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Last year showed that renewables are not fated to always and everywhere get steadily cheaper. But if 2023 was a year when the industry was hampered by inflation, high interest rates, and lingering supply chain issues, then maybe 2024 could be a year of normalization — when governments, utilities, and energy companies have at least started to figure things out.
“There’s optimism going into 2024,” Allegra Dawes, an associate fellow at the Center for Center for Strategic and International Studies, told me.
The difficulties of 2023 were nowhere more obvious than in offshore wind, where rising costs led to cancellations of projects as states and developers couldn’t agree on new contracts. This year already has seen the scrubbing of one New York offshore wind project, Empire Wind 2, although developers Equinor and BP will likely rebid under a new system that better accounts for the possibilities of costs rising.
At (nearly) the same time, though, power customers on New York’s Long Island were the first in the U.S. to receive utility-scale offshore wind power at the end of last year, while New Englanders enjoyed their first offshore wind power just this week. The turmoil of 2023 doesn’t mean that offshore wind — or any other part of the energy transition — is completely off track, just that it’s entering a different, more mature phase.
“What we’re all learning is that building out renewable sources will likely be more expensive,” Dawes said. Repeated and rapid cost declines in solar — far beyond experts’ annual projections — may have lulled investors and policymakers into thinking that all renewable energy sources would forever follow the same trajectory. If so, the awakening was a rude one. “Those cost declines we saw in solar are not going to be easily replicable in all technologies,” Dawes said.
High interest rates have particularly bedeviled renewable projects, as they typically need a large amount of upfront financing for years before they can start generating power. This, at least, is one place the industry can expect relief: Federal Reserve officials have predicted that the central bank will cut rates three times in 2024, which could bring partial relief to renewable developers. Traders, meanwhile, predict a much faster pace of easing. And as laws like the infrastructure bill and Inflation Reduction Act are further implemented, meaning that funding for specific provisions begins to flow in earnest and newly written rules come into effect, investors and businesses will be able to make informed decisions as to how best to take advantage.
“We have massive amounts of projects in the queue,” Dawes said. “Announcements of solar and wind continue.” Just in solar, the Energy Information Administration expects 37 gigawatts of new capacity, on top of the 23 gigawatts it expects when the figures for 2023 are tallied up. Solar and wind, the EIA projects, will, all-told, generate more power than coal for the first time ever.
All this renewable energy will need new transmission capacity to meaningfully affect the carbon intensity of electricity generation in the United States. The difficulties of building new transmission — especially long-distance transmission — and the never-ending queue of new projects waiting to be connected to the grid have long been considered a major hold-up in the decarbonization process. While the nation’s grid and transmission problems won’t be solved in 2024, incremental progress will likely be made, with billions of dollars in federal funds available for grid planning and investment. One massive transmission project to bring wind power from New Mexico and Arizona that’s been in the works for literally decades finally started construction late last year, indicating that these types of projects can get financed.
And there are signs that, despite the rocky recent past, investors are beginning to believe in the long-term future of renewables. “The impact of unprecedented investment in renewable infrastructure will likely become more apparent in 2024,” Deloitte analysts said in a report. “Regulatory boosts to renewable energy and transmission buildout could help address grid constraints.”
There are still any number of bottlenecks beyond financing and costs. One is actually getting federal government programs to begin to build. As of early December, the $7.5 billion allotted for building out an electric vehicle charging network, for instance, had produced precisely zero chargers. But that, too, could begin to change this year, with Ohio breaking ground on chargers.
If we were to say any one thing about the energy transition story in 2024, it’s that it won’t be all about huge new laws or policies, but instead about steadily chipping away at implementation. That’s not fun or sexy, but it is what grown-ups do.
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Spinning turbines have it, but solar panels don’t.
Spain and Portugal are still recovering from Monday’s region-wide blackout. The cause remains unknown, but already a debate has broken out over whether grids like Spain’s, which has a well-above-average proportion of renewables, are more at risk of large-scale disruptions.
At the time of the blackout, Spain’s grid had little “inertia,” which renewables opponents have seized on as a reason to blame carbon-free electricity for the breakdown. If the electricity system as a whole is a dance of electrons choreographed by the laws of electromagnetism, then inertia is the system’s brute force Newtonian backup. In a fossil fuel-powered grid, inertia comes from spinning metal — think a gas turbine — and it can give the whole system a little extra boost if another generator drops off the grid. Solar panels, however, don’t spin. Instead, they produce direct current that needs to be converted by an inverter into alternating current at the grid’s frequency.
“If a power plant goes out, that frequency starts to drop a little bit because there’s an imbalance in the power between supply and demand, and inertia provides a little bit of extra power,” Bri-Mathias Hodge, an electrical and energy engineering professor at the University of Colorado and a former chief scientist at the nearby National Renewable Energy Laboratory, explained to me. Inertia, he said, “just gives a little bit more wiggle room in the system, so that if there are big changes, you can sort of ride through them.”
Of course, blackouts happen on grids dominated by fossil fuels — the 2003 Northeast Blackout in the U.S and Canada, for example, which plunged several states and tens of millions of people into darkness. Even on renewable-heavy grids, blackouts can still come down to failures of fossil fuel systems, as with Texas’ Winter Storm Uri in 2021, when the natural gas distribution system froze up. Much of the state had no electricity for several days amidst freezing temperatures, and over 200 people died.
But Bloomberg’s Javier Blas was nevertheless fair to the Iberian blackout when he bestowed on it the sobriquet, “The first big blackout of the green electricity era.”
Spain has been especially aggressive in decarbonizing its power grid and there’s some initial evidence that the first generators to turn off were solar power. “We started to see oscillations between the Iberian Peninsula and the rest of the European power grid, and this generally means that there’s a power imbalance — somebody’s trying to export power that they can’t, or import power that they can’t because of the limits on the lines,” Hodge told me. “The reason why people have gone on to say that this is a solar issue is because where they’ve seen some of those oscillations and where they saw some of the events starting, there are a couple large solar plants in that part of southwestern Spain.”
While Spanish grid and government officials will likely take months to investigate the failure, we already know that Spain and Portugal are relatively isolated from the rest of the European grid and rely heavily on renewables, especially solar and wind. Portugal has in the past gone several days in a row generating 100% of its power from renewables;Spain, meanwhile, was boasting of its 100% renewable generation just weeks before the blackout.
Last week, Spanish solar produced over 20,000 megawatts of power, comprising more than 60% of the country’s resource mix.Spain’s seven remaining nuclear reactors — which still provide about a fifth of its electric power — are scheduled to shut down over the next decade (though officials have indicated they might be open to extending their life), while its minimal coal generation is scheduled to be retired this year.
“Spain and Portugal have been relatively early adopters of wind and solar power. The Iberian Peninsula is actually relatively weakly connected to the rest of Europe through France. And so that’s one of the tricky parts here — it’s not as well integrated just because of the geography,” Hodge said.
The disturbances on the grid started on the Spain-France interconnection, but a European power official told The New York Times that transmission issues typically don’t lead to cascading blackouts unless there’s some major disturbance in supply or demand as well, such as a power plant going offline.
Spain’s grid had issues before Monday’s blackout that can be fairly attributed to its reliance on renewables. It often has to curtail solar power production because the grid gets congested when particularly sunny parts of the country where there’s large amounts of solar generation are churning out power that can’t be transmitted to the rest of the country. Spain has also occasionally experienced negative prices for electricity, and is using European Investment Bank funds to help support the expansion of pumped-hydro storage in order to store power when prices go down.
On Monday afternoon, however, solar power dropped from around 18,000 megawatts to 8,000, Reuters reported. At the time the blackout began, the grid was overwhelmingly powered by renewables. Spanish grid operator Red Electrica said it was able to pinpoint two large-scale losses of solar power in the southwestern part of the country, according to Reuters.
That a renewables-heavy grid might struggle with maintaining reliability thanks to low inertia is no surprise. Researchers have been studying the issue for decades.
In Texas — which, like Spain, has a high level of renewable generation and is isolated from the greater continental grid — the energy market ERCOT has been monitoring inertia since 2013, when wind generation sometimes got to 30% of total generation, and in 2016 started real-time monitoring of inertia in its control room.
That real time monitoring is necessary because traditionally, grid inertia is just thought of as an inherent quality of the system, not something that has to be actively ensured and bolstered, Hodge said.
As renewables build up on grids, Hodge told me, operators should prepare by having their inverters be what’s known as “grid-forming” instead of “grid-following.”
“Right now, in the power system, almost all of the wind, solar, battery plants, all the inverter-based generation, they just look to the grid for a signal. If the grid is producing at 60 Hertz, then they want to produce 60 Hertz. If it’s producing at 59.9, then they try to match that,” Hodge said. This works when you have relatively low amounts of [renewable generation]. But when [renewables] start to become the majority of the generation, you need somebody else to provide that strong signal for everybody else to follow. And that’s sort of what grid-forming inverters do,” he said.
Grid-forming inverters could hold back some power from the grid to provide an inertia-like boost when needed. Right now, the only sizable grid outfitted with this technology, Hodge said, is the Hawaiian island of Kauai, which has a population of around 75,000. Spain, by contrast, is home to nearly 50 million.
The other key technology for grid-forming inverters to provide stability to a power system is batteries. “Batteries are actually the perfect solution for this because if you have a battery system there, you know most of the time it’s not producing or charging and totally full output or input. So the vast majority of time you’re going to have some room to sort of move on in either direction,” Hodge said.
But this requires both technology and market structures that incentivize and allow batteries to always be ready to provide that instantaneous response.
“The entire stability paradigm of the power grid was built around this idea of synchronous machines,” Hodge told me. “And we’re moving toward one that’s more based on the inverters, but we’re not there yet. We have to fix the car while we’re driving it. We can’t turn off the grid for a couple years and figure everything out.”
Current conditions: Dangerous flash flooding could hit the south-central United States today, with some areas facing the potential for 8 inches of rain in 12 hours • The U.N. is warning countries in Northwest Africa that weather conditions are favorable to locust swarms• Temperatures in parts of Pakistan today will approach 122 degrees Fahrenheit, the global record for April.
After 100 days in office, President Trump has the lowest job approval rating of any president at this point in their tenure in the past 80 years. “Chaos, uncertainty, ‘we don’t know yet.’ These are words I’ve heard more during Donald Trump’s first 100 days back in the White House than I’ve heard at any other time as a reporter,” my colleague Emily Pontecorvo writes for Heatmap (something I can vouch for, too). From his slashing of the federal workforce to regulatory rollbacks to his unpopular tariffs and targeted attacks on “climate” in every form, Trump is reshaping the economic and policy environment from the top down.
Emily put together five charts yesterday to help visualize the impact of Trump’s second term to date. Some of the most striking takeaways include:
You can read Emily’s full story — with charts! — here.
Emily also reviewed the first draft of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee’s budget, which was released on Tuesday. “Remember, the name of the game for Republicans is to find ways to pay for Trump’s long list of tax cuts,” she writes. In the proposed budget, the Transportation Committee puts forward one new revenue-generating program — an annual fee of $200 on electric vehicles and $20 on conventional gas-powered cars to pay into the Highway Trust Fund — plus a list of “rescissions” of unobligated funds from the Inflation Reduction Act. That list includes efforts to claw back more than $1.7 billion for improving the efficiency of government buildings, as well as whatever remains of the $3.2 billion allocated to the Federal Highway Administration to promote improved walkability and transportation access, along with five other key IRA grant programs. But “this is just a first pass,” Emily reminds us, “and this is all subject to change.”
COP30 President André Corrêa do Lago warned that as the U.S. retreats from the fight against global warming, it will become increasingly difficult to persuade other countries to commit to the energy transition. Speaking at the BloombergNEF Summit in New York, approximately six months out from COP30 in Belém, Brazil, Corrêa do Lago stressed that “There is obviously some that say ‘God, how am I going to convince my people to lower emissions when the richest country isn’t doing the same.’”
It is unclear what sort of delegation the U.S. will send to COP30, given the Trump administration’s severing of global climate research and its exit from the Paris Climate Agreement. China, meanwhile, has announced its intention to commit to stricter climate goals ahead of the November meetings in Brazil. “China is demonstrating an absolute conviction that it's the right way to go,’’ Corrêa do Lago said.
Ford’s director of electrified propulsion engineering announced on LinkedIn that the company has made a significant breakthrough in battery technology, the Detroit Free Press reports. “This isn’t just a lab experiment,” the director, Charles Poon, wrote. “We’re actively working to scale [Lithium Manganese Rich] cell chemistry and integrate them into our future vehicle lineup within this decade.” LMR replaces commonly used nickel and cobalt with manganese, which Poon says costs less and helps approach “true cost parity with gasoline vehicles” as well as “higher energy density” that “translates to greater range, allowing our customers to go further on a single charge.”
Many companies have made advances in LMR, which is not a new technology, but Ford clarified in comments to the Free Press that it has overcome some of the technical challenges of LMR, like voltage decay, while “not sacrificing energy density.” Still, Ford was short on details, leaving some skeptical of the supposed revolution in battery technology. Sam Fiorani, vice president of global vehicle forecasting at AutoForecast Solutions, thinks Ford “found a workaround, but this is far from a breakthrough,” according to Autoevolution. “However, such efforts are welcome as carmakers try to push the envelope of current battery technology.”
The largest bank in Canada, the Royal Bank of Canada, announced on Tuesday that it is “retiring” its sustainable finance goals and will not disclose its findings on how its high-carbon energy financing compares with its low-carbon energy financing, according to the Canadian Press. Per RBC, the move is due to regulatory changes, including Canada’s Competition Act, which was designed to prevent corporate greenwashing by requiring climate reporting to be backed by internationally recognized measures,The Globe and Mailexplains.
By backing off its target, RBC is abandoning a $500 billion commitment to sustainable finance this year. The bank previously exited the Net-Zero Banking Alliance, a global initiative spearheaded by Mark Carney, who was elected to a term as prime minister earlier this week. While “campaigners worry banks are seizing on a shift in the political climate, particularly under U.S. President Donald Trump, to dilute commitments to act quickly on decarbonising their portfolios” — per Reuters — RBC said it has not abandoned its intentions of addressing climate change and that it should be considered the “bank of choice” for the energy transition.
A startup in Switzerland is installing removable solar panels in the unused space between train tracks. The company, Sun-Ways, says that if it installs panels across the entire 3,300 miles of the Swiss rail network, it could generate one billion kilowatt-hours of solar power per year, equivalent to approximately 2% of the nation’s electricity needs.
Rob and Jesse talk with Texas energy expert Doug Lewin.
Texas is one of the country’s biggest producers of zero-emissions energy. Last year, the Lone Star State surpassed California to become the country’s No. 1 market for utility-scale solar. More solar and batteries were added to the Texas grid in 2024 than any other energy source, and the state has long dominated in onshore wind.
But that buildout is now threatened. A new tranche of bills in the Texas House and Senate could impose punitive engineering requirements on wind, solar, and storage plants — even those already in operation — and they could send the state’s power bills soaring.
Doug Lewin is the founder and CEO of Stoic Energy Partners in Austin, Texas. He writes the Texas Energy and Power Newsletter, and he is the host of the Energy Capital podcast. On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Jesse and Rob talk with Doug about how Texas became a clean energy powerhouse, how it has dealt with eye-watering demand power growth, and why a handful of bills in the Texas statehouse could break its electricity market. Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap, and Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University.
Subscribe to “Shift Key” and find this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.
You can also add the show’s RSS feed to your podcast app to follow us directly.
Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Robinson Meyer: What is the menagerie of legislation here that folks need to understand? What should they be following?
Doug Lewin: There’s a couple of different flavors of this. There’s a bunch of them that are just right up, they’re on a level like 1A, 1B, 1C, 1D — they’re all major, major problems that if any of them passed, the cost for all consumers in Texas would go up. And this is something that I think is starting to set in at the legislature right now — that members are starting to think about, what does this vote look like? If I actually take this vote and power prices go up 20%, 50%, 80%, what have I just done? That’s starting to set in.
But I would say one of them that is the most pernicious — and I think you’re going to see this around the country as a lot of the national groups start talking about it more and more — is firming requirements on renewables and assigning them to individual projects, or even individual developers across their portfolios. Because as you guys know, and I think most of your listeners know, but legislators don’t necessarily know yet — they’re getting an education in real time right now — you don’t firm for individual resources. You firm for a system, right? That is far more economically efficient. '
And we should talk about the right level of how many backups we need. Those conversations have been going on for years, and they continue to go on in Ercot stakeholder forums and at the Public Utility Commission. But to require every resource to have its own backup, you create, as I heard one witness at one of the hearings say, you’ve got a thousand mini Ercots, right? Everybody’s gotta have their own backup. That is an insane way to run an energy system.
Meyer: Can you just describe what exactly you mean by — like, what would it mean to firm up solar? What do these bills actually require?
Lewin: One of them actually requires solar to have full, 24-hour, round the clock backup. So like, forget the fact that solar has meant so much for Texas in the summertime. We had no conservation alerts last year, 2024, the sixth hottest summer in the history of the state. Not only did we not have any blackouts or energy emergencies, not even a conservation alert, all summer long. Because that 30 gigawatts, when it’s hottest, when it’s 105 degrees [Fahrenheit] and all those air conditioners are cranking all around Texas — we love our air conditioning — solar is just perfectly suited for that. But no, you would have to back it up around the clock.
Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.