The State Of Renewable Energy And Building A More Regenerative Future
Corinna Bellizzi, MBA
C-Level Executive | Board Member | Brand-Builder | Sustainability PhD Candidate | Podcaster | Author
This week we got the chance to sit down with Jesson Bradshaw, CEO of Energy Ogre, a Houton, TX based electricity management company. The episode aired on Wednesday, 4/20/2022 and it can be found wherever you listen to podcasts. The blog below reflects some of what we covered in our discussion and provides insights from the regeneration series of podcasts from Care More Be Better, spring-boarding from interviews with Paul Hawken, and his important work.?
During these pandemic times, while we may be driving less, home energy use continues to be on the rise. With hotter, longer summers, air conditioning units are being installed at a record pace in states where they were not the norm a decade ago (just look at the Pacific Northwest). So how do we tackle rising energy demands around the globe while also doing so sustainably? Where does the energy we use really come from? And how can we build a future that moves beyond our present unsustainable state to become truly regenerative?
Many of you will remember the menacing winter storm that swept its way through the central United States, hitting Texas like an ice hammer in February of 2021. People across Texas were out of power and without water for days on end. This was such a severe event, that some even lost their lives. As a result, we even named it the 2021 Texas Power Crisis. You see, the failure here was one of intricate balance, lack of fail-safes and backups, and it showcased for the national stage where weaknesses in our power management systems could arise.
Why we still rely on fossil fuels
When demand suddenly spikes from a severe weather event, whether hot or cold, power systems can’t suddenly produce and supply more than their load will bear. Energy storage isn’t as simple as that. You can’t store energy you don’t have the systems to store, and if you aren’t actually producing excess, good luck. Most often, energy is created when it’s needed, virtually on-demand — which is why our reliance on fossil fuels has maintained its status as the primary energy producer.
Where do you store all of the excess energy you produce from renewable systems including wind, solar, water, geothermal and biomass? Is that energy storage efficient enough and with a high enough capacity to protect against energy demand surges caused by an increasingly volatile weather system? These are all questions we will have to stress-test and answer as we build out a net-zero energy system in the decades to come.
Where are we now? Where does our energy come from??
As reported by the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, in 2020, renewables made up 19.7% of utility scale electricity generation in the US, with a bulk of that energy coming from hydropower (7.3%) and wind (8.4%) with solar, the fastest growing renewable energy, coming in third (3.3%). If you think this through, that means that 80.3% of our energy was still coming from fossil fuels in 2020.
Shifting our reliance away from fossil fuels
To shift our reliance away from fossil fuels, we will need massive grid scale storage improvements at power plants and energy storage facilities and even at our homes. Technological improvements in how we store our power without having to use rare earth metals and lithium-ion batteries are emerging for commercial scale. These include molten metals, recycled materials, and common minerals like calcium and iron.
Furthermore, we will also need to improve the efficiency of our energy use. Entrepreneurs are attacking this very question from many different angles. Connecting with Manik Suri, CEO and founder of Hello Therma, in an earlier podcast, we learned that 7% of global emissions come from refrigeration solutions, and that most of those greenhouse gases are comprised of gases that we cannot affect by drawing it down (i.e. not carbon dioxide). He seeks to build improve efficiencies by reducing energy used by fixed refrigeration units. By using technology to monitor temperatures in refrigeration units and refine their power usage throughout the day and night, he’s saving companies money, reducing failures in the sector, and also reducing greenhouse gases.
And as Jesson Bradshaw points out in our podcast interview this week, his company, Energy Ogre, has successfully saved many people as much as 40% on their electricity bills, just by refining when and how they use the energy they need.?
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You can listen to this episode of Care More Be Better on any podcast platform, or watch it on YouTube:?
Has renewable energy killed the coal industry??
To quote Paul Hawken’s recent New York Times Bestseller, Regeneration: Ending The Climate Crisis In One Generation, Coal is dead.
In May 2020, renewably generated electricity in the United States topped coal for the first time. Three-quarters of the coal-powered plants in the United States could be shut down, mothballed and replaced with solar, and it would save money for the owners of those plants while lowering electricity rates for consumers. Coal has become a fossil fuel in the true sense of the word. It’s dead. (p. 199)
For a deep dive into what it may take for us to move towards 100% renewable energy, I invite you to visit a blog and podcast I recorded on the subject of Electrifying Everything. This episode clocks in at 22 minutes and 32 seconds and was part 9 of an 11 podcast series dedicated to Paul Hawken’s book and work with Regeneration.org.
The Regeneration Series of Podcasts
The regeneration series followed our in-depth interview of Paul Hawken in September 2021, just prior to the release of his book, Regeneration: Ending The Climate Crisis In One Generation, which quickly became a New York Times Bestseller. The complete list of podcasts which reviewed each chapter of this book is included below. This series was even selected as curriculum for high schools that were covering the topic of climate change this fall:
Other episodes on the topic of regeneration and climate activism: