We'll do the bad news first. According to NASA and NOAA, 2020 was in a statistical tie for the warmest year on record, within a small fraction of a degree of 2016. What's notable about that is that this came despite the year having an overall trend towards cooler La Niña conditions. (It started off in weak El Nino, and shifted early in the year towards the cooler state). Just four years ago, setting a record required a strong El Niño to drive the warming; now, we can apparently get there without anything special happening. It's now the 7th year in a row that temperatures are above anything that came before in the instrument record - all 7 occupy spots in the 7 warmest years on record. You also have to go back 44 years to get to a year that was below the average temperature of the 20th century.
The year's average temperature was 1.2C above the 20th century average. That's getting very close to the 1.5C target that many nations have pledged to hit. At recent rates of warming, we may start seeing the first years exceed 1.5C in about a decade, and that to be the typical temperature about a decade after that.
Which is depressing. So, to cheer people up, here's some good news: 80% of the planned additions to the US grid this year will be emissions free. The remaining 20 percent will be natural gas, which is the least polluting of fossil fuels, and is typically flexible enough to be shut off easily when renewables are producing well. This continues a precipitous decline for fossil fuels, which were over 60% of the new additions just a few years ago.
It's an interesting year for renewables to dominate (70% of additions will be wind or solar). 2020 was supposed to mark the end of tax credits meant to promote wind and solar, which usually means projects get pushed through the pipeline rapidly, and then installations tail off badly in the year following. But by 2019, wind had reached the point where, in a lot of the US, even without tax breaks, it would be cheaper to build and operate a wind farm than it would be to buy the fuel for an existing natural gas plant. Around the same time, the plunge in photovoltaic costs meant that solar in sunny regions had, for the first time, become the cheapest way to generate power, having been the most expensive only a decade ago.
The tax breaks ended up being extended as part of the recent budget deal, and they'll still play a role, in that they'll ensure some projects that would otherwise be marginal will turn a profit. But for a lot of the uS, they're economically irrelevant now.
We've still got a long way to go before the grid as a whole gets close to where we need it to be (and we clearly need to be there quickly), and there are some very significant hurdles once we start producing more than 80% of our power from sources that aren't guaranteed. But we're now at the point where economics should drive us to figure those challenges out.
Note for Cowpoke: Texas will be leading the way with the most wind and solar added.
The year's average temperature was 1.2C above the 20th century average. That's getting very close to the 1.5C target that many nations have pledged to hit. At recent rates of warming, we may start seeing the first years exceed 1.5C in about a decade, and that to be the typical temperature about a decade after that.
Which is depressing. So, to cheer people up, here's some good news: 80% of the planned additions to the US grid this year will be emissions free. The remaining 20 percent will be natural gas, which is the least polluting of fossil fuels, and is typically flexible enough to be shut off easily when renewables are producing well. This continues a precipitous decline for fossil fuels, which were over 60% of the new additions just a few years ago.
It's an interesting year for renewables to dominate (70% of additions will be wind or solar). 2020 was supposed to mark the end of tax credits meant to promote wind and solar, which usually means projects get pushed through the pipeline rapidly, and then installations tail off badly in the year following. But by 2019, wind had reached the point where, in a lot of the US, even without tax breaks, it would be cheaper to build and operate a wind farm than it would be to buy the fuel for an existing natural gas plant. Around the same time, the plunge in photovoltaic costs meant that solar in sunny regions had, for the first time, become the cheapest way to generate power, having been the most expensive only a decade ago.
The tax breaks ended up being extended as part of the recent budget deal, and they'll still play a role, in that they'll ensure some projects that would otherwise be marginal will turn a profit. But for a lot of the uS, they're economically irrelevant now.
We've still got a long way to go before the grid as a whole gets close to where we need it to be (and we clearly need to be there quickly), and there are some very significant hurdles once we start producing more than 80% of our power from sources that aren't guaranteed. But we're now at the point where economics should drive us to figure those challenges out.
Note for Cowpoke: Texas will be leading the way with the most wind and solar added.
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