Originally published on Legal Planet. Reprinted with permission.
Despite the efforts of the Trump administration, renewable energy has continued to thrive. Key states are imposing rigorous deadlines for reducing power generation from fossil fuels. Economic trends are also supporting renewables. In the first half of 2019, Texas produced more power from renewables than coal.
Texas may be content to rely on market forces, but other states are taking a more active hand in shaping their energy futures. Here are the new renewable energy mandates and targets of 2019:
Ohio was the outlier, cutting its renewable energy requirement from 12 percent to 8 percent, tying itself ever more closely to the past of the energy system rather than its future.
The Energy Information Agency (part of the Department of Energy) "forecasts that utility-scale renewable fuels, including wind, solar, and hydropower, will collectively produce 18% of U.S. electricity in 2019 and 19% in 2020. EIA expects that annual generation from wind will surpass hydropower generation for the first time in 2019 to become the leading source of renewable electricity generation and that it will maintain that position in 2020."
According to Forbes, "the average cost of developing new power plants based on onshore wind, solar photovoltaic (PV), biomass or geothermal energy is now usually below $0.10/kWh. Not far behind that is offshore wind, which costs close to $0.13/kWh." Prices for conventional plants are $0.05-$0.10, making renewables quite competitive.
Energy storage is also increasingly affordable. According to a report from Bloomberg New Energy Finance, the levelized cost of electricity from lithium-ion batteries in late March had fallen by a third since the first half of 2018. Since 2012, the price has fallen 70 percent.
Of course, there's a huge amount of work that remains to be done. We've eliminated many of the least economic coal plants; getting rid of the remainder will be harder. And natural gas has expanded rapidly due to fracking, a trend that we need to cap and then reverse. But at least it's clear that Trump has no more been able to turn back the energy tide than King Canute managed with the sea.
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Daniel Farber | December 9, 2019
Originally published on Legal Planet. Reprinted with permission. Despite the efforts of the Trump administration, renewable energy has continued to thrive. Key states are imposing rigorous deadlines for reducing power generation from fossil fuels. Economic trends are also supporting renewables. In the first half of 2019, Texas produced more power from renewables than coal. Texas may […]
Daniel Farber | November 25, 2019
Originally published on Legal Planet. Reprinted with permission. The idea of low-hanging fruit is ubiquitous in environmental policy – sometimes in the form of a simple metaphor, other times expressed in more sophisticated terms as an assumption of rising marginal costs of pollution reduction. It's an arresting metaphor, and one that can often be illuminating. But […]
James Goodwin | November 22, 2019
This post was originally published on the Union of Concerned Scientists' blog. Reprinted with permission. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) appears poised to take the next step in advancing its dangerous "censored science" rulemaking with the pending release of a supplemental proposal. The EPA presumably intends for this action to respond to criticism of the […]
Karen Sokol | November 21, 2019
This post was originally published by Expert Forum, a blog of the American Constitution Society. Reprinted with permission. In her opening statement on the second day of the House public impeachment hearings, former Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch recounted how President Trump and his personal lawyer Rudolph Giuliani undermined the State Department's ability to "promote stated […]
Sean B. Hecht | November 21, 2019
Originally published on Legal Planet. Reprinted with permission. Over a year ago, EPA issued a proposed rule, ostensibly to promote transparency in the use of science to inform regulation. The proposal, which mirrors failed legislation introduced multiple times in the House, has the potential to dramatically restrict EPA's ability to rely on key scientific studies […]
David Flores | November 15, 2019
David Flores co-authored this post with Kathy Phillips, the Assateague Coastkeeper, an on-the-water advocate who patrols and protects the Maryland and northern Virginia Eastern Shore coastal bays and stands up to polluters. Last month, former CPR policy analyst Evan Isaacson wrote in this space about Maryland's proposal to revise and reissue its Clean Water Act […]
Lisa Heinzerling | November 10, 2019
This post was originally published on SCOTUSblog. It is republished here under a Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 US). Click here to read Professor Heinzerling's argument preview for this case. The Clean Water Act requires a permit for the addition to the navigable waters of any pollutant that comes “from any point source.” Last […]
David Flores | November 7, 2019
As Californians endure yet another round of devastating wildfires, they are rightly wondering if blazes of such frequency and reach are the new normal. The hard truth is that they may very well be. The fingerprints of climate change are all over this disaster, as they have been all over recent hurricane damage, and the […]
Lisa Heinzerling | November 4, 2019
This post was originally published on SCOTUSblog. It is republished here under a Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 US). The central regulatory construct of the Clean Water Act is the requirement of a permit for the addition to the nation's waters of any pollutant that comes "from any point source." Congress' high hopes for […]