How to Avoid a Climate Disaster

read Weather for Dummies, still one of the best books on weather that I’ve found

In other words, we’ll save money by building renewables in the best locations, building a unified national grid, and shipping zero-emissions electrons wherever they’re needed.*

Solar cells, for example, got almost 10 times cheaper between 2010 and 2020,

You can’t ship sunlight in a railcar to some power plant; it has to be converted to electricity on the spot. But most of America’s sunlight supply is in the Southwest, and most of our wind is in the Great Plains, far from many major urban areas

The best solar panels today convert less than a quarter of the sunlight that hits them into electricity, and the theoretical limit for the most common type of commercially available panels is about 33 percent

the world’s electricity supply will need to double or even triple by 2050. And that doesn’t even account for population growth, or the fact that people will get richer and use more electricity. So the world will need much more than three times the electricity we generate now

the more power lines we install, the more the price of power goes up. In fact, transmission and distribution are responsible for more than a third of the final cost of electricity

To get close to 100 percent, we’d have to move lots of clean energy from where it’s made (sunny places, ideally near the equator, and windy regions) to where it’s needed (cloudy, windless ones).

Between 2000 and 2018, China tripled the amount of coal power it uses. That’s more capacity than in the United States, Mexico, and Canada combined!

Over time, electricity has become extraordinarily cheap. One study found that it was at least 200 times more affordable in the year 2000 than in 1900.