The Week in Sustainability: Forecasting the cost of renewables and the “Falcon Curve”
Sustain.Life (now part of Workiva)
Future-proof your business by fighting climate change.
Welcome to The Week in Sustainability for October 10–14, 2022. Each week,?Sustain.Life’s sustainability team offers commentary about the week’s most pressing issues and stories in sustainability and ESG. Watch all episodes?here.
New studies released on forecasting the cost of renewables
The good news: The renewables we make are helping the cost of energy fall faster than previously expected. A new paper from economists at Oxford University highlights new modeling on the cost of clean technology. The TL;DR: We’ve vastly underestimated the economic benefits of clean technologies, and there are enormous savings to accelerating cleantech deployment.
In short, deploying clean technologies is good economic practice, not to mention the benefits of nearly eliminating GHGs and air pollution and building a stronger green economy.
The “Falcon Curve” or the impact of electrification on the grid
The Falcon Curve came out of a recent Harvard School of Public Health study and visualizes how electrification will impact the grid, and it takes a month-to-month approach to account for seasonal variations. It places importance on “flattening the energy creation and distribution curve.” Air source heat pumps and geothermal heat pumps could help bring that wintertime curve down. Seasonal energy storage and new tech in that space—like pumped hydro and geomechanical storage—could also help.