Solar, wind, hydropower, geothermal power...
All of these are sources of renewable energy.
"Renewables" refer to essentially inexhaustible sources of energy from natural sources.
They don't emit CO2.
We understand how to harness them.
And they're finally being deployed.
These are competitive sources of electricity now.
These are not some kind of far off thing, but they are ready to compete now
and increasingly are competing in a lot of different places.
The sources that have been growing the fastest, however, are wind power and solar power.
And those are the ones where you're seeing a huge amount of optimism about the role
that they can play in the energy system in a very clean way.
Really, deployment has been accelerating massively perhaps over the last decade.
And the main reason for that is because the cost curve has come down.
And they're cost-competitive with fossil fuels for making electricity --
a sector that's been relying on coal and natural gas.
Electricity is worldwide, the largest source of energy related carbon emissions,
and it is the second largest source in the United States after transportation.
Really aggressively confronting climate change, unavoidably, has to address electricity.
We use electricity to power a lot of things...
Buildings, hospitals, schools, factories...
And we'll likely be using more of it in the future, too.
There's the interest in not only using wind and solar for our traditional uses of electricity,
but also for expanding electrification into things that right now run on fossil fuels.
So, for example, that could be natural gas fired home heating or cooking.
You hear a lot about automobiles.
It's not always sunny.
The wind isn't always blowing.
We can't rely on wind and solar for all of our electricity just yet.
One thing is transmission, right?
Transmission means getting renewable energy from the place
where it's made to the place where it's used.
You want to be able to get the electricity created by those sources
to the population centers where it's really needed.
And so that means, I think a lot of people think we're going
to need a lot more transmission build out in order to meet some of our deployment goals.
Plus, energy storage, like batteries, will have to improve
to store excess renewable energy - and enable that transmission.
You basically just want to be able to use them in a way that allows very high levels of storage
of wind and solar power, so you can deploy them at a large scale as needed,
and that lessens the need for backup natural gas-fired power
or coal-fired power or power from other sources.
Almost any projection that you see out there shows aggressive growth in wind
and solar power going forward worldwide.
And we'll probably hear more about other kinds of renewables, too.
We're seeing a real strong amount of venture capital and investor interest in sort
of emerging advanced forms of geothermal electricity
that are nowhere near along the adoption curve that wind and solar are,
but that's another source that could play a significant role going forward as well.
No matter the specifics, each of these matters for cutting back on fossil fuels.
On a worldwide basis renewables, right now, are kind of adding
to our fossil energy system...We're going to have to see wind and solar and other forms
of renewables, not only being an addition, but actually taking away the market share
from those fossil energy sources.
Wind and solar are growing quickly, but renewable energy still has a long way to go.
Here's what we've learned.
Renewables could help us get clean electricity--
and power more things with electricity in the future.
We need better ways of storing and moving excess renewable energy to make the most of them.
But they're expected to grow a lot in the future.
That said, Wind and solar are not going to be enough on their own to kind
of fully decarbonize our energy system.
It's going to take a whole basket of approaches.
But certainly if you want to look at what are some of the pillar or foundational technologies
for confronting climate change, wind
and solar are really right up there at the top of the list.
Another technology at the top of the list?
Electric vehicles.