There are many people posting energy news on Twitter, loosely called ‘Energy Twitter.’ On my Twitter feed, I follow many clean-energy folks like Stanford professor Mark Jacobson @mzjacobson, Mike Bloomberg’s @BeyondCarbon, the CEO of Proterra electric buses, @rcpopple, the Microgrid Institute @microgridinst, and @Greentechmedia. (If you think Twitter is not something you can do, see below for how easy it is.)i I thought I would share with you several different postings I encountered this week that add up to a big picture.
I ran across Mark Jacobson’s Twitter posting of a link to the newly released Lazard’s Levelized Cost of Energy Analysis, Version 13.0, “which shows that, as the cost of renewable energy continues to decline, certain technologies (e.g. onshore wind and utility-scale solar), which became cost-competitive with conventional generation several years ago on a new-build basis, continue to maintain competitiveness…”
Through Twitter, I also ran across the article, Colorado’s cleanest energy options are also its cheapest,2 which illustrates exactly the benefit from the huge drop in wind and solar costs in a short amount of time (the Lazard report’s statistics). Colorado is pretty similar to Idaho; great wind and solar resources, which have been relatively untapped to date, but the potential that “Colorado could save $2.5 billion through 2040 by shutting down all its coal plants.”3 Idaho ratepayers have already saved $17.5 million by Idaho Power shutting down a few coal plants. I loved this statement by this article’s author, “The world may be a raging dumpster fire, but Colorado has the potential to be an island of sanity, moving toward a cleaner, cheaper, healthier energy system in a way that benefits all state residents.”
The difference between Colorado and Idaho though is that Colorado is actually doing something toward their clean-energy targets, like legislation to expand Electric Vehicle adoption, whereas Idaho Power has a clean-energy target by 2045 but, so far as I can see, has not started on a roadmap of how to get there. From @microgridnews, a tweet shared the news that Tata Power in India is installing 10,000 microgrids to bring power to 5 million people. (In contrast, Idaho doesn’t have one microgrid installed that I know about.)
Finally, I have re-tweeted the link to an incredibly positive TED talk by Christiana Figueres in which she talks about the journey from 2009 Copenhagen, where a climate agreement failed miserably, to 2015 Paris, where 195 governments unanimously adopted one.4 This talk can give us all hope that things can change in a relatively short amount of time; costs can drop exponentially, ratepayers can benefit from improved technologies, and the world can agree on priorities and change direction from the carbon-pollution-as-usual system. Idaho, can we join this positive direction with more than lip service?
[1] www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-and-levelized-cost-of-storage-2019/
2 www.vox.com/platform/amp/energy-and-environment/20…_medium=social&utm_source=twitter&_twitter_impression=true
3 Ibid
4 Ted.com/talks/christianafigueres via @TEDtalks
i The Twitter app is free to download on your phone, and is super-easy to use, just give yourself a handle name with the @ in front, and you can search topics with the magnifying glass, find breaking news, and find interesting conversation threads. Start to follow others; follow me @kikitidwell.