The transition to renewable energy is real, and really happening.

“Financial institutions with collective assets under management of nearly $100 trillion have come together under The Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero, or GFANZ,” said Janet L. Yellen, U.S. Secretary of the Treasury.

Speaking about the entire global energy effort, Yellen told colleagues at a UN Climate Change Conference that “This is not a challenge for future generations, but one we must confront today.

“If these ambitions are realized, those portfolios will be carbon-neutral by 2050 and significantly reduce emissions by 2030.”

UN envoy Mark Carney calls it “the greatest commercial opportunity of our age.”

I have already described the forceful move of Electric Vehicles to prevail over gas cars in a little more than a decade. Another reference has described how renewables in all other sectors will be the main source of electrical generation in three years.

Now, regarding the full energy situation, there is a spearhead of leaders who are driving to make Yellen’s vision a reality, from President Biden, the Prime Ministers of England and Canada, and President Macron of France, to 120 world leaders and 40,000 participants at the conference.

Are there signs that it is starting? Concrete actions include:

· Making vast swaths of public waters available for leasing to build 30 gigawatts of offshore wind-power by 2030.

· Passing a large infrastructure bill is moving through the United States Congress that will dot the American landscape with almost 500,000 electric vehicle charging stations, to accelerate the adoption of electric vehicles.

· Adding tax credits to incentivize the buildout of high-voltage capacity power lines and renewable energy generation capacity.

· Creating a financial alliance of institutions to Financial institutions to mobilize collective of nearly $100 trillion.

· U.S. President Joe Biden’s executive order calling for all-electric cars to make up 50% of new sales in the country by 2030.

After Biden’s call for EV’s, oil refiner Phillips 66 announced plans to purchase a 16% stake in Novonix Ltd., which supplies materials for lithium-ion batteries. The oil companies are starting to hedge their bets.

The Bank of America has also signed an accord, along with 131 countries, 234 cities, and 695 of the world’s biggest companies.

Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk have invested in this transformation as well.

The low cost of renewable electricity is now starting to replace fossil fuels in non-vehicle sectors.

A prime reason for the replacement is that renewable electricity is now cheaper per unit energy than oil, about the same price as fossil methane. It is still more expensive that coal. But that pricing is artificial; if coal were priced without government subsidies, there would be a massive close-down of the commodity.

U.S. taxpayers spend tens of billions of dollars a year subsidizing new fossil fuel exploration, production, and consumption. This directly affects how much oil, natural gas, and coal gets produced — and how much clean energy doesn’t. An estimate from Oil Change International puts the U.S. total at around $20.5 billion annually. New coal plants are no longer economical, and the costs of converting old coal plants to “clean coal” are exorbitant. These subsidies favor the fossil fuel industry over the renewable energy sector 7 to 1. Now that the public push is toward renewables, we can look forward to seeing a flip side to that ratio. It will be an uneasy contest: the coal miners v.s. the environmentalists. But in the end, prices should push the victory to renewables. Already, between 2011 and mid-2020, 95 gigawatts of U.S. coal capacity was closed or switched to another fuel, and another 25 gigawatts is slated to shut down by 2025.

The fact is that non-renewable energy supplies will raise prices and make further economic development more difficult. Renewable electricity does not face such cost factors. Instead, learning by experience brings costs down. Thus, when utilizing renewable energy, successful economic development makes further economic development easier, as costs of energy decrease.

The drive to “electrify everything” is well underway. Even manufacturing processes like steel production have since long been increasingly electrified, and now there are attempts to replace coal with hydrogen. Already, manufacturers are replacing combustion engines in appliances, power tools, and farming, with electrical technologies. “We’ve seen a dramatic increase in interest in electrification from electric utilities, equipment manufacturers, and others,” said Trieu Mai, a senior researcher at the U.S. National Renewable Energy Laboratory. “Widespread electrification could have major energy, economic, and environmental impacts to the entire U.S. power system and broader economy.”

Speaking personally, I already use a ground-source heat pump for my home heating and cooling. I have plans to go solar in my home within two years, and make my primary vehicle a rechargeable one. I’m looking forward to the independence as well as the lower costs.

Another reason for the dominance of electricity is that it often offers other opportunities, such as cheaper transport, better control, higher energy efficiency in final production of energy services and lower local environmental costs.

A critical component of a new electricity-dominant infrastructure will be electrical power storage. Integrating large amounts of renewable power into the grid requires effective storage methods. Today battery deployment is only 3 gigawatts annually. That number needs to grow 40-fold by 2030. The Chinese have an interesting solution that involves turning railway container cars into giant batteries, and moving them around the country if needed. Another solution involves the use of parked-and-plugged-in EVs as fine-grained cells in a ‘hive battery’. Gravity storage is a further option.

Surprisingly, even with an assumption that the global economy doubles in size and that another 2 billion people join the population, it is estimated that the world will demand 8% less energy than today. This represents a strong decoupling of economic output and energy demand.

Such progress can only happen with massive investments in innovation.

Building construction and operation, for example, uses nearly 40% of global energy and produces an equal share of CO2 emissions. While ambitious retrofit programs can significantly improve energy efficiency, the pace of retrofitting needs to triple and new construction must increasingly focus on net-zero buildings.

An efficient way to control temperatures in buildings, is to use ground-source heat pumps. There are 180 million heat pumps installed at the moment world-wide, but a 10-fold growth in their installations by 2050 is required.

I’ve done my part: my house has a ground-source heat pump. Amazing, quiet and cheap to run. So the world can check one off the list.

Renewables are set to account for almost 95% of the increase in global power capacity through 2026, with solar PV alone providing more than half.

The world has gone through one replacement process, where muscle power was replaced by oil, coal and gas. Now a second replacement process is underway, where low cost renewable electricity replaces the fossils fuels.

Moving to renewables is one of those transitional shifts that brings it all: positive social, environmental, and financial returns.

A great place for our children.

https://barry-gander.medium.com/the-global-transition-to-renewables-a-reality-backed-by-100-trillion-in-assets-8d56acd8236c