Energy ?revolution ?underway

The most important piece of news on the energy front isn’t the plunge in oil prices, but the progress being made in battery technology. A new study in Nature Climate Change, by Bjorn Nykvist and Mans Nilsson of the Stockholm Environment Institute, shows that electric-vehicle batteries have been getting cheaper much faster than expected.

From 2007 to 2011, average battery costs for battery-powered electric vehicles fell by about 14 percent a year. For the leading electric-vehicle makers, Tesla and Nissan, costs fell by 8 percent a year. This astounding decline puts battery costs right around the level that the International Energy Agency predicted they would reach in 2020. We are six years ahead of the curve.

The Swedish researchers believe that Tesla’s new factories will be able to achieve the 30 percent cost reduction the company promises, simply from economies of scale and incremental improvements in the manufacturing process. That, combined with a rebound in gas prices to the $3 range, would be enough to make battery-powered vehicles an economic alternative to internal combustion vehicles in most regions.

But this isn’t the only piece of good energy news: Investment in renewable energy is powering ahead.

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The United Nations Environment Programme recently released a report showing that global investment in renewable energy, which had dipped a bit between 2011 and 2013, rebounded in 2014 to a near all-time high of $270 billion. But the report also notes that since renewable costs – especially solar costs – are falling so fast, the amount of renewable energy capacity added in 2014 was easily an all-time high.

Together, the two cost trends will add up to nothing less than a revolution in the way humankind interacts with the planet and powers civilization.

Of course, opponents of the renewable revolution continue to downplay these remarkable developments. The takeoff of solar- plus-batteries has only begun to ramp up the exponential curve, and market shares are still small. But it has begun, and it doesn’t look like we’re going back. •

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