In Which I Persuade You That the Energy Transition is Awesome

Clayton New Mexico wind turbine dedication, January 1978

So why the heck should you care about New Mexico’s clean energy transition anyway?

I recognize that, unlike me, you may not care a whit about a dusty, sparsely populated state that barely seems part of the US. And you may only catch news stories about the energy transition here and there as the torrent of information pours over you. You may also feel like you already have quite enough to despair about, thank you very much.

This newsletter is for you! Because learning about the energy transition won’t just make you more informed — it’ll make you more hopeful and empowered. Really.

In fact, the biggest reason I love learning about the energy transition is that it pulls me out of the undifferentiated overwhelm that constantly threatens us all these days. The vision is genuinely exciting, both because it addresses climate change and because the technology is just super cool. There’s so much to think about and so much to be done — and it’s so doable.

To spell this out, let’s start with my claim in my introductory post that the energy transition is unstoppable regardless of what happens in Washington. I’m guessing that comes as a surprise to many of you. And if it doesn’t, then you probably already know you care about the energy transition (in which case, you can move along for now, but, um, will you first please send this post along to someone who doesn’t yet?).

Let me start defending my claim with an appeal to authority. There are many I could pick, but we’ll go with John Kerry, former US climate envoy, who said, “The question is not will we — all of us — come to live in low-carbon, no-carbon economies. We will. The question is: Will we get there in time to avoid the worst consequences of the crisis?”

That might sound almost delusional in these political times. So how on earth can this be true?

Reason 1: Renewables are super cheap

Nothing produces electricity more cheaply than solar and wind, even factoring in cloudy days and calm nights. But to make them most useful, you need to add batteries so that they provide steady power whenever you need it. Then they’re not vastly cheaper anymore, but even so, in many situations, they’re still about as cheap or cheaper than any fossil fuel. And next year, they’ll often beat out all fossil fuels: Battery costs fell by 40% in 2024 alone, and solar fell by half in 2023.

Unsurprisingly, then, almost all new sources of electricity added to the grid are renewable: Why pay more?

But how can prices be falling that fast, especially year after year after year? That points to the next reason for the unstoppability of the energy transition:

Reason 2: Scale is magic

Every technological development that has felt like magic has been driven by industrial scale. If you’re old enough, you’ll remember 200 kilobyte floppy discs — now a laptop might have four terabytes, more than 20 million times as much. The development of computers was described by Moore’s law: Every couple of years, computers get twice as powerful and cost less. The more computers we build, the better we get at it, and the more powerful and cheaper they get.

A similar law, Wright’s Law, describes solar and batteries: Each time the world produces twice as many of them, they each get around 20% cheaper.

Costs tumble because as we produce more batteries and solar panels, we learn tricks to get more power out of them for less money. And as factories get bigger and bigger, we reap the rewards of economies of scale. Solar and batteries are perfect for industrial scale: They’re modular, factory-made, easy to ship, and plug-and-play on site. Partly for that reason, solar has been outstripping wind lately—those giant turbines are hard to ship and assemble.

Fossil fuel-based technology can’t access this scaling magic. This old technology isn’t growing like renewables are, so capacity increases aren’t triggering big price drops. And there’s a floor on costs, because you have to keep digging fossil fuels out of the ground to burn them up. With renewable energy, once you’ve built it, your expenses are essentially over.

Reason 3: Electricity can accomplish more and more

EVs let us drive on electricity. Electric heat pumps let us warm our homes. Electric motors let us power entire factories. We’re steadily electrifying more of what used to require fossil fuels. For some tasks — like manufacturing cement or flying airplanes — we don’t have the tech yet to power them without fossil fuels. But we have roadmaps to get there.

Now the challenge is scaling up fast enough that the magic of industrial scale kicks in, making everything better and cheaper, fast.

Reason 4: The future is tugging us toward electricity

Fossil fuels kinda suck. They’re clumsy, inefficient, dirty, unsafe, and dumb. I mean, seriously, you have to light them on fire! And then lots of the heat they produce gets wasted and noxious gases spew out. You have to work hard just to manage the messiness of the fuel, with exhaust systems, fuel lines, filters, etc. Plus fossil fuels are stupid — they can’t talk to software. Let’s not even get into how they kill people: They explode, foul the air, and, of course, warm the planet.

Electricity, on the other hand, is elegance itself. It’s power wrapped up in an organized, highly usable form. It moves at the speed of light, obeys software, flows exactly when and where you want it. You can store it, reverse it, network it, all within microseconds, with no smoke or fire or mess.

So if you’re designing a new technology, you’re going to use electricity. Ever noticed that all robo-taxis are EVs? They need the precision, efficiency, instant torque, cool operation and digital integration of electricity. Plus, electricity is cheaper. Why would you innovate with a mess like fossil fuels instead?

The future has ruled: We’re going electric.

The vision

We’re not just putting up some solar panels and wind turbines. We’re in the middle of a reinvention of our entire energy system. The transformation is unimaginably huge: We are changing the way we power our cars, warm our homes, heat our water, smelt our steel, manufacture our cement, fertilize our crops, fly our planes, ship our merchandise, and do nearly everything else. Some of these changes are already underway, others are still taking shape, and a few are just rough sketches, with breakthroughs yet to come.

This reinvention is still malleable, particularly how it treats humans in its path. So if we’re paying attention, we can bend it toward justice. And critically, we can help speed it up, which is essential for reducing future tragedies like the Los Angeles fires and the Texas flooding.

At every level, there are tasks at hand: reducing the carbon impact of our own lives, decarbonizing our homes for ourselves and their future inhabitants, spreading the word to our friends (my personal favorite), influencing local policy decisions, researching new technologies that we need, helping to bring them to market, pushing them up to the scale of production needed so they become cheap and ubiquitous, on and on and on. That work continues no matter the chaos of politics, and there’s a whole ecosystem of inventive, determined, focused people doing it.

So I hope you’ll come along as we explore this transformation and that you’ll find your own place in it.

If you’d like to learn more about this big vision of the energy transition, I highly recommend Bill McKibben’s recent piece in the New Yorker.

That still leaves the question: Why New Mexico? (Other than the fact that I happen to live here.) The brief answer is that New Mexico provides a particularly fascinating lens on the changes that are happening everywhere, but we’ll leave the details of that for the next post.