More Than 100 Cities Worldwide Now Powered Primarily by Renewable Energy

As the price of renewable energy drops, more cities are cutting the cord with fossil fuel-based electricity.

Burlington, Vermont, gets 100 percent of its power
from renewable energy, including from solar farms
 like this one, built on locally made systems that
track the sun. 

A new report released Tuesday by the environmental group CDP finds that more than 100 cities worldwide now get the majority of their power—70 percent or more—from renewables. That's up from 42 in 2015, when countries pledged to cut greenhouse gas emissions in the Paris climate agreement.

CDP notes that more than 40 of those cities are now powered entirely by renewables, including Burlington, Vermont, which gets its electricity from a combination of wind, solar, hydro and biomass. Burlington will have more company within the next 20 years—58 U.S. cities, including Atlanta and San Diego, having announced plans to do the same.

Read the Inside Climate News story by Georgina Gustin - “More Than 100 Cities Worldwide Now Powered Primarily by Renewable Energy.”

The ‘utopian’ currency Bitcoin is a potentially catastrophic energy guzzler

The recent upsurge in the price of Bitcoin seems to have finally awakened the world to the massively destructive environmental consequences of this bubble.

These consequences were pointed out as long ago as 2013 by Australian sustainability analyst and entrepreneur Guy Lane, executive director of the Long Future Foundation. In recent months, the Bitcoin bubble has got massively bigger and the associated waste of energy is now much more widely recognised.

In essence, the creation of a new Bitcoin requires the performance of a complex calculation that has no value except to show that it has been done. The crucial feature, as is common in cryptography, is that the calculation in question is very hard to perform but easy to verify once it’s done.

Read the piece on The Conversation by Professor from the School of Economics at The University of Queensland, John Quiggin - "The ‘utopian’ currency Bitcoin is a potentially catastrophic energy guzzler.”

The PM's plan will deliver more expensive, dirtier power

The problem with our energy politics is, they have not caught up with energy economics.The price of renewables is plummeting and the investors are rushing. But our discourse remains stuck around clean energy targets being "too expensive”.

Liddell power station in Musewellbrook
did not perform last  February.

The new reality is that the cost of building new renewable energy is far cheaper than the cost of building new coal-fired power plants. If left to the market, no new coal-power station would be built again in Australia. Gas prices, as predicted, have gone through the roof – so that is no longer a cheaper option, either.

Rather than use the falling cost of renewable energy as an opportunity to roll out renewable energy and reduce our energy pollution more rapidly, in the topsy-turvy world of Australian policy debate it is being used as an explanation for why we should prop up uneconomic and unnecessary coal- and gas-fired power stations.

And while renewables are cheaper, energy infrastructure is very-long-term investment. This is where the renewable energy target has worked, by enabling long-term power purchase agreements to underpin investment. And it's how a clean energy target or similar scheme could also work into the future.

Read Ben Quist’s story in The Sydney Morning Herald - “The PM's plan will deliver more expensive, dirtier power.”

Delaying the inevitable

What is inevitable is naturally unavoidable.

The impacts and complications of climate change are unavoidable, but the governments of both Australia and Canada have delayed that inevitability.

That is, however, not quite right for they haven’t delayed the inevitabilities of climate change rather, they have procrastinated about and frustrated a reasoned response.

Further evidence of the necessary, but critical time-wasting intrigue, is illustrated in a story headed: “Nick Xenophon’s ploy to price carbon” published in The Saturday Paper.