, and how to ease constraints on the grid. The result was that almost overnight, 20 percent of Japan’s peak electricity demand simply vanished, and a new casual trend of shorts and blazers — called, I kid you not, “Super Cool Biz” — became acceptable summer office men’s wear.
When crises happen, people get creative. Similarly, it would seem that the EU is now finally snapping out of its funk regarding the “inevitability” of relying on Russian gas. They have released a plan to cut reliance on Russian natural gas by 80 percent by the end of the year, and be entirely weaned from Russian gas by 2027. The plan borrows a bit from all of the opportunists: It both expands use of liquified natural gas imported from places like the United States, and aggressively scales up renewable energy installations over the next five years.
Never let a good crisis go to waste. I would hope that the lesson is not lost on Granite Staters. It was just a few short years ago that I remember natural gas promoters telling me that we had a 100-year supply just a few states over in Pennsylvania, and gas would never be expensive again. We get most of our electricity from natural gas, and are paying for it dearly this year.
Certainly, I’m not here to glibly suggest that a transition to locally generated clean energy is going to be simple, or that doing so will totally disentangle us from the actions of strongmen an ocean away. But in January, the average price of electricity in New England was nearly three times higher than average, and I recently saw a $5-per-gallon gas price for the first time in my life.
The main benefit of renewable energy (apart from the fact that it reduces emissions, which we must eventually do) is that you pay for it up front, and lock in our price for the years that follow, rather than riding the waves of geopolitical chaos. Those “expensive” renewable sources of energy and electric cars are not looking like such a bad bet anymore, are they?
Sam Evans-Brown is executive director of Clean Energy NH, an organization that advocates for and promotes the use of clean energy and technologies.
