A Quote by Christiana Figueres
The fact that solar has gone down 80 percent since 2008 is astonishing. Wind is perhaps not coming down as quickly. Lack of storage - batteries - is a bottleneck. That makes it very difficult to put large amounts of renewable energy on the grid.
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Wages for the ninety-nine percent have gone down, steadily, since 2008. They've gone down especially for the bottom twenty-five percent of the population. This means that they've gone down especially for Blacks and Hispanics and other blue-collar workers. Their net worth has actually turned negative, and they don't have enough money to get by.
It took me a bit to realize how big the changes have been in the last decade. In so many places - electricity from solar and wind is cheaper than electricity from fossil fuels, and now the batteries are coming down in costs very quickly. So it's very exciting news that needed to be told.
Humankind has never transitioned to energy sources that are more costly, less reliable, and have a larger environmental footprint than the incumbent - and yet that's precisely what adding large amounts of solar and wind to the grid requires.
The most straightforward path would be if we could bring the cost of solar electric and wind down by another factor of say, three, and then have some miraculous storage solution, so that not only over the 24-hour day but over long periods of time where the wind doesn't blow, you have reliable energy. That's a path. But energy storage is hard. That's not a guaranteed path.
Once you got a solar panel on a roof, energy is free. Once we convert our entire electricity grid to green and renewable energy, cost of living goes down.
One of the biggest issues with renewables right now is the fact that if the wind isn't blowing, if the sun isn't shining, we don't have energy. Many people are working on storage technology so when the wind isn't blowing, we can use the energy stored in our giant batteries, essentially. But what happens if we don't have enough stored energy?
Sunlight and wind are inherently unreliable and energy-dilute. As such, adding solar panels and wind turbines to the grid in large quantities increases the cost of generating electricity, locks in fossil fuels, and increases the environmental footprint of energy production.
In reality, Republicans have long been at war with clean energy. They have ridiculed investments in solar and wind power, bashed energy-efficiency standards, attacked state moves to promote renewable energy and championed laws that would enshrine taxpayer subsidies for fossil fuels while stripping them from wind and solar.
I think there's a really great amount of potential for Hawaii to become an example of what's possible with renewable energy because there are so many renewable resources here: energy, solar energy, and wind energy. There's so much potential here.
Clubbing energy efficiency with renewable energy will give us the much-needed window to incubate the renewable energy sector, particularly large solar, without having to increase the price of electricity.
Energy consumption has to be managed by an intelligent grid when it comes to highly populated areas. Smart-grid technologies allow for the integration of renewable energy into the grid as well as energy from distributed sources.
Renewable energy and climate change are very important to a lot of people, because we need jobs and we really, really believe that we can create jobs by moving down a path toward 100 percent renewable energy.
By the year 2000, such renewable energy sources could provide 40 percent of the global energy budget; by 2025, humanity could obtain 75 percent of its energy from solar resources.
One of the reasons I think the population question is important, if we want to be as green as possible, any of our energy that is truly renewable is limited. Solar and wind are intermittent and they're so diffuse, it's difficult to harness them in a significant way. But one thing we could be doing is making it a law (like it is in Israel and Cyprus) to take every building eight stories or under and heat all of the water in those buildings with solar energy. It's absolutely simple and cheap technology.
Germany has a lot of solar power. In fact, in 2005, some 55 or 57 percent of worldwide installations were photovoltaics in Germany. That's 57 percent of all worldwide solar photovoltaics. Because of the high feed-in tariff, they have a way of allowing you to produce electricity and ship it into the grid at very high prices.
I stood with Jeff Merkley, the senator from Oregon, and Bernie Sanders, who I think may come from the very state you are in today. And they put forward really a landmark piece of legislation. For the first time, they said we need 100 percent renewable energy. Not, "We need some solar panels and we need some fracking wells." Not the all of the above energy policy that the Obama administration favored. Instead, finally saying, we are ready to go, 100 percent. The technology is clearly there.
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