Bill McKibben Says The Renewable Energy Revolution Is Unstoppable

Bill McKibben this week posted a conversation he had with Emily Atkin of HEATED on his Substack page entitled “Where Does The Climate Movement Go From Here?” The question is pertinent because the US Department of Energy has now changed its website to say that more carbon dioxide is good for the planet and the Environmental Protection Agency is hell bent on overturning the so-called “endangerment finding,” which is the foundation for virtually all federal climate regulations promulgated since 2009.

McKibben says, “It must be kind of disorienting to realize that the fossil fuel industry is, for the moment, in charge of a lot of things. But here’s the interesting thing about it — they’re clearly very scared too. They’ve spent more money than they ever have on politics before. They’re doubling down in every possible way — state, local, federal. They understand that they face an unprecedented threat.”

“The threat they faced for 30 years was a bunch of activists causing them some trouble. We shut down some pipelines, we divested a lot of money. But now, thanks to some combination of activism and engineering, they’ve got a deeper problem on their hands for the first time. They don’t have the cheapest power on Earth. [Emphasis added.] We live on a planet where, all of a sudden, the cheapest way to make energy is to point a sheet of glass at the sun.”

The fossil fuel game is to scream as loudly as possible that renewable energy is not reliable because the sun doesn’t always shine and the wind doesn’t always blow. But they omit the piece of the puzzle that makes renewables not only the cheapest form of energy but also the most reliable — storage. It is no longer necessary — or economical — to keep boilers heated by methane or coal fired up 24 hours a day. Energy storage has changed the game and tilted the playing field dramatically in favor of renewables.

Just this week, Energy Dome announced a major new contract to use its compressed carbon dioxide technology to help power Google data centers not just in the US but around the world. Batteries come in many sizes and flavors. In Finland, Polar Night is using sand batteries to provide reliable electricity during winter nights in the Arctic.

“Here’s a number that’s probably the most encouraging number I’ve heard in all the years,” McKibben said. “California is, almost every day, producing a hundred percent of its electricity for long stretches from renewable sources. Which means that at night, when the sun goes down, the biggest source of supply to the grid is batteries — often that have been soaking up extra sunshine all afternoon.

“But the bottom line is, California, the fourth largest economy on planet Earth, is this summer using 40 percent less natural gas than it did two years ago to generate electricity.[Emphasis added.] “If you want to know why the fossil fuel industry is freaking out and sponsoring every bad politician on Earth, that’s why.”

That pretty much sums it up. The fossil fuel industry has bought and paid for the entire US government and many state governments as well, all in a brazen attempt to make America a wholly owned subsidiary of Big Oil. Project 2025 is the product of the Heritage Foundation, an organization begun decades ago with funding from Charles and David Koch. The Federalist Society that grooms ultra right wing judges like Clarence Thomas, John Roberts, Sam Alito, Brett Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch, and Any Comey Barrett also began as an instrumentality of the Koch Brothers.

“Where I live in Vermont, the biggest power plant is not a power plant at all,” McKibben says. “It’s the four or five thousand [residential] batteries that they’ve helped Vermonters to buy and put in their basements. When we have a hot day they can take the power out of those batteries for a few hours at the peak. It’s quite remarkable.”

Emily Atkin chimed in with this interesting bit of information. “I don’t think a lot of people realize this, but in other countries, you don’t have to own your house to install solar. You can go buy a solar panel from the Best Buy-equivalent store and then just put it on your balcony and start generating your own clean power to reduce your own electric bill. We don’t have that here, and we don’t have that here for a very specific reason: Because of fossil fuel controlled utility companies and lobbying and regulations that don’t allow us to go do that.”

But we do have that here, albeit in small pockets of the country — for now. Utah this spring passed a bill smoothing the path to so-called balcony solar systems (they can also go in the backyard or on the roof of a garden shed). The bill was got unanimous bipartisan support in the Utah legislature and was signed into law by that state’s Republican governor.

Recently, McKibben drew a line under this concept in a piece he wrote for Mother Jones. “You have a right to the sunshine that falls on your home, whether you’re a renter with a balcony or a homeowner. We’re used to thinking of roofs as protection from rain, but the sun can provide you a shower of dollars and cents. And some bureaucrats shouldn’t force you to stay at the mercy of Big Utility. Why should the Chinese and the Australians and the Germans get access to the sun while you’re denied it? I mean, what the hell? We’re bathed in free energy every daylight hour and we need a bunch of permits to use it? What’s American about that?” So many excellent questions; so few answers.

Federal Policy Can’t Stop Renewable Energy

Dan Gearino of Inside Climate News pointed out in a recent article that energy policy is like a large ship. Slowing it down or changing its course is a hard thing to do, even with all the aggressive policy shenanigans of the failed administration.

“The United States added 22,332 megawatts of power plant capacity in the first half of this year, and the vast majority of it was utility-scale solar, batteries and onshore wind,” he wrote. “[Methane] was next, and there was zero new coal or nuclear, according to the Energy Information Administration. Through 2030, the US energy landscape looks a lot like these last six months in terms of the mix of new power plants, with solar and batteries leading the way, according to the EIA’s list of planned power plants.”

David Victor, a professor of innovation and public policy at the University of California San Diego, told Gearino, “There’s a lot of inertia in the system, which means that when you’re trying to build new clean stuff, it takes a long time to get going in that direction, but when you’re trying to stop building clean stuff and build dirty stuff, which seems to be the Trump policy, it takes a long time for that signal to be felt in the system.”

Victor added that the OBBB passed by quislings in congress (that word used to be capitalized but no longer deserves that honoric) is more of a slowdown than a reversal of momentum, partly because the demand for electricity continues to rise to serve data centers and other large power users. The main beneficiaries are energy technologies that are the easiest to build and most cost effective, including solar, batteries, and gas.

Looking ahead to 2030, Gearino wrote the US “has 254,126 megawatts of planned power plants, according to EIA. (To appear on this list, a project must meet three of four benchmarks: land acquisition, permits obtained, financing received and a contract completed for selling electricity.) Solar is the leader with 120,269 megawatts, followed by batteries, with 65,051 megawatts, and natural gas, with 35,081 megawatts.”

Fittingly, McKibben has the last word on this topic. “There are so many things that are interesting to me about solar power. In the largest sense, it’s really beautiful to imagine relying on a power source that you can’t hoard. I mean, that’s the architecture of the fossil fuel industry. That’s how they got rich. They have concentrated deposits of a resource that you could monopolize and hoard.”

“[Solar] is exactly the opposite. Every place on earth gets sun and wind every day, and nobody can really figure out how to stash it away. In fact, I’d wager that it’s going to be hard, even for human beings, to figure out a way to fight wars over solar power.”

The cry from MAGAlomaniacs that renewables are not reliable is being exposed for the lie it is every day. These people are trying to get us to go back to using mimeo machines and typewriters with carbon paper to satisfy their small minded view of the world. But the impetus toward renewable energy is now too strong to stop, even with a a putative dicktator in charge. Meanwhile, the US will continue to be a laughing stock among the other nations of the world, who see the future and are not pulling every lever they can find to prevent it from arriving.

For renewable energy, the train has left  the station and is picking up speed. Those who stand in its way will get mauled, and deservedly so.