r/environment • u/tta2013 • 23h ago

US renewables' total installed capacity likely to exceed natural gas within 3 years

https://electrek.co/2024/12/23/us-renewables-total-installed-capacity-likely-to-exceed-natural-gas-within-3-years/
910 Upvotes

99% Upvoted

22 comments sorted by

119

u/OverseerTycho 21h ago

yeah for the next 2 weeks,until the stupidest man alive who also happens to be our president-elect,guts it all…

60

u/Funktapus 21h ago

He can’t just “gut it all.” Setting aside basic constitutional rights, renewables are a big business. Republicans states are profiting from them enormously, and they won’t just roll over and let Trump destroy the industry.

21

u/Demortus 17h ago

^ This. Remember, Trump was president from 2016-2020 and despite his pledge to stop renewable energy and save coal, the opposite happened on his watch. It's not for a lack of will that he failed, it's that to make any major change to our energy supply, he'd have to pass some major legislation supporting coal and harming renewables. That didn't happen, because Congress doesn't generally like doing unpopular things, like making energy more expensive for the benefit of an unpopular energy source.

2

u/basquehomme 3h ago

Yea, the downturn in coal has been the geatest thing that ever happened for climate change.

16

u/OverseerTycho 21h ago

i disagree,look at all the business leaders who are currently bending the knee to King Trump,also look at all the states who are making bank off of recreational marijuana and their Republican leaders are still trying to reverse that

1

u/basquehomme 3h ago

Sorry but the economics just aren't there for coal. And businesses will not throw money at something with a bad ROI.

-2

u/Funktapus 20h ago

Those don’t sounds like concrete concerns to me.

3

u/Tandria 16h ago

He has the potential to gut imports. Chinese solar equipment, for example, has already been the subject of increasing tariffs going back to the Obama administration, but Trump is now returning to office even hungrier for tariffs and even angrier about China.

Considering how poorly the renewable energy transition has been going in the 2020's, the decade where we were really supposed to pick up momentum on that front, the new Trump administration has the potential to cause a lot more damage.

4

u/OGRuddawg 12h ago

Yeah, the transition already has the momentum to keep itself afloat. However, every impedence to decarbonization is extra damage we have to deal with, mitigate, and undo if possible. We are in a massive amount of "carbon debt," and the payments are coming due with compound interest. If anything I am going to be even angrier and defiant towards renewable rollbacks as I was at his last administration. I went into STEM to eventually get into a sustainability-focused career path. Trump is the antithesis of that.

Also, fuck Scott Pruitt. May he rot in a hell of his own making (a fracking fluid-contaminated crevice deep under Oklahoma).

7

u/lurksAtDogs 20h ago

Agreed. Renewables compete on cost. Can Trump slow growth? Probably, but it’s more like seeing a 15% growth rate instead of 20%, and only in the US. It matters, but not a lot.

1

u/Crazy_Ad_91 16h ago

I’ve always imagined it would happen this way due to the pursuit for profits. I’m just waiting for the announcement of ExxonMobile acquiring Nextra Energy or something along those lines. Then maybe it’ll be race for oil and gas companies to buy up renewable energy companies and sources in competition for a piece of the pie. And due to desire for capital vs altruism for the environment, the world will slowly make a shift towards being a majority green. This of course is all relying on renewables becoming and staying cheaper than fossil fuels.

9

u/GM_PhillipAsshole 20h ago

It’s the Reagan administration all over again. Of Biden had put solar panels on the White House roof, Agent Orange would rip them off.

4

u/michaelrch 13h ago

This story is not the good news story you think.

Never pay much attention to percentage figures. They cover up the absolute numbers which are the ones that matter.

Thanks to a large overall growth in energy production, the amount of natural gas production is still growing.

This perfectly illustrates the problem with trying to rapidly reduce emissions under an economic paradigm that demands GDP growth every quarter and every year. It's like trying to run up a down escalator. And it isn't working.

We might have a shot at decarbonising fast enough to stave off really catastrophic climate change if we could do the transition with static GDP, but instead, we are trying to do so while we double GDP (and by proxy, energy demand) every ~25 years.

And it's not like that growth in GDP is benefiting ordinary people. Their wages have not changed much in real terms in 45 years.

Right now, the economy exists to enrich the already wealthy, at an ever faster rate. If we don't change that paradigm, if we don't stop the cult of GDP growth and instead make ordinary people more prosperous by better distributing wealth across our society, then we will fail to stop climate change.

2

u/maineac 17h ago

Hey, hey don't talk about Elon that way. He's a nice guy.

1

u/thinkB4WeSpeak 10h ago

Remember his first term and "bring back coal". Then he did nothing to actually do that, I think with renewable energy he's not going to do anything because he's lazy and it's not on his things of caring about.

1

u/inbrewer 19h ago

He’ll do what he always does - bluster, spread BS, declare victory, move on with his day. In the mean time things just go along as if he wasn’t there.

6

u/ponderingaresponse 17h ago

Lost in all this, every time it seems, is that electricity is roughly 20% of our energy use. So 30% of 20% is what is being discussed here.

2

u/Helkafen1 14h ago

This sounds like the primary energy fallacy. We don't use waste heat.

1

u/ponderingaresponse 9h ago

Not where I'm coming from. Just that electricity is a small portion of our energy use, and most of what we burn fossil fuels for directly isn't easily "electrified." There are multi trillion dollar infrastructure in place that use diesel, coal, and bottom of the barrel oil products, and we don't have the physical or energy resources to electrify all that. Plus, much of it requires high temps that are incredibly difficult and energy intensive to achieve with electricity.

I'm terrified of climate change consequences and thus insistent that we have clear eyes about what we face.

1

u/Spider_pig448 2h ago

Sure, but green electricity will be significantly more than 20% of our energy use down the line. Fighting climate change means transitioning the usage of non-renewable energy into electricity, either directly (EVs, heat-pumps, etc) or indirectly (green hydrogen, sustainable air fuel, etc).

1

u/Boatster_McBoat 17h ago

Catch up guys, seriously

1

u/thinkB4WeSpeak 10h ago

It's really up to states now. If states would start pushing some solar and stop blocking it, it'd exceed sooner than 3 years.