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'Fossil fuels have lost. The rest of the world just doesn’t know it yet.'
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| Wind turbines in California. CREDIT: AP/Noah Berger, File |
Traditional
energy companies and mainstream financial publications are finally
waking up to the new reality: The shift to renewable energy, electric
cars, and a low-carbon economy is now unstoppable.
The details of this transition are spelled out in a new, must-read, 4000-word article in the Financial Times, “The Big Green Bang: how renewable energy became unstoppable.”
What is most remarkable about the article is that it appears in the Financial Times. The free-market oriented paper
is the “most important business read” for the world’s top financial
decision makers and “the most credible publication in reporting
financial and economic issues” for global professional investors,
according to surveys.
We simply don’t see articles like this in Rupert Murdoch-run Wall Street Journal or even the New York Times, which continues to misreport the clean energy revolution and just hired a columnist who spreads misinformation on climate solutions.
The
business community, though, is starting to see the writing on the wall,
especially in Europe. The CEO of Royal Dutch Shell, Europe’s largest
company, declared in a recent speech
that the transition to a low-carbon economy is not just “unstoppable.”
It is a necessity that “must be embraced” if an oil company like Shell
is to survive and thrive. The low-carbon future, he explained, will be
built around renewable electricity and electric cars.
The
Financial Times article, in fact, begins with an anecdote of a company
that developed a better turbocharger for gas-powered cars. After getting
some interest from big car companies last year, in January, “Suddenly,
none wanted new products for cars running on fossil fuels.” Instead, car
companies were putting their limited R&D budgets into electric
cars, a seismic shift at an unprecedented speed.
Electric
cars that were hard to even buy eight years ago are selling at an
exponential rate,” explains FT’s environment correspondent Pilita Clark,
“in the process driving down the price of batteries that hold the key
to unleashing new levels of green growth.”
Indeed,
one key reason the clean energy revolution is unstoppable is the
dramatic and ongoing improvements in battery cost and performance.
Advanced batteries are game-changing not only for the electrification of
transportation, but also for the continued rapid penetration of
renewables.
Battery prices have been cut in half
since 2014. Europe’s largest power company, Italy’s Enel, projects
battery costs falling some 30 percent more by 2021, the FT reports.
One
reason battery prices are going to continue to plummet is that a
staggering amount of new production capacity is being built. Tesla’s
Gigafactory has gotten most of the press attention in this country, but
it is “only one of at least 14 megafactories being built or planned,”
the FT reports. Nine of the factories are in China.
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| Credit: Benchmark Mineral Intelligence via Financial Times |
“Investors
say important trends like this are obscured in countries where the
existence of climate change is still so widely contested that the scale
of the energy transition is under-estimated,” explains Clark, referring
to countries like the United States.
The
article ends by quoting Eddie O’Connor, CEO of Mainstream Renewable
Power, an Irish wind farm developer and a big winner in Chile’s 2016
auction for new generation. The company easily beat providers of fossil
fuel power — even though all bids had to guarantee meeting electricity
demand 24 hours a day.
“Fossil fuels have lost,” O’Connor said. “The rest of the world just doesn’t know it yet.”
Links
- Why The Renewables Revolution Is Now Unstoppable
- Chart of the month: Driven by Tesla, battery prices cut in half since 2014
- Renewables just passed coal as the largest source of new electricity worldwide
- New report shows renewables could create hundreds of thousands of jobs in Ohio
- The second-largest city in the U.S. is on the verge of being 100 percent renewable
- Led By Solar And Wind, Renewable Energy Grew Like Never Before Last Year
- The 4th Largest Economy In The World Just Generated 90 Percent Of The Power It Needs From Renewables
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