The Rise of Renewables
5 years, 16 days, 21 hours
5 July 2024
Part of our human psyche is that we find it easier to expect that things continue much as they are than recognising that a seismic shift is occurring.
So we endlessly extrapolate out from today despite the small print that says the past is no guide to the future. Perhaps I was guilty of this when last week I said ‘At this rate of progress it will take us 200 years to be totally green in energy’, though I was consciously trying to make a point about the behaviour change we need.
But what if we are at that inflexion point where things rapidly change? That the slew of awful 2023 energy stats that I shared last week represent not another step towards the summit of oblivion but peak-coal, peak-oil, peak-emissions. And the path down the other side to net zero is going to be very steep.
That is the wonderfully uplifting, factually-grounded hypothesis of this compelling set of slides, The Cleantech Revolution, by RMI (Rocky Mountain Institute) that Arnaud van Dijk cheered me with last week. Don’t let the fact there are 87 slides put you off. They tell a beautifully illustrated and frankly gripping if simple story, of the inevitable exponential ascendency of technologies that are not only cheaper but better in every way than fossil fuels. Of all the slides I particularly love the one I reproduce below.
Just one note of caution. If we swing from one extreme of despair to the other of confident hope, the risk is we conclude it’s all going to be fine and we don’t need to do anything. Far from it. Perhaps the most important message of the whole deck is the one I keep trying to make each week as this clock counts down: Direction is inevitable, but the speed is up to us.
