In a Race Between Trump, Climate Chaos, and the Green Tech Build-Out, Who Will Win? |
Our world seems to me to be moving very very fast these days—often that’s because of the feral energy of the Trump White House, feverishly trying to do the wrong thing on as many fronts as possible. In the last few cycles have come the news that that the White House is evicting bison herds from federal lands in Montana (a favor to ranchers, an insult to tribal leaders), approving fruit-flavored vapes (a favor to the big-donor vapor lobby, an insult to public health), and insisting that the Pope wants Iran to have a nuclear weapon (an insult to Catholics, a favor to his easily bruised ego). If the strategy is designed to wear us down, it’s definitely working on me.
But something else is moving fast too, and far more productively—that’s the ascension of new technologies. I don’t mean AI, which so far has had little impact on me and a generally dispiriting one on my fellow Americans, to judge from the polling; I mean the surging changes in clean tech, which are rewriting what’s possible in the course of months, even days.
Consider, for instance, the news from California. As I’ve noted before, the Golden State is suddenly supplying huge amounts of night-time energy from big grid-based batteries; basically, at night its running on stored sunshine. But the reporter Claire Barber, in an interview with grid expert Ed Smeloff, put a number on this Wednesday: California’s new batteries, installed over the last 36 months or so, are the equivalent of a dozen new nuclear power plants. If California had installed a dozen nukes in a couple of years, you’d know about it—indeed, the fate of its single reactor, at Diablo Canyon, has inspired thousands of articles, documentaries, protests, and counterprotests over the same stretch of time. But batteries are… metal boxes that pose no great threat. They just… work. Smeloff:
The most remarkable change in the California energy market has been the very rapid addition of grid-connected batteries and the use of those batteries to provide peak demand capacity. California is transitioning fairly quickly from using primarily natural gas resources to now using batteries. The batteries are [used] during the peak period, which is in the evening, typically around seven o’clock, producing as much as 40% of the peak capacity requirements. That’s a pretty remarkable achievement in a short period of time.
Bottom line, from Stanford’s Mark Jacobson on Tuesday: California using 61% less natural gas this year to generate electricity than it did three years ago.
There’s also the sudden advent of a slightly smaller class of batteries, ones that as Elizabeth Ouzts observes are:
designed to fill specific community needs and—due to their size—relatively quick and low-cost to build.The Blue Ridge Power Agency, which serves a string of nonprofit utilities in central and western Virginia, is set to go live this summer with a collection of five batteries of about 5 megawatts each. The systems will help two rural electric co-ops and the city of Salem’s utility save money by storing power when it is cheap and abundant. They can then rely on that saved-up power when high demand on the grid spikes prices.All in all, the projects are predicted to save the member utilities $100 million over the batteries’ 20-year lifespan, addressing long-held local concerns over rising costs.
And now move down one more order of magnitude, and consider the report, out Thursday morning, from the Rewiring America think tank, about how solar, battery, and heat pump technology have advanced so quickly that a few policy shifts could allow the electrification of almost every home in America, turning them into useful and affordable parts of a national energy infrastructure. (Good coverage from Catherine Boudreau here). Consider, say, what we could require of data centers. If some must be built, then force them to supply their own electricity—by buying heat pumps and solar panels for surrounding homes. It’s cheaper than building new supplies, and much much faster:
Hyperscalers are driving more than $100 billion per year into energy generation and infrastructure investment. Directing even a portion of that spending toward distributed energy resources could mobilize tens of billions of dollars for household energy upgrades. Hyperscaler investment in home energy upgrades would make such upgrades affordable for an additional 19 million households (increasing affordability from 30-58% of eligible households)—unlocking average lifetime savings of $9,400 per household.
Again—all this stuff is available right now. There are plenty of heat pumps and batteries; if Google wants a data center, it should be handing them out to the neighbors. And once they have, then all these homes can be........