The Weekly Anthropocene, April 19 2023
A tipping point for renewables worldwide, a huge boost for EVs in America, two new malaria vaccines saving lives in Africa, and more!
Clean Energy Worldwide
A landmark new report from energy think tank Ember finds that the world is on the verge of a historic tipping point towards renewable energy. Some key points:
Electricity today is the cleanest in history. Wind and solar power provided 12% of electricity globally in 2022, up from 10% in 2021 and less than 1% in 2010.
Wind and solar growth is rapid and accelerating, already dominant in plans for the future of electricity around the world. Wind and solar met 80% of global demand growth (all new electricity production being added to the grid) in 2022, and are likely to exceed global demand growth in 2023.
Thanks to this progress, 2022 may have seen the “peak” of greenhouse gas emissions from the global electricity sector. Ember forecasts that 2023 will see an 0.3% fall in fossil fuel generation, with bigger and bigger declines in coming years as wind and solar continue to grow!
Spain is seeing a surge in hybrid wind-solar projects (that’s wind turbines and solar panels occupying the same land, not the same piece of technology), with proposals for over 1,000 megawatts (1 gigawatt) of new wind/solar parks under review!
Brazil installed 1,485 megawatts (1.485 gigawatts) of new wind power and 920.2 MW of new solar power in the first quarter of 2022 alone, from 44 new wind farms and 23 new solar farms. Wind plus solar represented over 87.6% of newly installed electricity generating capacity in Brazil in January-March 2023!
Electric vehicles are already taking over the world, but the technology is still improving: a research team in South Korea has announced their invention of a new high-capacity battery anode that has the potential to expand EV driving range tenfold! It’ll take years to fully develop and commercialize, but it’s definitely something to look forward to!
And electrification isn’t just for big American-style cars. Smaller two- and three-wheeled vehicles are going electric across Southeast Asia, where they’re a dominant form of transportation.
Indonesia is allocating $455 million to subsidize new electric motorcycle sales. (This is a much bigger deal than it would be in other countries, as Indonesia has just 20 million cars but 125 million motorcycles).
And Indian automaker Mahindra recently made its 50,000 e-Alfa, a light three-wheeled electric rickshaw. The sector is already taking off: more than half of rickshaws sold in India in 2022 were electric.
Clean Energy in America
Biden’s EPA has formally proposed epoch-making new vehicle emissions standards with the potential to greatly accelerate the transition to EVs. This is a really big deal! Under the new rules, that automakers will be required to reduce their fleetwide emissions (across all cars they sell) 52% from Model Year 2026 to Model Year 2032, plus a 57% reduction for trucks. The new rules are technically “technology-neutral,” (in theory, automakers could sell only very small and light hyper-efficient combustion engine cars) but in practice making more EVs will be the only feasible way to meet the new standards.
The EPA projects that under the new rules, EVs would make up 67% of new light-duty vehicle sales and 46% of new medium-duty vehicle sales by model year 2032. For context, EVs made up just 7% of new light-duty vehicle sales in 2022 (but that’s up from just 2.3% in 2020!). The impact of these new rules would be huge: early calculations indicate that the new rules would reduce the emissions of all of America’s cars and trucks combined by 46% by 2032, and reduce US crude oil imports by 1 billion barrels per year by 2050 (for context, the US imported 2.2 billion barrels in 2021).
There’s still a lot of work to do to make this happen: even if the new rules survive Republican-led legal challenges, ramping up EV production to these extent will require a major expansion of industrial supply chains and critical minerals production. Fortunately, most automakers are starting to do that anyway (as regularly noted in this newsletter over the last six months), spurred by the Inflation Reduction Act! Great news.
The legislature in Maryland just passed a landmark offshore wind bill, targeting 8.5 GW (8,500 MW) of offshore wind capacity by 2031! (Maryland currently has four offshore wind projects totaling 2 GW approved, but not yet built). The bill also makes sure to address the details, specifying plans to sell more offshore wind leases, build out transmission line infrastructure, and prioritize local workers and supply chains.
After the Democrats won both houses of the state legislature and kept the governorship in the 2022 elections, Michigan is considering a new climate and energy package that would phase out coal by 2030 and require 100% clean electricity by 2035. The Wolverine State may soon join the 15+ other states (including Maine!) with a legal mandate for 100% clean power!
America’s grid interconnection backlog is now, along with the complicated and lengthy permitting process, one of the last remaining bottlenecks slowing down a complete society-wide shift to clean energy. A new report from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has found that the grid interconnection queue (projects waiting for a slot where the grid can accept new power) grew 40% in 2022 (thanks in large part to the Inflation Reduction Act providing more incentives for renewable energy!). Amazingly, there are now over 1,350 GW of proposed electricity generation projects (overwhelmingly wind and solar, mostly solar) and 680 GW of proposed energy storage projects (mostly batteries) waiting for permission to connect to the grid so they can confidently start building. In total, over 95% of that waitlist is zero-carbon energy.
This is an insanely huge amount. One gigawatt (GW) is 1,000 megawatts (MW). For context, at the end of 2021, the entire United States had just under 1,200 gigawatts of electricity generating capacity. This means that there is now more electricity-generating capacity in the backlog of American renewables projects waiting to be built than in all current American electricity generating facilities combined!
It’s really frustrating that all of these projects are being held up by an aging grid’s inability to accommodate them, but this is ultimately a great problem to have. Companies want to build all of these projects! The free market (with a push from the Biden Administration!) has now definitively decided that it’s a good business bet to build enough new renewables to meet the entire United States’ electricity demand! We have people champing at the bit to go build everything we need! Now we just have to overcome the last few obstacles to make it happen. In the coming years, anyone who cares about climate change needs to be cheering for new power lines as much as for new solar and wind farms!
Fortunately, there are signs of progress in modernizing the grid, although it’s painfully slow. A major new transmission line was just approved in the West after a whopping 18 years of navigating the cumbersome permitting process. The 732-mile TransWest Express will run from Sinclair, Wyoming to the Eldorado substation in Nevada, with construction starting this year and expected to be completed in 2028. This project will provide the key high-voltage link that will bring 3,000 megawatts of wind power from the plains of Wyoming (where a 600-turbine windfarm in a former coal mining community began construction this year) to power the cities of southern California, boosting the national transition to renewable energy!
Malaria Vaccines
Malaria is one of the most deadly enemies of the human species. In 2021, this mosquito-transmitted parasite sickened 247 million people and killed 619,000, most of them children in sub-Saharan Africa. Many scientists are concerned that climate change will increase malaria risk by expanding the preferred habitat of malaria-carrying mosquitoes (warm and wet). Fortunately, at long last we are making serious progress towards eradicating this deadly disease, thanks to the launch of not one but two groundbreaking new malaria vaccines.
In 2019, a pilot project for humanity’s first-ever working vaccine for malaria was launched: RTS,S/AS011 (also known as Mosquirix). Now, this project, the World Health Organization’s Malaria Vaccine Implementation Programme (the first major real-world usage of any malaria vaccine!) is going spectacularly. Across the three pilot countries of Kenya, Ghana, and Malawi, 1.4 million children have now received at least one of the four doses in a Mosquirix regimen, and 28 additional African countries are applying for support to deploy the vaccine! Malaria hospitalizations and child deaths have dropped substantially in the regions of Kenya where the vaccine has been deployed.
“The malaria vaccine has been a game-changer and a breakthrough. We’ve seen mortality go down in under-1 and under-5 children. People didn’t think we could have a vaccine for malaria, and now everyone’s excited.”
-Dr Gordon Okomo, County Director of Health, Homa Bay County, Kenya
And Mosquirix isn’t the only game in town; humanity is now in the middle of an extraordinary Cambrian explosion of biomedical advances2. A second malaria vaccine, R213, has been in clinical trials for the last few years, with early results indicating a much higher efficacy rate (reduction of malaria risk for those who receive the vaccine, broadly) of up to 80%!4 Based on not-yet-public data from an R21 trial with 5,000 children, Ghana has recently become the first country to approve the vaccine for widespread use-meaning that there are now two malaria vaccines authorized to be used on their soil, compared to zero anywhere in the world in 2018. And since R21 is so great, medical companies and African countries are moving fast to scale it up hugely. The Serum Institute of India (a vaccine maker) has pledged to make 100-200 million R21 doses per year and is currently constructing a vaccine factory in Accra, Ghana. Each dose will cost no more than a few dollars each!
The momentum appears to be unstoppable for malaria vaccines, now set to spread through Africa and save millions of children’s lives in the next few decades. This is truly spectacular news-a great victory for humanity, and a key building block to make the Anthropocene a better world for millions!
The Mosquirix vaccine was developed by GlaxoSmithKline and the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research in Maryland, with funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
R21 was developed by an international collaboration including the University of Oxford, Novavax, the Serum Institute of India, and others.
Mosquirix is great (and amazingly better than nothing) but it’s not perfect: it reduces hospital admissions by “only” about 30%, and efficacy can vary. It’s very much a “first draft” vaccine. It’s not quite an apples-to-apples comparison between Mosquirix’s 30% reduction in hospitalization rates and R21’s up to 80% efficacy rate but it’s pretty close.
Every issue is a new high it feels! This the best yet!!
The enthusiasm in your column is much appreciated! Several of the above (energy capacities and grid, EVs, vaccines) are good reminders that seemingly impossible problems can be overcome by moving towards a survivable line, rather than accepting the bad. Keep it coming, and please revisit the issues as they progress.