According to energy think tank Ember’s annual World Electricity Review, the amount of electricity and greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel-fired power plants are set to peak in 2023. This means that human civilization has reached an important turning point.
Last year, 30% of the world’s electricity came from renewable sources, largely due to a surge in solar and wind power. Pollution from the energy sector is expected to start declining from this year, with fossil fuel-based electricity generation expected to fall by 2% by 2024.
‘The decline in power sector emissions is no longer inevitable; 2023 is an important milestone in our energy history. But the pace of this …… depends on how fast the renewable energy revolution continues.
The US is already the world’s largest gas producer and last year used a record amount of gas. Without the US, electricity generation from gas would decline globally by 2023. Excluding the US, the global economy generated 62 terawatt hours less electricity from gas last year than the previous year. But the US nearly doubled its gas electricity production over the same period, and will generate an additional 115 terawatt hours of electricity from gas in 2023.
Much of the problem stems from the fact that the US is replacing many of its aging coal-fired power plants, the dirtiest fossil fuel, with gas-fired power plants instead of carbon-free alternatives. “The US is moving from one fossil fuel to another,” says Jones. After two decades of heavy reliance on gas-fired electricity generation, the US is on a major journey to a truly clean electricity system.
According to Ember, the US gets only 23% of its electricity from renewable sources, below the global average of 30%.
President Joe Biden has set a goal of 100% carbon pollution-free electricity by 2035 and signed into law the Inflation Reduction Act, the largest investment in clean energy and climate change to date. But in 2022, the Supreme Court ruled that the Environmental Protection Agency should not be allowed to decide how the US generates electricity, limiting the administration’s authority to mandate a transition to cleaner energy. Since then, the EPA’s long-awaited rules on greenhouse gas emissions from power plants have shifted toward allowing energy companies to capture carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels.
Fortunately, renewable energy sources have become surprisingly affordable; solar power is now considered the cheapest source of electricity in history and the fastest growing source for 19 consecutive years.
“The outdated technologies of the last century can no longer compete with the exponential innovation and declining cost curve in renewable energy and storage,” Christiana Figueres, former Executive Secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, said via email.
Ember’s report is closely linked to other forecasts from the International Energy Agency (IEA), which said in October that the transition to clean energy was ‘unstoppable’: The IEA has projected that global demand for coal, gas and oil will peak this decade (across all energy uses, not just electricity). It has also predicted that renewables will account for around 50% of the global electricity mix by 2030.
Ember is slightly more optimistic following the UN Climate Change Summit in December, where more than 130 countries pledged to triple renewable energy capacity by 2030: In 2000, less than 20% of electricity came from renewable sources, but if this materializes, 60% will come from renewable sources within a decade If it continues, it will reach 60% within a decade.
