Renewables Surge but Faster Action Needed to Hit 1.5°C

Solar, wind, and battery storage have been growing far faster than most energy models ever predicted, but not yet fast enough to deliver a 1.5°C climate future, concludes a new analysis released this month by RMI, the Colorado think tank previously known as the Rocky Mountain Institute.

“Solar, wind, and batteries have been following a typical path for new technology,” write RMI co-authors Kingsmill Bond and Sam Butler-Sloss in a summary of their report, titled X-change: Electricity. “Learning curves led to falling prices, which led to rapid growth in new capacity, which led to change in the generation mix.”

Those changes look likely to accelerate, with solar and wind deployment growing 15 to 20% per year, fossil fuel demand falling 16 to 30%, and solar costs falling by half by 2030, they add. But while all of that activity “will lead to disruption of the global electricity sector this decade,” the pace of change will have to be even faster to deliver on the Paris agreement’s 1.5°C target for stabilizing the global climate.

“We are on the path to net-zero by 2050 but we are not on the path to limit warming to 1.5°C,” Bond and Butler-Sloss warn. “Each death induced from fossil fuel air pollution matters, each dollar spent on importing expensive fossil fuels has an opportunity cost, and each fraction of a degree is a threat multiplier. In this context, there is no such thing as ‘fast enough.’ Speed is justice.”

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