“We have created a new brick that can be incorporated into your house that has the functionality of storing electrical energy.” Bricks are about as basic as architectural materials can get, yet these simple building blocks have hidden powers that can be leveraged to provide electricity, according to …
Scientists Turn Normal Red Bricks into Electricity-Storing Supercapacitors
The smart brick. Image: D’Arcy Laboratory, Department of Chemistry, Washington University in St. Louis
Bricks are about as basic as architectural materials can get, yet these simple building blocks have hidden powers that can be leveraged to provide electricity, according to a new study.
Scientists modified a common red brick—the same kind you’ll find on sale for under a dollar at your local hardware store—so that it could power a green LED light. This proof-of-concept for a “smart brick” reveals that brick technology, which dates back thousands of years, can be tweaked to have futuristic applications, including electrical conductivity and sensing capabilities. The results were published on Tuesday in Nature Communications.
“We have created a new brick that can be incorporated into your house that has the functionality of storing electrical energy,” said study co-author Julio D’Arcy, assistant professor of chemistry at Washington University in St. Louis, in a call.
“We are thinking that sensing applications is a low-hanging fruit for these bricks,” he added.
For years, D’Arcy and his colleagues have experimented with rust, the ubiquitous reddish film that forms on any structure that contains iron. Rust is normally seen as a corrosive nuisance, but D’Arcy’s team has shown that rusty iron oxides have useful properties for material science.
“We discovered that if you actually treat rust chemically, it actually becomes reactive,” D’Arcy explained. “So something that we typically think of as waste turns out to be a useful chemical for producing materials that can be used for storing energy.”
The pigment in red bricks is partially derived from rust, which inspired the researchers to take a closer look at the structural properties of bricks to see if they could be converted to an energy-storing device called a supercapacitor.
The intricate porous interiors of bricks turned out to be an ideal space to introduce sophisticated polymer coatings, which react with rust to increase the surface area and conductivity of bricks.
These photos and microscope images show the structure of a common fired red brick before and after deposition of nanofibrillar coating that increases surface area within the brick. Image: The D’Arcy Laboratory in Washington University in St. Louis
As a result of the modifications, the team was able to engineer a prototype smart brick that stored enough energy to power the green light. The team is currently building on its findings by manufacturing specialized bricks with various metal oxides and polymer coatings.
In addition to tinkering with conductivities and storage capacity, the researchers hope to demonstrate that air sensors or water purification systems could be integrated into the bricks.
“When the water runs down your rooftop and it goes through the brick, what if the water gets purified when it comes down and you finally collect it?” D’Arcy speculated. “We always think about purifying water on a filter. But what if the house was a filter?”
In the near-term, however, D’Arcy and his colleagues are focused on boosting the efficiency of these bricks so that they could be incorporated as a back-up power source in regular homes, such as an emergency lighting system.
“If we can increase the amount of energy that can be stored in one brick,” D’Arcy said, “we can scale up and use even less bricks.”
Highly efficient process makes seawater drinkable in 30 minutes
Access to clean, safe drinking water is a necessity that’s worryingly not being met in many parts of the world. A new study has used a material called a metal-organic framework (MOF) to filter pollutants out of seawater, generating large amounts of fresh water per day while using much less energy than other methods.
MOFs are extremely porous materials with high surface areas – theoretically, if one teaspoon of the stuff was unpacked it could cover a football field. That much surface area makes it great for grabbing hold of molecules and particles.
In this case, the team developed a new type of MOF dubbed PSP-MIL-53, and put it to work trapping salt and impurities in brackish water and seawater. When the material is placed in the water, it selectively pulls ions out of the liquid and holds them on its surface. Within 30 minutes, the MOF was able to reduce the total dissolved solids (TDS) in the water from 2,233 parts per million (ppm) to under 500 ppm. That’s well below the threshold of 600 ppm that the World Health Organization recommends for safe drinking water.
Using this technique, the material was able to produce as much as 139.5 L (36.9 gal) of fresh water per kg of MOF per day. And once the MOF is “full” of particles, it can be quickly and easily cleaned for reuse. To do so, it’s placed in sunlight, which causes it to release the captured salts in as little as four minutes.
While there’s no shortage of desalination systems in use or development, the team says that this new MOF is faster-acting than other techniques, and requires much less energy throughout the cycle.
“Thermal desalination processes by evaporation are energy-intensive, and other technologies, such as reverse osmosis, has a number of drawbacks, including high energy consumption and chemical usage in membrane cleaning and dechlorination,” says Huanting Wang, lead author of the study. “Sunlight is the most abundant and renewable source of energy on Earth. Our development of a new adsorbent-based desalination process through the use of sunlight for regeneration provides an energy-efficient and environmentally-sustainable solution for desalination.”
The research was published in the journal Nature Sustainability.
Source: Monash University via Eurekalert
New catalyst rearranges carbon dioxide and water into ethanol fuel
Researchers at the US Dept of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory, working with Northern Illinois University, have discovered a new catalyst that can convert carbon dioxide and water into ethanol with “very high energy efficiency, high selectivity for the desired final product and low cost.”
The catalyst is made of atomically dispersed copper on a carbon-powder support, and acts as an electrocatalyst, sitting in a low voltage electric field as water and carbon dioxide are passed over it. The reaction breaks down these molecules, then selectively rearranges them into ethanol with an electrocatalytic selectivity, or “Faradaic efficiency”, higher than 90%. The team says this is “much higher than any other reported process.”
Once the ethanol is created, it can be used as a fuel additive, or as an intermediate product in the chemical, pharmaceutical and cosmetics industries. Using it as a fuel would be an example of a “circular carbon economy,” in which CO2 recaptured from the atmosphere is effectively put back in as it’s burned.
If the process is powered by renewable energy, which the researchers say it can be due to its low-temperature, low-pressure operation and easy responsiveness to intermittent power, then great; all you’re losing is fresh water, which is its own issue.
Realistically, you’re still a lot better off running an EV than a car fueled with gasoline using this ethanol as an additive. While its Faradaic efficiency might be excellent, its overall electrical efficiency won’t be; putting the same amount of energy into a battery will get more power to the wheels at the end of the day, because combustion engines are horribly inefficient in comparison to electric powertrains, and there will be additional significant power losses at this catalysis stage, as well as the industrial carbon capture and transport stages.
There’s no way of telling at this stage what the costs might be, either. There are already a number of synthetic fuels using catalytically captured carbon dioxide; Carbon Engineering is one firm that pulls CO2 from the air to create a synthetic crude that can be refined into high-purity aviation fuel, for example.
Such synthetic fuels need to compete with regular fossil gasoline on price, so without knowing how the Argonne team’s carbon-capture ethanol competes with bioethanol and other sources there, it’s hard to place this on the spectrum between “neat result that won’t see wide scale use” and “environmentally significant discovery.”
The paper is published in Nature Energy.
Source: Argonne National Laboratory
How falling solar costs have renewed clean hydrogen hopes
The world is increasingly banking on green hydrogen fuel to fill some of the critical missing pieces in the clean-energy puzzle.
US presidential candidate Joe Biden’s climate plan calls for a research program to produce a clean form of the gas that’s cheap enough to fuel power plants within a decade. Likewise, Japan, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand, and the European Union have all published hydrogen roadmaps that rely on it to accelerate greenhouse gas reductions in the power, transportation, or industrial sectors. Meanwhile, a growing number of companies around the world are building ever larger green hydrogen plants, or exploring its potential to produce steel, create carbon-neutral aviation fuel, or provide a backup power source for server farms.
The attraction is obvious: hydrogen, the most abundant element in the universe, could fuel our vehicles, power our electricity plants, and provide a way to store renewable energy without pumping out the carbon dioxide driving climate change or other pollutants (its only byproduct from cars and trucks is water). But while researchers have trumpeted the promise of a “hydrogen economy” for decades, it’s barely made a dent in fossil fuel demand, and nearly all of it is still produced through a carbon polluting process involving natural gas.
The grand vision of the hydrogen economy has been held back by the high costs of creating a clean version, the massive investments into vehicles, machines and pipes that could be required to put it to use, and progress in competing energy storage alternatives like batteries.
So what’s driving the renewed interest?
For one thing, the economics are rapidly changing. We can produce hydrogen directly by simply splitting water, in a process known as electrolysis, but it’s been prohibitively expensive in large part because it requires a lot of electricity. As the price of solar and wind power continues to rapidly decline, however, it will begin to look far more feasible.
At the same time, as more nations do the hard math on how to achieve their aggressive emissions targets in the coming decades, a green form of hydrogen increasingly seems crucial, says Joan Ogden, director of the sustainable transportation energy pathway program at the University of California, Davis. It’s a flexible tool that could help to clean up an array of sectors where we still don’t have affordable and ready solutions, like aviation, shipping, fertilizer production, and long-duration energy storage for the electricity grid.
Falling renewables costs
For now, however, clean hydrogen is far too expensive in most situations. A recent paper found that relying on solar power to run the electrolyzers that split water can run six times higher than the natural gas process, known as steam methane reforming.
There are plenty of energy experts who maintain that the added costs and complexities of producing, storing and using a clean version means it will never really take off beyond marginal use cases.
But the good news is that electricity itself makes up a huge share of the cost—upwards of 60% or more—and, again, the costs of renewables are falling fast. Meanwhile, the costs of electrolyzers themselves are projected to decline steeply as manufacturers scale up production, and various research groups develop advanced versions of the technology.
A Nature Energy paper early last year found that if market trends continue, green hydrogen could be economically competitive on an industrial scale within a decade. Similarly, the International Energy Agency projects that the cost of clean hydrogen will fall 30% by 2030.
VOESTALPINE
Green hydrogen may already be nearly affordable in some places where periods of excess renewable generation drive down the costs of electricity to nearly zero. In a research note last month, Morgan Stanley analysts wrote that locating green hydrogen facilities next to major wind farms in the US Midwest and Texas could make the fuel cost competitive within two years.
A June study from the US National Renewable Energy Laboratory found it may be closer to the middle of the century before hydrogen is the most affordable technology for long duration storage on the grid. But as fluctuating renewables like solar and wind become the dominant source of electricity, utilities will need to store up enough energy to keep the grid reliably working not just for a few hours, but for days and even weeks during certain months when those resources flag.
Hydrogen shines in that scenario compared to other storage technologies, because adding capacity is relatively cheap, says Joshua Eichman, a senior research engineer at the lab and co-author of the study. To increase the length of time that batteries can reliably provide electricity, you need to stack up more and more of them, multiplying the cost of every pricey component within them. With hydrogen, you just need to build a bigger tank, or use a deeper underground cavern, he says.
Putting hydrogen to use
For hydrogen to fully replace carbon-emitting fuels, we’d need to overhaul our infrastructure to distribute, store, and use it. We’d have to produce vehicles and ships with fuel cells that convert hydrogen into electricity, as well as fueling stations along ports and roads. And we’d need to stack up fuel cells or build or retrofit power plants to use the fuel to power the grid directly.
All of which will take a lot of time and money.
But there’s another scenario that sidesteps, or delays, much of this infrastructure overhaul. Once you have hydrogen, it’s relatively simple to combine it with carbon monoxide to produce synthetic versions of the fuels that already power our cars, trucks, ships, and planes. The industrial process to do so is a century old and has been used at various times by petroleum-strapped nations to make fuels from coal or natural gas.
CARBON ENGINEERING
Carbon Engineering, based in Squamish, British Columbia, is developing facilities that capture carbon dioxide from the air. The company plans to combine it with carbon-free hydrogen to make synthetic fuels. The idea is that the fuel will be carbon neutral, emitting no more carbon dioxide than was removed or produced in the process.
In a presentation at a Codex conference late last year, Carbon Engineering founder and Harvard professor David Keith said that falling solar prices should enable them to bring “air-to-fuels” to market for about $1 a liter (around $4 per gallon) in the mid-2020s–and that the price will continue to fall from there.
“The big news here is that this could be done with commodity hardware starting soon,” he said. “You could get to something like a million barrels a day of air-to-fuels synthetic hydrocarbon capacity, I think, soon after 2030, and after that there’s no obvious scaling limit.”
In effect, the process provides a way to convert fleeting, fluctuating solar power into permanently storable fuels that can fill the tanks of any of our machines. “This is about an energy pathway to … deal with the intermittency problem and deal with it in a way that allows you to power high-energy density needs around the world; allows you to fly airplanes across the North Atlantic,” Keith said.
The Dawn of Wireless Electricity Is Finally Upon Us. Here’s How New Zealand Will Do It.
Picture the street outside your home. Now erase the power lines. Imagine interstate highways without the unsightly cable towers that dot the expansive United States landscape. This could be the wireless future of energy if a partnership between New Zealand’s government and a startup called Emrod works out—and it all dates back to the wildest dreams of Nikola Tesla.
Wireless electricity sounds like science fiction, but the technology is already realized and primed for a utility-scale case study. And in this first-of-its-kind pilot program, Powerco—New Zealand’s second-largest electricity distributor—will test Emrod technology beginning in 2021.
The companies plan to deploy the prototype wireless energy infrastructure across a 130-foot expanse. To make it possible, Emrod uses rectifying antennas, a.k.a. “rectennas,” that pass microwaves of electricity from one waypoint to the next: a solution well-suited to New Zealand’s mountainous terrain. Specialized square elements are mounted on intervening poles to act as pass-through points that keep the electricity humming along, and a broader surface area “catches” the entire wave, so to speak.
“We’ve developed a technology for long-range wireless power transmission,” says Emrod founder Greg Kushnir. “The technology itself has been around for quite a while. It sounds futuristic and fantastic but has been an iterative process since Tesla.”
The link to Nikola Tesla, Kushnir admits, is more of an imaginative, feel-good tale than a true genealogy. Tesla considered wireless power in the 1890s, as he labored over his breakthrough “Tesla coil” transformer circuit that generated alternating current electricity, but he couldn’t prove that he could control a beam of electricity across long distances. “The sheer fact that he could imagine it is remarkable, but the sort of technology he was looking to apply wouldn’t have worked,” Kushnir says.
Emrod, by contrast, can keep the beam of electricity tight and focused with two technologies. The first is transmission-related: Small radio elements and single wave patterns create a collimated beam, which means that the rays are aligned in parallel, and will not spread much as they propagate. Second, Emrod uses engineered metamaterials with tiny patterns that effectively interact with those radio waves.
Emrod’s wireless antennas are a medium, like a cable, meaning that their task is to simply connect an electrical supply to customers. Kushnir envisions placing Emrod technology on difficult terrain that links with the sunniest, windiest, or most hydro-friendly points on Earth as these often rural places have the widest gap in electrification.
By eliminating the need for long stretches of traditional copper wiring, Emrod says it can bring power to these regions, which can’t afford the kind of infrastructure that supports the power grid. There could be positive environmental ramifications to this, as well, since many sites that don’t have access to electricity end up leaning on diesel generators for energy.
There are even opportunities to support offshore wind and solar farms, Kushnir says, because the current friction point for those forms of renewable energy come down to the cost of transmission. In the Cook Strait—which connects the North and South Islands of New Zealand—offshore wind farms require expensive underwater cables, for instance.
At this point, Kushnir has enough corporate buy-in to take the next regulatory steps, and begin propagating Emrod’s technology. The real challenge, he says, will be to reassure and educate the public.
“We anticipate a lot of pushback similar to the stuff we’ve been seeing with 5G,” he says. “People push back on additional radiation around them, and it’s completely understandable.” But luckily, he says, Emrod’s controlled beam sheds no
radiation. It’s not a “spray” pattern like a cell phone antenna.
So if all goes well during the New Zealand pilot program in early 2021, wireless energy could quite literally be on the horizon in the U.S., too. As for when? That’s anybody’s guess.
Power Without Wires
To wirelessly conduct energy, Emrod generates electricity in a tight and focused beam in the non-ionizing Industrial, Scientific, and Medical band of the electromagnetic spectrum—the portion of the radio band that corresponds to Wi-Fi and Bluetooth frequencies.
From there, a transmitting antenna sends the power through various relay points to a “rectenna” that can safely transport the waves in the same frequency range as the microwave oven in your home. Meanwhile, tiny lasers monitor the rectennas to sense any obstructions between relay points. That way, there is no outside radiation, and
no birds are harmed in this transfer of power.
—Courtney Linder
🎥 Now Watch This:
Caroline Delbert is a writer, avid reader, and contributing editor at Pop Mech. She’s also an enthusiast of just about everything. Her favorite topics include nuclear energy, cosmology, math of everyday things, and the philosophy of it all.
This article was originally published by Grist and is republished here as part of an ongoing collaboration.
On Tuesday, the House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis released a report that it has been working on since January 2019. With Republicans in control of the Senate and President Trump in the Oval Office, the policy proposals in the report have no chance of getting enough votes to become law, but that’s not really the point. The 538-page plan is a message in a bottle to Democratic voters: Hang tight, the left has a climate plan.
Let’s hit the rewind button and go back to 2018 — a couple hundred eons ago in coronavirus years, which makes it hard to remember the conditions that started the ball rolling on the Select Committee’s report.
On June 26, 2018, a relatively unknown progressive candidate from the Bronx managed to unseat incumbent Democrat Joe Crowley in New York’s 14th congressional district. That progressive, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, campaigned on the Green New Deal, an economy-wide proposal to achieve emissions reductions and economic equity simultaneously.
At the same time, a group of young climate activists and Bernie Sanders stans called the Sunrise Movement — buoyed by progressive wins in the midterms — were ramping up a grassroots campaign in support of that very plan. The Green New Deal, an idea that had existed in relative obscurity for years before the midterms, burst onto the national stage a week after the November election, when the Sunrise Movement set up camp in House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office and Ocasio-Cortez, who was attending her freshman orientation on Capitol Hill on that very day, joined them.
The activists had a list of demands, chief among them a request that the new Speaker of the House create a committee on the climate crisis. Pelosi, a first-wave climate hawk herself, had established a similar panel when she was House Speaker from 2007 to 2011, which was disbanded by Republicans when they regained the majority in 2011. She was quick to do it again, and appointed Kathy Castor, a Florida Democrat and longtime climate advocate, as committee chair. Including Castor, the committee has nine Democrats and six Republicans.
Establishment Democrats would have likely pursued climate policy in the 116th Congress on their own. But added pressure from the progressive wing of their party and a cadre of unyieldingly vocal climate activists, plus some pretty visceral climate change impacts in 2018 and growing concern about rising temperatures among Democratic voters, handed Democrats a mandate to address the crisis.
On Tuesday, the committee unveiled a plan to do just that. The preface notes the inopportune timing of the report, considering the nation is in the midst of both a pandemic and a mass uprising against racial inequity. “Both underscore that there are no foregone conclusions. What we choose to do now shapes the future,” the report says. “What happens next — for racial equality, for public health, for the climate crisis — depends on us.”
The policy targets laid out in the report are a testament to how much the left has moved the Overton window on climate in recent years. The report recommends eliminating emissions from the electricity sector by 2040 and achieving net-zero emissions across the board a decade after that. It suggests that all new vehicles sold in the United States should be electric by the year 2035. It recommends putting a price on carbon and then funneling that money to low- and mid-income households, an emissions reduction tactic that also has some traction on the right.
Most importantly, especially now, the report connects the dots between racial inequity and rising temperatures. Climate change is already impacting low-income communities and people of color. The report includes a long list of policy proposals to alleviate that burden. The list includes allocating funds to decarbonize and retrofit all public housing in the U.S., boosting federal funding for residential solar projects that would help poor communities pay for clean energy, and increasing tax credits and efficiency incentives for developers building affordable housing. Many of the recommendations put forth by the report echo legislation that has already been introduced in Congress. The recommendation to decarbonize public housing, for example, mirrors Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders’ Green New Deal for Public Housing Act, which was introduced in 2019.
The report has garnered praise from climate advocates across the political spectrum. In a statement to Grist, the Sunrise Movement’s legislative manager, Lauren Maunus, said the report is a good start. “We are happy to see the Select Committee’s Action Plan reflect much of the vision for a Green New Deal,” she wrote. “This plan is more ambitious than anything we have seen from Democratic leadership so far, but it still needs to go further to match the full scale of the crisis.”
An effective climate plan hinges on three major pillars, Sam Ricketts, formerly climate director of Washington Governor Jay Inslee’s presidential campaign and now a senior policy adviser for Evergreen Action, an organization that provides policymakers with an open-source climate policy platform, told Grist: Create performance standards for each sector of the economy; funnel federal investments into green jobs; and confront environmental racism by addressing climate impacts in frontline and low-income communities. “These pillars are foundational in this House Select Committee climate crisis report,” Ricketts, who was consulted by the committee on policy items multiple times over the past several months, said. “Ultimately, this is a great foundation upon which Congress can begin to act in a comprehensive and ambitious way to confront this climate challenge.” He noted that some of the timelines outlined in the report could be sped up.
The American Conservation Coalition (ACC), a Republican-leaning group that advocates for conservative solutions to climate change, is also supportive of aspects of the report. “There’s elements of it that we agree with and that I think many Republicans could agree on, too,” Quillan Robinson, vice president of government affairs at ACC, told Grist, naming carbon capture and investments in new energy technologies as examples of proposals that could garner bipartisan support. But he noted that the committee’s report was introduced without input from the Republican minority on the committee. “The whole purpose of the committee was to bring Republicans and Democrats together and develop some common ground policies to charter a path forward,” he said. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and nine other Republican members of the House recently backed a climate plan put out by ACC that also calls for net-zero emissions by 2050, a surprising step that indicates Republicans may be amenable to climate proposals that come from their own side.
Ricketts isn’t so sure that the reason why the Republican minority is absent from the report is because it was snubbed by committee Democrats. “The leader of the Republican Party doesn’t just believe that climate change doesn’t exist, he called this pandemic that has killed 120,000-plus Americans a hoax,” Ricketts said. “It’s unfortunate but it is a reality that only one party believes in not only confronting this crisis but that it exists at all.”
Regardless of how the report came together, one thing is clear: Democrats will have a hard time getting its wide-ranging and ambitious policy proposals passed even if they regain a majority in the Senate and put Joe Biden in the White House. Biden’s climate plan as it stands proposes investing a modest $1.7 trillion in clean energy spending. The House climate committee’s report doesn’t put a price tag on its recommendations, but in terms of scope it looks similar to Sanders’ climate plan, which would cost $16 trillion.
Still, some groups think it could go even further. “With less than 10 years to keep warming at below 1.5 degrees C, the plan’s targets for phasing out emissions need to be stronger,” 350.org’s associate director of U.S. policy, Natalie Mebane, said in a statement. “Specifically, these plans need to go further on regulating and phasing out fossil fuel production with clear target dates for the elimination of all fossil fuel expansion and subsidies.”
On the other side of the aisle, Republicans are already sharpening their knives. “Democrats’ My Way or the Highway bill is nothing more than a liberal wish list,” Representative Don Young of Alaska tweeted on Tuesday afternoon.
The last time the feat was accomplished, the United States relied primarily on wood for energy. There’s no turning back now.
The world was a radically different place in 1880. The United States was only 15 years removed from the Civil War. The professional baseball organization known as the National League, which survives to this day as half of Major League Baseball, had existed for only four years. Light bulbs were used outside for the first time. The first patent was issued for a cash register.
It was also the last time energy consumption from renewable energy topped coal, according to historical data compiled by the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA). Well, that was until 2019, when the United States accomplished the feat again. Due to various market factors, the country will never again consume more energy from coal than renewables.
Here’s how the United States achieved the energy milestone, why there’s no turning back, and what it means for individual investors.
Image source: Getty Images.
A milestone 139 years in the making
The last time the United States consumed more energy from renewable energy than coal was around 1880. To that point, biomass (primarily wood) was the primary energy source for the nation. But that changed as the first coal-fired power plants began producing electricity in the 1880s. While the first hydroelectric dams also entered operations that decade, coal proved much more scalable and distributable. By 1885, coal generated more total energy than renewable energy (still comprising only wood in that year) and held onto the edge for roughly 139 years.
That all changed in 2019, although a healthy dose of nuance is needed. Energy consumption from renewable energy topped coal last year, but only when all energy sources are counted. In other words, the math only works when electricity production, transportation, and consumption from industrial, residential, and commercial markets are combined. Similarly, renewable energy is a broad category that includes wind, solar, hydro, biofuels, other biomass, and several smaller contributors.
In 2019, energy consumption from renewable energy totaled 11.5 quadrillion British thermal units, or quads, according to the EIA. Coal was used to generate only 11.3 quads of energy last year. But the acceleration of the energy transition in the electric power sector means there’s no going back.
A combination of mild winter weather, natural gas prices that are at the lowest levels since 1995, the addition of nearly 33,000 megawatts of utility-scale wind and solar power, and the consumption-sapping effects of the coronavirus pandemic will combine to deliver a record blow to coal and a record bump to renewables in 2020.
In 2019, the United States generated 966 terawatt-hours of electricity from coal-fired power plants and 720 terawatt-hours from all utility-scale renewable energy power sources. That was the lowest output from the nation’s coal fleet since the 1970s and the highest ever for renewables.
In 2020, the United States might only generate 627 terawatt-hours to 724 terawatt-hours of electricity from coal (a 25% to 35% decline from the previous year), compared to 792 terawatt-hours from renewable energy sources (a 10% increase from the previous year). Adding small-scale solar bumps up the latter number to a projected output of 832 terawatt-hours, which would surpass the annual output from nuclear power for the first time since the 1980s.
Image source: Getty Images.
What does the feat mean for investors?
The rapid growth of renewable energy is quite the feat. It was made possible by significant government policies, better wind turbine and photovoltaic panel technologies, and bountiful geographic advantages across the Lower 48. The value extended to renewable energy sources from the combination of those factors will likely compound in the next decade, which suggests natural gas-fired power plants could be the next assets to feel economic pressure from renewables starting in the 2030s.
But individual investors don’t have to sit out the next decade to benefit from the trend. Here are some investment ideas that contributed to renewable energy’s toppling of coal in 2019.
Coal: Investors should absolutely stay away from coal stocks. Coal-fired power plants are unlikely to regain much, if any, market share lost in 2020 due to factors described above. Investors can expect a wave of accelerated retirements in the coming years as power generators chase the enhanced economics from cleaner power sources. If your portfolio is exposed to companies such as coal-heavy PPL Corp that are moving more slowly than the energy transition, then that could be putting your capital at risk.
Biofuels: Aside from the electric power sector, renewable transportation fuels are the second-largest source of renewable energy in the United States. The country mandates 10% ethanol blends in the gasoline supply and relies heavily on biodiesel and renewable diesel each year.
Unlike electric power, biofuels have generally been a poor investment for individual investors. For instance, Green Plains (GPRE -4.97%) can produce 1.1 billion gallons of ethanol each year, but has struggled to overcome the weak margin environment of the industry. Ethanol prices in 2020 could be the lowest of the century. Green Plains has ambitious plans to increase operating efficiency and sell high-value, high-protein animal feed products. If the strategy works, then the small-cap stock could lift off multiyear lows for good. But it’s still too early to gauge progress.
Meanwhile, Renewable Energy Group (REGI) has been a rare biofuels stock with above-average returns in recent years. But it, too, faces headwinds. It’s not profitable without generous government subsidies, although those are now in place through the end of 2022 for biomass-based diesel fuels. If the business can invest its cash hoard into high-value renewable diesel and retail sales, then it might be on sustainable footing in a few years.
Image source: Getty Images.
Wind: The EIA estimates the United States could add up to 20,400 megawatts of onshore wind power capacity in 2020. That could be affected by the coronavirus pandemic, but as of early May many power generators reported being on track with projects slated for completion this year.
Xcel Energy (XEL 0.80%) is leading the way. The company, which owns four electric utilities in the American wind corridor, is bringing 1,692 megawatts of new wind power projects into service in 2020. It recently placed the 200-megawatt Blazing Star 1 project into operation, has another 300 megawatts slated for completion in 2021, and expects to have over 4,300 megawatts of owned wind capacity in service when the dust settles.
Solar: The EIA estimates the United States could add up to 12,700 megawatts of utility-scale solar power capacity in 2020. NextEra Energy (NEE 1.42%) is one of the companies leading the way. Through its Florida Power & Light subsidiary, the company plans to build 10,000 megawatts of solar power by 2030. That includes 1,200 megawatts that have or will enter service in 2020. The low operation costs of solar farms are expected to allow the electric utility to keep customer bills low and shareholder value trekking higher.
Renewable energy is just getting started
The United States consumed more total energy from renewable energy than coal in 2019 for the first time in about 139 years. That’s an impressive feat, but the trend is still getting started.
Renewable energy accounted for only 11% of the nation’s total energy consumption last year. There are major growth opportunities in stealing the rest of coal’s market share (which would double total renewable energy consumption) in the 2020s, beginning to pressure natural gas in the 2030s, and powering cars and trucks as the transportation sector moves toward electric mobility. That suggests individual investors have many more opportunities to pounce on the energy transition — and certainly won’t have to wait another 139 years for the next big milestone.