Xcel is leading the pack, with a pledge to go 100% zero carbon by 2050. Other major electricity providers are trading coal for wind and solar sooner than planned.
Even with all the evidence that renewable energy has become less expensive than fossil fuels, it doesn't seem real until utilities start to stake their futures on it.
For some Midwestern utilities, 2018 is the year that happened.
Xcel Energy of Minnesota in early December said it would go to zero carbon emissions throughout its eight-state territory by 2050, the first major utility to do so.
That followed some big steps by Consumers Energy in Michigan and NIPSCO in Indiana, which issued plans to shut down coal-fired power plants sooner than previously planned while also accelerating development of wind and solar power.
These corporate decisions are part of what has made 2018 a fulcrum year for the clean-energy transition, a time when long-building trends in energy consumption and pricing have led to a clear shift in the market, according to analysts and clean-energy advocates. These dynamics are most noticeable in the Midwest because of extremely low wind energy prices, but they are spreading to other regions.
Read more at A Clean Energy Revolution Is Rising in the Midwest, with Utilities in the Vanguard
The 400-megawatt Vineyard Wind project is the first large offshore wind farm in the U.S. It won’t be the last.
Sometime in 2019, construction on Vineyard Wind, the first major offshore wind farm in the United States, will begin. Workers will start prepping a pair of undersea substations to be installed about 55 kilometers south of the Massachusetts mainland. A specially equipped trawler will lay undersea transmission cable between the site and a landfall on Cape Cod. The cable will connect to the switching station in Barnstable, and from there to the New England power grid.
Meanwhile, the first of 84 wind turbines, 9.5 megawatts each, from MHI Vestas will be shipped to the site and installed in an array that will populate a 650-square-kilometer expanse and generate some 800 MW. The exact timetable for all that work is uncertain, though. The developers—Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners and Avangrid Renewables—declined to be interviewed for this story.
The most remarkable thing about Vineyard Wind isn’t its size or scope or the fact that it’s a first for the United States. It’s the 7.4 U.S. cents per kilowatt-hour price that Vineyard Wind has agreed to charge for the wind farm’s electricity. In the project’s second phase, the price will drop to just 6.5 cents, making it competitive with coal and natural gas, but without the carbon emissions. For comparison, electricity from the tiny five-turbine, 30-MW Block Island wind farm, which became operational in 2016 off the coast of Rhode Island, is priced at 24.4 cents per kilowatt-hour.
“Vineyard Wind’s price is a game changer,” says Bill White, who spoke to IEEE Spectrum in September, when he was senior director of offshore wind development at the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center. (In October White joined the German renewable energy firm EnBW.) “Offshore wind is good for [combatting] climate change. It creates jobs. It meets the need for more electricity as the Northeast’s power-generation fleet ages. Offshore wind has been a no-brainer—except on cost. Now, cost has almost been taken off the table.”
The U.S. offshore wind market has been a long time coming, says Walt Musial, manager of offshore wind at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). He’s worked on wind power for 35 years, so he’s intimately familiar with the technical, economic, regulatory, and, above all, political hurdles that have stymied U.S. efforts, even as other countries embraced the technology.
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The Massachusetts Clean Energy Center helped ensure that Vineyard Wind’s fate didn’t mirror Cape Wind’s. “We recognized that offshore wind would come to Massachusetts but that there were obstacles, so...we’ve been doing all this work to get ready,” White says.
That work included environmental surveys, planning for transmission lines, and funding a study of gray whales, which may be affected by wind farm construction. Massachusetts spent $100 million upgrading its New Bedford Marine Commerce Terminal, to allow it to handle massive turbine components. Despite such preparatory efforts, at press time local fishermen were protesting the project, upset over the positioning of the turbines.
Turbine technology has evolved considerably since Cape Wind’s time, Musial notes. “Back in 2003, we couldn’t place turbines south of Martha’s Vineyard. Now we can.” Cape Wind’s turbines were to be 3.6 MW. “Now turbines are more than twice that size, which means you need fewer of them.” Though the turbines are also taller, they’ll be farther from shore.
Read more at With Vineyard Wind, the U.S. Finally Goes Big on Offshore Wind Power
7 years after the Tesla Model S first went on sale, American drivers in all 50 states still have precious few battery electric automobiles with more than 200 miles of range to choose from. That will change in 2019 as new models from Jaguar, Audi, Hyundai, and Kia find their way into US showrooms.
Read more at 4 New Electric Cars with Long Range Coming to US Showrooms in 2019
2018 was a hot year — in fact, the fourth warmest on record. The only years that were, on average, warmer were the past three, according to the World Meteorological Organization.
It has been warming for decades now. But 2018 brought several major new and markedly more precise reports from scientists about what climate change is doing to the weather and how dire they expect the consequences to be.
That didn't stop President Trump and others from continuing to question the evidence.
"Is there climate change?" Trump said to reporters from Axios on HBO in November. "Yeah. Will it go back like this?" he added, motioning up and down with his hand. "I mean will it change back? Probably. That's what I think."
Another politician who weighed in on the clear evidence of a warmer planet was Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, when he was campaigning this past fall.
"Well, listen," he assured a moderator at a televised debate. "Of course the climate is changing. The climate has been changing from the dawn of time. The climate will change as long as we have a planet Earth."
Both statements are at odds with the consensus within the climate science community.
"The climate has never changed this rapidly"
Many in that community met in Washington, D.C., in December at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union. "We're not seeing cycles" in which warming is likely to go back down, says climate scientist Martin Hoerling. "We're not seeing things that are going to revert back," as long as greenhouse gases in the atmosphere continue to increase.
What about that idea that the climate has changed from the dawn of time? Climate scientist Stephanie Herring says sure, that's technically true, but it misses an important difference happening now. "The current change that we are experiencing now is particularly alarming," she says, "and that's because in the history of human civilization the climate has never changed this rapidly." For example, 20 of the warmest years on record around the planet occurred in the past 22 years, according to the WMO.
The yawning gap between the views of some politicians and the vast majority of scientists on climate change isn't new. But 2018 was a watershed year in the amount of new evidence for continued warming and its effects.
Read more at 2018 Was a Milestone Year for Climate Science (If Not Politics)
