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Transistion to genuinely clean energy has succeeded in many cases, including economically

Michael Grubb: Limiting climate change will require an unprecedented
global movement to make low-carbon technologies the norm. COP26 – the UN
climate conference held last November in Glasgow – showed that
unfortunately, the world is far from ready for such a movement.

Many leaders still assume that reducing emissions and growing their countries’
economies aren’t compatible goals. Yet in many places, transitions to
clean energy technologies have succeeded far beyond expectations.

Since 2010, wind power has grown from providing under 1% to providing 10% of
electricity in Brazil, and provided 15% of the EU’s electricity demand in
2019. Solar power – described as “the most expensive way to reduce
carbon emissions” as recently as 2014 – now costs 85% less than it did
a decade ago, increasingly making it the cheapest electricity in history.

And in India, affordable energy access programmes drove sales of
high-efficiency LED bulbs from just 3 million in 2012 to 670 million in
2018, with prices also falling by 85%.

These three technologies now offer
some of the cheapest ways to produce electricity or light across much of
the world. What’s crucial is that these transitions all involved
significant government action. Plus, most went ahead despite the fact that
in many cases, early economic calculations suggested that developing
renewables would be an especially expensive way to cut emissions.

Rather than relying on research and development to bring down costs through coming
up with new inventions – or leaving the market to do so on its own
through competition – governments used subsidies and public procurement
programmes (government commitments to buy a certain volume of a new
product) to keep costs down and boost uptake.

Historically, it’s been widely assumed that reducing emissions would mean damaging countries’
economies. And low-carbon transitions do, of course, involve social and
economic challenges. But well-designed policies – such as those used to
drive the revolutions in wind, solar and LEDs – have the potential to
create huge benefits for participating countries, not just for our climate.
If we want to solve climate change, we first need to transform our economic
thinking.

 Renew Economy 20th Jan 2022

An energy revolution is possible, but only if leaders get imaginative about how to fund it

January 22, 2022 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | 2 WORLD, renewable