Sustainability in Troubled Times

system may trump Trump, with California
explicitly remaining the vanguard
of clean-tec.”
Meanwhile in Europe, green energy
seems to be forging ahead. New French
President Emmanuel Macron plans to
“make science great again” by providing
a home in exile for climate scientists who
feel sidelined in the United States, and
has banned new shale oil extraction as
well as oil and gas exploration. Britain
has taken the decision to close all its
coal-fired power plants by 2025, replacing
them with cleaner (and cheaper) gas-fired
stations. Austrian energy firm Verbund
has even targeted 100 percent renewable
generation by 2020 – a remarkably rapid
deployment.
China: Reducing coal use as quickly
as possible
EY’s May 2017 Renewable Energy Country
Attractiveness Index shows the
United States falling to third place behind
China and India, with European
countries strung out among the top 20.
Both China and India still depend heavily
on coal, but are now making huge
strides to replace it with renewables. A
report from Greenpeace, the Sierra Club,
and Coalswarm shows that construction
is frozen on more than 100 coal project
sites in India and China, representing
68 GW of power, while coal starts have
fallen 62 percent.
China now owns five of the six largest
solar manufacturing firms, is the largest
turbine manufacturer, and is investing
aggressively in renewables, both within
China and abroad. A $780 billion investment
from now till 2030 should see the
country get 15 percent of its energy from
renewables by 2020, with renewables
representing half of all new electricity
generation from then onwards. Though
coal still accounts for half of all Chinese
power generation, it is rapidly being
downpedalled – China’s massive air
pollution problem (estimated to be responsible
for 1.1 million deaths a year)
has forced the government to focus on
reducing coal use as quickly as possible.
2016 saw coal’s share of power generation
fall for the third year in a row – that
now seems to be a stable trend.
China’s big problem – as in many other
countries – is the grid. Greenpeace reckons
8 percent of Chinese wind power
was wasted in 2014, and this rose to 17
percent last year, with solar curtailment
as high as 30 percent. A grid designed
for huge hydro plants is not f lexible
enough for the varying output of solar
plants, and China will have to invest in
the grid as well as in production capability
for renewables to make their full
impact.
India reached the inflection point
India, too, is now adding renewable
energy capacity at a rate of knots –
renewables already account for almost
50 percent of all new generation, and
17 percent of total power generation.
There is a strong pipeline of new projects
– 10 GW of solar capacity planned for
2017–2018 compares with a total US
installed base of 40 GW, which gives a
good idea of the size of India’s potential
contribution to battling climate change
– with a target of 40 percent renewables
by 2030.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi
seems almost to be the opposite of Trump
with his commitment to sustainables.
At Paris 2015 he announced 160 GW
of wind and solar investment by 2022,
while at the Vienna Energy Forum, Energy
Minister Piyush Goyal advocated
greater investment in renewables and
warned “Every moment counts.” Even on
a detailed level, India is making changes
– a program to switch town lighting to
energy-saving LEDs began in 2015 and
should be finished by 2019.
Yet, 300 million Indians do not have
electricity at all. Unlike the United States,
India has to meet climate change goals
while progressing toward universal access
to affordable energy – squaring
Sustainable Development Goals 7 and
13. But, in fact, micro-solar can make
the provision of affordable energy to
remote districts easier to achieve.
India has now reached the inflection
point; huge investments have forced
down the price of renewables so that
solar energy is now cheaper than coal.
In May this year, the state of Gujarat
cancelled a proposed 4 GW coal-fired
power project, and further cancellations
are expected nationally. Coal imports
are being cut – a 22 percent fall in
January alone – and India should be
able to overachieve its Paris Agreement
commitments.
Energy storage problem left to solve
A decade ago, when Europe and the
United States were leading the drive
for renewables, subsidies were needed
to support the high costs of renewable
technologies. Fossil fuels were much
cheaper. Now, better tech, together with
economies of scale, is pushing down
the price of renewables. In China, large
solar projects have seen a fall of more
than 40 percent in cost per MW since
2010. Fossil fuels were unlovable but
cheap – now they are unlovable and
expensive. Moreover, while renewables
are becoming cheaper, fossil fuels are
becoming more difficult and costly to
extract. Even in terms of jobs, Trump has
got things wrong. In China, renewables
employ 13 million, whereas in the United
States, wind plant manufacturing is the
highest-growth job sector, and solar already
accounts for twice as many jobs as
fossil fuels. It seems that we have now
reached the point at which renewable
energy is self-sustaining.
However, there is one problem left to
solve. As Mark Parfitt, an analyst at Hardman
& Co, points out, “Energy storage is
still a real issue. If you can’t store excess
solar production, it’s wasted. The nascent
hydrogen economy may be the key
here, both to grid-load balancing and to
transport fuel systems. If the engineers
can solve that, then fossil fuel’s days are
numbered.”
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Global Compact International Yearbook 2017