We know what we need to do to cut carbon emissions and clean up the air we breathe — replace fossil fuel-burning vehicles with EVs, and fossil fuel power plants with renewable energy sources.
Stating the problem and the solution may be simple, but actually achieving it is difficult.
Today’s main renewable electricity-generating technologies are wind, solar, geothermal and hydroelectricity, collectively known as Wind-Water-Solar (WWS) technologies. All are heavily commercialized. In fact, wind and solar are currently the lowest-cost electricity-generating technology around.
Wind and solar are also so plentiful that they can each power the world’s all-purpose energy many times over.
Of course, renewable energy needs to work in tandem with energy storage. Existing storage technologies include batteries, pumped hydropower, hydroelectric dams, flywheels and compressed air storage, and several of these are already in commercial operation.
Already in many places, solar plus battery technology is cheaper than coal or nuclear and is replacing both. In fact, battery costs have declined 90 percent in the past 10 years.
Transportation is the other half of the equation, and here also implementation has gone far beyond the demonstration and prototype phases.
Electric vehicles are commercial and replacing fossil-fuel vehicles of all types and weights.
We have 95 percent of the technologies we need today and the know-how to get the rest to address both energy and non-energy emission.
No miracle technology is needed. By implementing only clean, renewable WWS energy and storage and implementing non-energy strategies, we will address not only climate, but also the 7 million annual air pollution deaths worldwide, and energy insecurity.
None of the ‘miracle technologies’ addresses all three. No miracle is needed in this area, we just need more rapid deployment.
Reference- National Geographic, IEA Repot, EVANNEX, Clean Technica