2023 wrapped

Looking back on 2023 can be a pretty bleak exercise. The war in Ukraine dragged on, with new conflict in Israel and Palestine bringing fresh horror and baffling political rhetoric. The world largely left COVID behind (though of course the virus has had no such amnesia). In our race toward normalcy, inflation burned a hole through businesses and budgets. Rising interest rates intended to cool economic engines have had an outsize effect on renewable energy projects, and for the first time ever prices for renewable energy rose. This is an especially unfortunate development in a year that smashed warming records. Historic floods struck Pakistan and Libya, killing thousands, while millions were subjected to unhealthy air quality from Canadian wildfires that raged all summer long. More wildfires swept through Greece and razed an entire historic community in Hawaii with deadly speed. Meanwhile, atmospheric rivers dumped so much rain in California's central valley that they resurrected long-dormant Tulare Lake, breaking a years-long drought and critical water emergency.

Fires, floods, war. It's no surprise that the world continues to feel tenuous, like we haven't fully emerged from the fever dream of COVID but instead have entered a dream-within-a-dream. Waking Life meets Twin Peaks. There's a lively debate in the U.S. about why folks report feeling pessimistic about the economy when, by most traditional measures, the economy is quite strong. Perhaps people are just generally feeling pessimistic? This would be understandable, and with a major U.S. election on the horizon in 2024, you could be forgiven for carrying pessimism into the new year.

Well, that's just not my style. Here are my top five good things that happened in 2023.

1. Groundwire launched in March 2023: Shameless self-promotion alert! I launched this newsletter with its inaugural edition on March 14, 2023. What I didn’t realize at the time is that within two weeks a newsletter would evolve into a new business. Since then, we have published 41 newsletter editions, worked with five clients covering the full spectrum of the energy transition, and reached audiences across the globe. These past nine months have been a wild ride and I am enormously grateful for all the support and encouragement I've received. Highlights from 2023 include publishing a Letter to the Editor in the Financial Times (shout-out to Raquel Pichardo for her support on this), a deep-dive interview with Darius Snieckus at Aegir Insights , and qualifying as an Offshore Wind Trailblazer finalist for the Oceantic Network 's Ventus Awards.
2. Implementation of the Inflation Reduction Act and historic investments by the U.S. Department of Energy: U.S. federal agencies had a big job to do in 2023: the implementation and distribution of?hundreds of billions of dollars in climate and infrastructure investment. The U.S. Department of Energy awarded over $3.5 billion in funding to transmission projects, with a second funding opportunity underway, and selected seven hydrogen hubs to receive up to $7 billion in federal funding. New tax provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act are intended to spur adoption of clean technologies like renewable energy, electric vehicles, and hydrogen. As always, the devil is in the details. The Internal Revenue Services has been working overtime to issue guidance documents that define how these credits can be accessed, with major guidance forthcoming any day for the controversial hydrogen production tax credit. I had the honor of being featured in Air & Waste Management Association 's Q4 edition of EM+, their members-only publication for air and waste management professionals, with an article explaining what is at stake in the clean hydrogen debate.
3. COP28's commitment to tripling renewables by 2030: Climate delegates from 118 countries gathered in Dubai for the 28th Conference of Parties (see previous editions focused on this meeting here, here, and here). There was broad disappointment among the climate community that this year's agreement failed to achieve a commitment to phasing out fossil fuels. However, the delegates did agree to a commitment to triple renewable energy capacity by 2030, with the goal of eliminating fossil fuel use for electricity by 2050. That's a big deal! The goal of reducing fossil fuel use is key - in recent years, global energy demand has risen nearly as fast as renewable energy deployment. Is Jevon's Paradox in play?
4. Solar installations hit 1 GW every day: BloombergNEF analysis revealed that this year, solar installations were expected to reach 1 gigawatt every day. Solar has truly come to the forefront as the renewable energy success story of the 2020s and shows no sign of slowing. It will be interesting to see how that midyear projection stacks up against the actual figures at the end of the year. The rapid rise in interest rates could have slowed the pace of development in the second half. I also wonder how many of those gigawatts are delivering electricity - the vast majority of installations took place in China, where project development sometimes outpaces grid interconnection capacity.
5. Taylor Swift, Beyonce, and Barbenheimer: What does pop culture have to do with the energy transition? Well, aside from the stimulus these juggernauts delivered (Swifties and the Beyhive delivered $10 billion in economic activity in the U.S. alone!), they also represent something that has been sorely lacking in U.S. culture more broadly: a unifying thread. This is a phenomenon I've been reflecting on a lot lately, especially throughout my recent Mad Men rewatch binge. Pre-1990s, current events and celebrity were much more collective experiences. Monolithic almost. Today's cultural landscape is highly atomized and the consequences of our fragmentation into algorithmically-curated demographic bubbles are potentially grave. Perhaps the enormous, almost universal popularity of these pop culture phenomena signals a desire to find community. As we emerge from pandemic isolation, there is comfort in shared experiences. We need to lean into that impulse as much as we can.

?

?Groundwire will be taking a much-needed holiday break next week. I'm looking forward to bringing you more great content in the new year! Stay tuned for a special report coming soon with trends to watch in 2024.