With the attention pandemics and politics are drawing, the world has overlooked an undeniable silver lining: the arrival of the green future. Almost without exception, renewable energies are cheaper today than from fossil fuels. The prices of battery packs for electric vehicles and solar panels continue to fall, and adoption is increasing exponentially. The 2020s will be the decade when the planet finally closes the chapter on fossil fuel destruction and pollution and enters a new realm of clean and near-free energy. And that changes everything.
The evidence of a great green wave is now overwhelming. According to BloomergNEF, the world spent half a trillion dollars on renewable energy, electric vehicles and other clean technologies in 2020 and received much more on that investment than ever before. The average cost of lithium-ion batteries, which are critical to electric vehicles, fell from more than $ 1,100 per kilowatt-hour a decade ago to below $ 140 in 2020. Some factories in China cut their prices below $ 100. Although the prices for lithium-ion batteries are not on a declining Moore's law curve, they are falling at an inflation-adjusted rate of around 13 percent per year – halved over four years.
As the expanding market enables economies of scale, prices will continue to fall and the adoption of renewable energies will increase. This will also accelerate the transition to electric and hybrid vehicles, as is already the case in China, Europe and the US. In Germany, the proportion of vehicles that use electricity (hybrids, plug-in hybrids and all-electric vehicles) rose from less than 3 percent in 2016 to almost 25 percent in 2020. However, this exponential acceptance is still driven by generosity government subsidies, but as the market continues to grow this will soon no longer be necessary.
Electric vehicle prices are falling in other ways too. Tesla, for example, plans to integrate battery cells into its vehicles in order to avoid the weight and cost of battery packs.
The move to electric vehicles will cleanse our air dramatically. Fossil fuel engines – especially diesel engines – are still among the main emitters of harmful chemicals. A 2020 report by the American Lung Association found that a full shift to electric vehicles by 2040 would help “prevent $ 72 billion in health damage, save approximately 6,300 lives, and more than 93,000 asthma attacks and 416,000 lost work days avoided each year due to a significant reduction in “traffic-related pollution” in the United States alone. In more polluted countries, the benefits will be even greater.
This shift will also reduce global CO2 emissions through the use of renewable energy sources. Unlike petroleum, which necessarily comes from petroleum, an electron is an electron and can come from anywhere. (And yes, you can make fossil fuels more environmentally friendly by using algae, for example, but an electric drive can completely eliminate the carbon emission problem.) The falling price of battery packs has made electric and hybrid car ownership and operation cheaper now than traditional ones Cars.
That's logic. Not only do you pay much less for electricity than you do for gas, but hybrid and electric vehicles also tend to have lower maintenance costs. It is essentially a battery pack connected to an electric motor, with significantly fewer moving parts and less complex systems.
These cars and their batteries are powered by a power supply that includes a rapidly growing proportion of renewable energy sources, primarily solar and wind power. Both energy modes now even undercut the prices for natural gas energy under equivalent conditions. The cost of solar energy has dropped a whopping 99 percent over the past four decades. Solar modules are essentially semiconductors, so their cost curves are essentially the same as for computers. The final state of the collapse in solar energy prices will be energy so cheap that its main cost will be to transmit it to our homes and businesses via cables.
Once this happens, many energy intensive industries will be disrupted. For example, the manufacture of glass, concrete and steel is currently mainly based on high temperature fossil fuel furnaces. When electricity prices fall and these industries switch to electric ovens, the cost of the necessary equipment and industrial equipment should fall and production will become more environmentally friendly. According to Chatham House, concrete production, to name just one example, is responsible for around 8 percent of all carbon emissions each year.
Perhaps even more important for the green future is water. There is a lack of fresh water in many regions of the world, and international conflicts over water are already bubbling up in South Asia, the Middle East, Africa and North America. But cheap electricity can easily solve the problem. The primary barrier to the purification of seawater using reverse osmosis on a scale is its energy intensity. Sea water is abundant and readily available, and inexpensive electrical energy converts it into drinking water. The ubiquity of solar power will also enable water treatment projects, even in tiny communities that are far from a grid.
The combination of cheaper renewable energies and cheaper batteries leads to further breakthroughs. Until recently, generating electricity from natural gas and other fossil fuels had the advantage of being able to provide energy even when renewable energies couldn't: when the sun wasn't shining or the air was still. The rapid decline in battery prices has finally made the combination of renewable energy and battery storage cheap and efficient enough to offer a cost-effective alternative to fossil fuel base load generation.
The international impact of clean energy is also promising. Just as wireless communications technology has enabled developing countries to quickly catch up with, and even overtake, rich nations in telecommunications infrastructure, so green energy will be a great economic leveling off. The falling cost of green energy and the inherent flexibility in its modes of production will soon enable India and Africa to compete with the West in energy production. The resulting regional benefits will not only be economic. The burden of unhealthy air lies more heavily in China, India and the developing world than in the west. For example, green energy helps clear the skies of New Delhi, makes the air more breathable, reduces the health burden and extends the lives of the city's residents by years. By the way, pupils can attend school who otherwise could not go to school due to lung diseases.
This transformation has only just begun. Major economic and infrastructural changes could become apparent. California, for example, could divide power generation and storage into numerous smaller facilities to make the power grid more resilient to forest fires and other disasters – less dependent on remote facilities and high-maintenance transmission infrastructure. Alternatively, we can see sprawling solar parks in vast dusty deserts like the Mojave and Sahara that dwarf today's power plants. Since storage and generation do not have to coincide geographically, these companies could supply distributed networks of buffer battery systems or systems with other storage mechanisms such as compressed air or water, which is then pumped uphill for subsequent hydropower generation. While such energy backups may initially be limited to richer countries, their plummeting cost is a good sign of mass adoption by all, just as smartphones and online storage have been.
In our lives, fossil fuel vehicles will die out and the chimneys of power plants that run on coal or gas will no longer shed their dirt. Speaking to our future grandchildren, we can say this decade is when the switch flipped and the planet embraced an extremely promising green future.