Ask A Scientist: What Energy Solutions to the Climate Crisis Are Within Reach

As electric vehicle charging stations sprout like mushrooms along our roads and clusters of new wind turbines come online, these two clean energy solutions to the climate crisis are becoming more commonplace. Also more commonplace are the obvious, dangerous, and destructive effects of climate change on people and communities.

The United States needs to speed its transition to clean energy in order to stave off even worse impacts of climate change. But beyond more electric cars and solar panels, what can everyday people do?

One place to look is the power grid, responsible for a quarter of the United States' carbon emissions. UCS grid modeling shows that there are readily available solutions to achieve a clean grid-but there are also a lot of distractions that end up slowing progress.

Paul Arbaje is an energy analyst in the Climate & Energy program at the Union of Concerned Scientists and an expert on electricity policies and reforms that reduce fossil fuel use and reliance. He shares his thoughts on the solutions in the energy sector that are within reach for individuals, businesses, and policymakers, and the traps everyone should avoid.

AAS: What do you say to the person who already has an electric vehicle charging in their garage and solar panels on their roof? What other clean energy solutions are there to get excited about?

Paul Arbaje: First off, if you have been able to transition to an electric vehicle, have access to public transit that is electric, or live in a home with solar panels, that's great! Electrifying transportation is a key piece of how we clean up the broader economy, and rooftop solar is a great way to get more renewables on the grid using the existing built environment.

The energy enthusiast who owns their own homes can take further steps toward making their homes completely free of direct fossil fuel use. For a large percentage of people in this country, this means disconnecting themselves from the local gas utility by switching to electric appliances, and for a smaller percentage it means switching from fuel oil to electric heat pumps for heating.

For space heating and cooling, as well as water heating, heat pumps are a great solution for replacing fossil fuel appliances such as gas boilers-even in wintery parts of the country, thanks to new cold-climate heat pumps. Heat pumps are far more efficient, and homeowners can receive large incentives under the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) for installing them. Additionally, the IRA provides incentives for induction cooktops, which can replace your traditional gas stove.

There are benefits to installing these clean appliances that go far beyond just contributing less to climate change. People can save money by insulating themselves from future price spikes of fossil fuels, such as the 2022 price spike that made energy bills skyrocket. Further, the body of research on indoor air pollution continues to grow, showing more and more negative health impacts.

AAS: What options are there for people who don't own their home or don't have the means to switch appliances?

Paul Arbaje: It's crucial that the clean energy solutions that are readily available aren't restricted to just people who own their own homes. Both renters and landlords can currently take advantage of IRA rebates and other incentives to make their residences cleaner and more efficient, but policymakers need to do more to make sure no one is left behind in the clean energy transition. State regulators, for example, must make sure that low-income customers aren't left to cover unreasonably large amounts of gas utilities' costs if they electrify their homes later than other customers.

AAS: What can small and large businesses do about their energy use to help curb emissions?

Paul Arbaje: Businesses can take advantage of IRA incentives to make investments that render their facilities much cleaner and much more efficient. These investments include those heat pumps and rooftop solar, as well as battery storage systems. The combination of solar and storage, in particular, can help businesses reduce so-called demand charges, which are based on a customer's peak electricity usage.

Larger businesses and corporations can follow the same steps at their buildings, but they also can choose to procure their own clean grid power from a large-scale solar or wind project. There are multiple ways to do this and the pathways vary by location. The basic idea is that a wind or solar developer builds a project, and a corporation agrees to be an "offtaker," or a buyer, to purchase the generated electricity, which would be transported through the local utility's power lines.

AAS: You mention utilities, so let's scale up our search for solutions. What can power providers and policymakers do to accelerate the clean energy transition and help consumers build climate resilience?

Paul Arbaje: On the consumer side, utilities can work with state regulators and advocates to go beyond the IRA and provide even better incentives and programs for energy efficiency and other clean energy investments, such as home battery storage (with or without rooftop solar). These types of solutions not only reduce emissions, thereby helping stave off future climate change, but also make households more resilient to climate impacts, such as grid-threatening extreme weather events.

Efficiency and weatherization, for example, can better insulate homes and keep them at a comfortable temperature for a longer period of time in the event of a power outage. Home battery storage can also keep homes at least partially powered if the local grid gets damaged in a storm or another extreme event.

At the more macro level of the US power grid, federal policymakers have taken several key actions in recent years that will help facilitate the buildout of a modernized grid, get clean energy onto that grid faster, and hold fossil fuel polluters accountable for the harms they cause. As the implementation of these policies gets underway, they will grow very helpful in accelerating the clean energy momentum that we urgently need.

However, there's a lot more that can be done. The transmission system, for example, must grow better connected between the grid's various regions, not just within regions, as one recent federal policy addressed. This will enable more renewable energy sharing between regions and make the grid much more resilient to extreme weather events.

State regulators also play a huge role in deciding which grid resources get built, and they should be very skeptical of any applications for more fossil fuel power plants that will stick around for decades. This is particularly the case for gas plants, which have been found to be susceptible to large-scale failures in extreme winter storms, and vulnerable during other extreme weather events.

AAS: Speaking of new grid resources, there is considerable buzz in the news around the potential for hydrogen to be a major clean energy solution. Should we be supportive, wary, or somewhere in between?

Paul Arbaje: People should certainly be skeptical of the way hydrogen is being promoted and hyped up by a wide range of energy industry players. That doesn't necessarily mean folks shouldn't be excited about the potential future of the technology if we get it right, meaning cleanly produced and strategically prioritized for use where other clean energy solutions don't work. But at the moment, there are far too many in industry pushing for us to get it wrong just so they can rake in more profits (much of which would be public money via tax credits), not to actually advance the clean energy transition.

Part of the problem is that fossil fuel companies are pushing hydrogen as a "climate solution" in all the wrong ways: producing hydrogen using fossil fuels instead of renewables, and using hydrogen in sectors where it makes little sense compared to cleaner and more cost-effective technologies, especially swapping fossil fuels for direct use of clean electricity.

Gas utilities, for example, routinely advocate for blending hydrogen into local gas distribution systems to be delivered to homes and businesses. But they only prefer this strategy because it perpetuates investments in fossil fuel infrastructure.

Direct electrification of buildings is a far superior solution; heating a home with truly clean hydrogen, for example, would take roughly five times the amount electricity required with an efficient heat pump. Because we're racing to displace fossil fuels with renewables as fast as possible, that translates into an untenable waste of clean energy along the way.

AAS: If we can do all of the above, how close is the United States to a 100% clean grid?

Paul Arbaje: The United States has made significant progress on cleaning up the grid over the last two decades. In the mid-2000s, coal was about half of our electricity supply, and renewables were less than 10%, and almost all of that was hydropower.

Today, renewables generate more electricity than coal. In 2023, renewables generated roughly 23% of US electricity, while coal only generated about 16%. Wind, solar, and all other low-carbon sources such as hydropower and nuclear together contributed about 41% of US electricity generation. Since the cost of building new wind and solar is now lower than the cost of continued operation at 99% of US coal plants, this is great news for ratepayers, not even to mention all of the climate and public health benefits resulting from reducing power plant pollution.

AAS: You've laid out some very clear and hopeful climate solutions that are, most importantly, within reach. What are the immediate challenges to making these solutions a reality?

Paul Arbaje: We have to be wary of various efforts by fossil fuel interests to continue delaying climate action, and there are a lot of them. This includes the more visible campaigns such as the so-called Project 2025-which would be disastrous-but also more insidious efforts, like using projections of electric load growth as justification for keeping coal plants open and building more gas plants.

We also have to keep at the front of our minds the potential rollbacks of good federal climate policy that has been put in place over the last few years. This includes the many different pieces of the IRA, various pollution protections by EPA, and transmission-related measures by FERC.

These challenges can seem daunting, but they are surmountable.

I also want to stress how important it is that we not only rapidly proceed with the clean energy transition, but also that we do so in an equitable way. Part of the way we achieve this is by thoroughly pushing back on false claims that fossil fuels like gas, which exacerbate historical inequities, play an "important role" in this transition.

But policymakers and other decisionmakers must go even further. They should account for cumulative impacts on communities when evaluating the suite of solutions for both mitigating and adapting to climate change. They should employ more equitable practices in the siting of energy infrastructure that don't perpetuate historical harms. They should adhere to the Equitable Grid Principles laid out last year by UCS and more than a dozen partners for the Midcontinent transmission grid.

These are just a few of the more concrete actions decisionmakers can take to make climate solutions benefit a broader set of the population. And while there are many present and future challenges, as we discussed, the vision is in my mind certainly achievable.

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