Electricity produced from renewables surpassed coal in the U.S. last year

Electricity produced from renewables surpassed coal in the United States for the first time in 2022, the US Energy Information Administration announced, as reported by PBS. Meanwhile, a recent study published in a scientific journal argued that the trend is likely to continue in future.

Renewable energy surpassed nuclear power for the first time last year, and also surpassed nuclear power in 2022.

The growth of wind and solar power has significantly driven the growth of renewable energy and contributed 14% of domestic electricity generation in 2022. Hydropower contributed 6%, while biomass and geothermal sources contributed less than 1%.

“I’m glad to see that we’ve crossed that threshold, but it’s just the first step on a fast, inexpensive journey,” said Stephen Porder, an ecology professor and assistant provost for sustainability at Brown University.

California accounts for 26 percent of the nation’s utility-scale solar generation, followed by Texas at 16 percent and North Carolina at 8 percent.

Texas has the most wind power, accounting for 26 percent of the U.S. total, followed by Iowa (10 percent) and Oklahoma (9 percent).

“This booming growth is largely driven by economics,” said Gregory Weston, president and CEO of the American Renewable Energy Council. “Over the past decade, the cost of wind levelling has fallen by 70 percent, while the cost of solar levelling has fallen by an even more staggering 90 percent.”

“In most of the United States, renewables are now the most affordable source of new electricity,” he said.

The U.S. Energy Information Administration projects that wind will increase its share of the U.S. electricity generation mix from 11 percent to 12 percent between 2022 and 2023, and solar from 4 percent to 5 percent. From 2022 to 2023, natural gas’s share is expected to remain at 39 percent, while coal is expected to fall from 20 percent last year to 17 percent this year.

“Wind and solar are going to be the backbone of renewable energy growth, but whether they can supply 100 percent of America’s electricity without a backup is something engineers are debating,” said Brown’s Porder.

He said there were many decisions to be made as the proportion of renewable energy supplied to the grid increased.

That poses challenges for engineers and policymakers, Porder said, because existing energy networks are built to provide power from a consistent source. Renewable energy sources such as solar and wind power generate electricity intermittently. As a result, battery storage, long-distance transmission and other measures are needed to help address these challenges, he said.

The environmental impact assessment found that the country still relies heavily on burning fossil fuels that contribute to climate change. Coal-fired power accounted for 20 percent of the power sector in 2022, down from 23 percent in 2021. Natural gas was the largest source of electricity in the United States in 2022, accounting for 39 percent last year and 37 percent in 2021.

“When you look at the data,” said Melissa Lott, director of research at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy, And what you find is that natural gas has been a major driver of lowering greenhouse gas emissions from electricity because it has largely displaced coal-fired power plants.”

“Going forward, you can’t let emissions continue to rise, you need to bring them down quickly,” Lott said.

The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which affects the number of renewable energy projects coming online in 2022, is expected to have a “huge” impact on accelerating clean energy projects, Lott said.

Meanwhile, a researcher at Nanjing University in China, recently used grey forecasting models to study the electricity production from coal and renewables in the USA, China and Japan. The study arrived at similar conclusions, and projected an increase in electricity generated from the renewables in the US in the future.