Th big beautiful bill may have eliminated as much as 72% of all the clean electricity that would have been produced in the U.S. [thenewyorker]

https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-a-warming-planet/46-billion-years-on-the-sun-is-having-a-moment

 

A few excerpts: 

An analysis from the Rhodium Group think tank found that by 2035 the big beautiful bill may have eliminated as much as 72% cent of all the clean electricity that would have been produced in the U.S. under the current law. 

 

But here’s the current prediction from the I.E.A.: by 2026, solar will generate more electricity than all the world’s nuclear plants combined. 

 

By 2029, it will generate more than all the hydro dams. 

 

By 2031, it will have outstripped gas and, by 2032, coal. According to the I.E.A., solar is likely to become the world’s primary source of all energy, not just electricity, by 2035. 

 

But the I.E.A. also estimates that if we are to keep on the climate track set out in the Paris agreement in 2015—heading for a net-zero carbon world by 2050—we need to increase the pace at which we’re installing renewables by about twenty per cent. 

 

So it’s worth asking two questions: What might slow this revolution down, and how might we speed it up? By some measures, as Bloomberg’s David Fickling worked out, seven Chinese companies that I’d wager most Americans have never heard of—

 

Tongwei, GCL Technology Holdings, Xinte Energy, Longi, Trina Solar, JA Solar Technology, and JinkoSolar— 

 

produced more energy in 2024 than the seven global giants at the heart of Big Oil.

 

Across Europe, renewables surged dramatically in 2024; the war in Ukraine has pushed the Continent toward controlling its own energy destiny. The United Kingdom—where, after all, fossil fuel really began—now has so much wind power that in 2024 its carbon emissions fell below what they were in 1879, a year that saw the start of the Anglo-Zulu War and the marriage of Prince Arthur, Queen Victoria’s seventh child, to Princess Louise Margaret of Prussia. 

 

On the last day of September, England shuttered its last remaining coal-fired power station, at Ratcliffe-on-Soar, in Nottinghamshire, with the blessings of the local unions, which said that their workers had been offered alternate job training. 

 

The Pakistan example is perhaps the most dramatic. 

 

As 2024 began, demand for electricity on the national grid started falling—not because the economy was in decline but because (as careful scrutiny of images on Google Earth revealed) so many Pakistanis were putting up solar panels. 

 

As one Lahore-area corn farmer, Mohammad Murtaza, told Bloomberg, pointing to his own photovoltaic array, “I have never seen such a big change in farming. Ninety-five percent of farmland has switched to solar in this area.” 

 

Many farmers can’t afford metal mounting brackets for the panels, which are more expensive than the panels themselves, so they just lay the panels on the ground, cells to the sun. 

 

“In Namibia, we’ve uncovered that people have built about seventy megawatts of distributed generation, mostly rooftop solar—that’s the equivalent of about fifteen per cent of the country’s peak demand. In Eswatini, which is a very small country, it’s about eleven per cent of peak demand,” he told me. 

 

In South Africa, the continent’s economic colossus, small-scale solar now provides, by his reckoning, nearly a fifth the capacity of the national grid. 

 

 “You won’t see these numbers anywhere,” Nana said. In Namibia and Eswatini, “they’re not reported in national plans—no one knows about them. It’s only when you speak to the utilities. And, in fact, the numbers could be much higher, because the smallest systems aren’t reporting to anyone, not even the utilities.” 

 

 Here, again, the switch is being driven by the desire for reliable and affordable power. 

 

In April, 2024, for instance, Nigeria’s electrical grid had its fifth blackout of the year. Nigerian businesses survive because they have backup diesel generators—in fact, those “backup” generators can supply far more power than the national grid.

 

But it’s expensive to keep pouring diesel into the tank, so “solar has become a no-brainer for most businesses, if not all. The prices just make sense,” Nana said. “In a lot of places, it’s all the malls, all the mills—any business that has enough roof space.” 

 

Many African countries have well-established trade networks with China, so the panels have come flooding in. “You have some utilities, like in Mozambique,” Nana added, that see small-scale solar power as “a threat and are trying to claw it down. But the realization is this is happening anyway, whether you like it or not. If you fight people, they’ll just go clandestine and install it without letting you know.” 

 

Some experts feared that we might run out of the minerals necessary to build the panels and turbines and batteries, but that fear seems to be fading: just in the past few years, for instance, vast new sources of lithium, an essential ingredient of most of the world’s batteries, have been found; the price of most of the minerals needed for the energy transition has fallen even as the demand for them has soared.

And, although getting them will involve scraping and gouging the earth, the scale of that destruction is far less than what we’re doing now.

(The dangers facing the men, women, and sometimes children who labor in the mines in nations such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo is a separate issue that must also be addressed.)

According to a 2023 report from the Energy Transitions Commission, all the materials needed to reach net zero by 2050 will be less than the amount of coal consumed in a year.

Lithium, once mined, does its job for decades; coal just gets burned, which means you have to mine more.

And, when batteries or solar panels degrade, the minerals in them remain valuable enough that they will almost certainly be recycled—large-scale recycling operations are appearing around the world.

(One of the biggest in the U.S. is run by a Tesla alumnus in Nevada.)

A report from the Rocky Mountain Institute predicted that by 2050 we will have done all the mining we’ll need to do for battery minerals; after that, we’ll just recycle them, over and over again.

That seems an unlikely claim—even the best recycling systems currently recover only about ninety-five per cent of the minerals—but with each passing year we learn to build batteries with less lithium, less cobalt, and less nickel, and solar panels with less silver.

Improving that efficiency by six to ten per cent a decade is enough to offset the recycling losses, and we’re doing far better than that already.

The Rocky Mountain Institute report states, “Such a closed-loop supply system means we can continue to derive value from battery minerals for centuries. Over the next 20 years, we will gather minerals not just to power the energy system of 2050 but also through to 2100 and beyond.”

This combination of recycling and increasing efficiency makes for a kind of mind-blowing virtuous cycle.

As Hannah Ritchie, a data scientist and a senior researcher at Oxford University, calculated recently, “the silver used in one solar panel built in 2010 would be enough for around five panels today.” By 2035 or so, when my oldest panels may have started to go out of service, the minerals that each contains will almost certainly be enough for ten new panels.

Like, for example, some of the fields currently used to grow corn, the most widespread crop in America—particularly those used to grow corn for ethanol.

Converting some of these fields to solar panels makes enormous ecological sense. As more than two hundred scientists at thirty-one colleges and universities across Iowa pointed out in 2023, a “one-acre solar farm produces as much energy as 100 acres of corn-based ethanol.”

In April, researchers at Cornell University’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences noted that all the corn grown for ethanol in the U.S. takes up about thirty million acres, an area roughly the size of New York State.

If forty-six per cent of that land were converted to producing solar energy, they found, it would generate enough electricity for the U.S. to decarbonize its system by 2050.

Instead, the blockages come from policy and infrastructure: there are nearly enough renewable projects on the books to power the United States entirely from renewables, but they wait in an “interconnection queue” for utility companies to approve them.


The Biden Administration was committed to reducing these blockages—a special team in the White House constantly tracked the biggest choke points and wrangled state permits.

The Trump Administration is actively trying to impede such progress; at a June congressional hearing, the Secretary of Energy (and former fracking executive), Chris Wright, said that solar and wind power were intermittent and hence were “just a parasite on the grid.” In May, he issued orders keeping a coal plant in Michigan and an oil-and-gas-fired plant in Pennsylvania from being retired as planned.