New data on clean energy's growth just came in and it delivered the good news I needed this week.

Through May, the U.S. added more than twice as much solar power capacity as it did through the same period last year.

There were a few other positive trends in the data:

🧵 Battery storage capacity is growing even faster than solar.

The U.S. has added 384% more storage capacity this year compared to the first 5 months of 2023.

Solar and batteries are expected to make up 80% of new power capacity this year in the U.S.

Both technologies are going to shatter the records they each set in 2023.

🧵 Last year, the U.S. added a record 19.3 GW of utility-scale solar capacity.

That was a big year and represented 72% more than 2022. But it's nothing compared to what's in store this year.

By year's end, the U.S. is expected to add 37.5 GW of capacity (94% y/y growth).

In the last decade, the price of lithium-ion batteries has plummeted.

As a result, we're now building much bigger batteries capable of storing more clean energy.



🧵 distilled.earth/p/the-rise-of-…
As I wrote in a story last year, LIB batteries have quickly gone from providing niche grid services like frequency regulation to storing large amounts of power and supplying energy at times of peak demand.

distilled.earth/p/the-growth-o…

Last month, the U.S. built 3,980 MW of carbon-free electricity generating capacity.

So how much fossil fuel capacity did the country build that same month?

1 MW.

🧵 In April 2024, Texas built the most clean energy capacity of any state, adding 435 MW of solar, 528 MW of wind, and 243 MW of battery storage capacity.

Georgia brought the second most online because, well, Vogtle.

To decarbonize homes, we need to install millions of heat pumps.

In 2023, heat pumps outsold gas furnaces for the second year in a row.

I spent the last month trying to understand why. Here's what I learned:

🧵 distilled.earth/p/heat-pumps-o…
Reason #1 -- State and local policies

Over the last decade, more than 130 cities and 10 states have passed laws encouraging homeowners and builders to electrify their homes.

Many of those laws are working.

Paris just voted to triple parking fees for SUVs.

This is one of the many policies that has helped Paris go from one of the most polluted, traffic-clogged cities in the world to a sustainability leader.

Here's the story of how Paris took back its streets from cars. One of the first efforts to reduce car dependency in Paris was the launch of a bike-share service called Velib.

These bike-share services are in cities around the world today.

But when Paris launched the program in 2007 it was revolutionary.

In the 1960s a group of nuclear weapons scientists at Los Alamos went rogue.

Instead of building bombs, they began exploring a new form of clean energy.

50 years later, that technology is finally coming to market. It could solve one of renewable energy's biggest problems.

🧵 The initial idea came when one of the scientists, Bob Potter, was reading At The Earth's Core, a 1914 fantasy novel.

He began to wonder, what if it was possible to harass the vast amount of heat under the Earth’s surface to create electricity?

Mr. Bean just wrote an op-ed claiming that gas-powered cars are better for the environment than EVs.

But apparently he's never heard of a lifecycle analysis.

All EVs—even big electric trucks/SUVs—are better for the environment than their gas-powered counterparts. Make no mistake, there are environmental problems with EVs.

That's why we should build dense walkable cities with better public transit.

We should make and encourage people to buy smaller EVs.

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American cars are uniquely big, expensive, and inefficient.

Here's the best-selling car in America last year (right) vs. the best-seller in Europe (left).

So why are American cars so big?

🧵 The screenshot above comes from a video I just published on the weird loophole that made American cars so big.

If you want the 10 min version of the story, check out that video.

For those that want the 2 min version, below is a quick summary..

2020 corporate execs: "Let's make a big climate pledge. We can just buy junk offsets. It'll be cheapest, easiest marketing we've ever done."

2023: Here's a video I made about Delta's junk offsets a few months ago:

The way that humans generate electricity is changing rapidly.

Here are 7 charts that show one of the most important trends in power generation:

The growth of solar energy.

🧵 Between 2000 and 2010, solar production grew by a factor of 20.

The following decade, growth accelerated even more; between 2010 and 2020, production grew by a factor of 35.

Over the last ten years solar has grown by an average of 30% per year.

In the 1990s, Paris was one of the most polluted, traffic-clogged cities in the world.

Today, the city is a world leader in sustainable urban development.

Here's the story of how Paris took back its streets from cars. One of the first efforts to reduce car dependency in Paris was the launch of a bike-share service called Velib.

These bike-share services are in cities around the world today.

But when Paris launched the program in 2007 it was revolutionary.

In the last few decades, the SUV market in America has exploded.

Automakers say the reason for this growth has been "changing consumer preferences."

But that's not the full story.

One of the main reasons for the growth is the "SUV loophole."

🧵 In 1975, Congress passed a law that forced automakers to double the average fuel efficiency of their vehicles to 27.5 miles per gallon by 1985.

But half a century later, the average vehicle produced in America still doesn’t get 27.5 MPG.

So what happened?

Clean energy critics often argue that addressing climate change will require too much mining.

So I looked into the data.

I found that our current fossil fuel economy requires 535x more mining than a 100% clean energy economy would.

🧵 In 2020, 7m tons of minerals were mined globally for low-carbon energy, according to @IEA.

(These are often referred to as “transition minerals.”)

In order to limit warming to 2°C, we’ll need to scale up that production to about 28m tons per year.

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Scientists from around the world worked on the latest IPCC report for almost a decade.

But according to leaked documents, many of their recommendations were removed or altered significantly.

🧵 Whenever the IPCC releases a major report, media outlets generally refer to “the report” in the singular.

But there are actually multiple reports.

There's a report that scientists produce that is often thousands of pages.

And there's the summary report for policymakers.

The heat pump market is growing quickly in Europe.

Last year sales were up 38%, according to newly released data.

🧵 According to @janrosenow and @duncanmgibb:

In some countries, like Poland, heat pump sales grew by more than 100% year-over-year.

90% of homes in Israel use a solar water heater.

But even in sunny U.S. states like California and Florida, virtually no one uses a solar water heater.

Here's why:

🧵 Surprisingly ~100 years ago, a lot of American homes used solar water heaters.

In the 1940s about 40% of homes in Los Angeles used a solar water heater.

Why?

The state had a lot of sunshine, mild winters, and most importantly, expensive energy.

distilled.earth/p/90-of-homes-…

In the 1970s, Dutch cities like Amsterdam were full of traffic and air pollution.

Now they are models of sustainable urban planning.

Here's the story of how the Netherlands started building their cities for humans, not cars.

🧵 Like many countries, the Netherlands built a lot of car infrastructure in the 1950s and 60s.

At one point, the government brought in an American planner named David Jokinen to advise them.

Here's what he wanted Amsterdam to look like:

Renewable energy critics love to point out that it takes 255 tons of coal to build a wind turbine.

But it would take a coal-fired power plant 154,494 tons of coal to generate as much electricity as a wind turbine produces over its entire life.

🧵 When I joined 40+ anti-renewable Facebook groups a few months ago, I saw the meme below a lot.

One of the goals of this meme is to argue that wind power isn’t environmentally-friendly because turbines are made using coal.

But it lacks some important context.

For the last month I've been writing weekly summaries of climate-related news.

Here's what happened last week:

🧵 One of the biggest stories of the week was Biden's World Bank pick.

A couple weeks ago, David Malpass announced he would step down as president of the World Bank.

The Biden administration said they planned to nominate a replacement with a strong background in clean energy.

Fossil fuel companies in the Permian Basin claim 1.4% of the methane they drill gets into the atmosphere.

But when a group of Stanford researchers measured 26,000 oil and gas wells, they found a 9% leak rate.

That makes gas from the Permian worse for the planet than coal. According to a study by EDF, if more than 3.2% of natural gas (methane) leaks before it is burned in a power plant, then it results in more greenhouse gas emissions than coal in the short term (20 years).

pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pn…