alt Hacker News"Overall, renewables and nuclear together met nearly 60% of the growth in energy demand".
That's not enough. It's obvious this is going in the right direction but adoption is still too slow, considering how cheap renewables are now (and will be).
Replies
fulafel • today at 9:54 AM
In deed. We are really late in ramping down fossils usage and emissions, and the death toll is higher than the other bad things in the news headlines.
➕ show 1 reply
Read it carefully. The growth in renewables exceeded the growth in electricity demand. The 60% figure is all forms of energy.
Stated another way, we could (hypothetically) stop building coal and gas fired electrial generation and we'd still have enough renewable growth to cover electrical needs.
There's certainly room to start offsetting non-electrical power usage, but that's a different ball game entirely. I'd be pretty happy if we got to a point where only transportation ran on oil. To do that, we need enough renewables to both offset growth (done) and to start shutting down non-renewable generation. Even if we did nothing, those plants have a usable service life of < 100 years so we're within a human lifetime of not needing them anymore.