(C) Common Dreams This story was originally published by Common Dreams and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Here’s the good and bad news on the US clean energy transition [1] [] Date: 2023-06 In key sectors of the U.S. economy, the transition to clean energy is well underway. It’s just not happening fast enough to forestall the worst impacts of climate change. That’s the overriding message of the 2023 Sustainable Energy in America Factbook released Wednesday. The joint project of BloombergNEF and the Business Council for Sustainable Energy has been tracking global and national energy-transition trends since 2013. Its latest report indicates that 2022 was another record-breaking year for the growth of renewable energy, electric vehicles and other key decarbonization technologies. Subscribe to receive Canary's latest news Over the past decade, renewable energy has moved from the fringe to the center of the power sector. Electric vehicles have taken on a central role in automakers’ future manufacturing plans. Lithium-ion batteries are being produced on multi-gigawatt scale for mobile and grid applications. And developing technologies such as electric heating, carbon capture and hydrogen for decarbonizing heavy industry and transport are being supported by government policy, including last year’s Inflation Reduction Act. The historic investments enabled by that bill are ​“truly a game-changer” for the energy transition, which is ​“now kind of hardwired into the U.S. economy,” Ethan Zindler, head of Americas for Bloomberg NEF, said in a Tuesday briefing. BNEF tracked a record-breaking $141 billion in U.S. energy transition finance in 2022, second only to China, he said. This category spans renewable power, batteries, electric vehicles, electrified heating, carbon capture, sustainable materials, nuclear power and hydrogen production. Energy transition investment across the world and by sector in the United States (BNEF) In the last decade, renewable energy has been the main bucket of energy transition spending. Ever-cheaper solar and wind power took the lion’s share of new generation built over that time, shifting the power sector from being the country’s primary source of carbon emissions to emitting less than the transportation sector and on par with industrial emissions, Zindler noted. Renewables have made up the majority of new electricity-generating capacity built over the past decade. (BNEF) While U.S. renewables growth saw a slight dip in 2022 compared to 2021 — the result of rising equipment and construction costs, permitting and interconnection challenges and trade disputes — the sector continued to break records in terms of the share of power it supplied U.S. grids, reaching 13 percent of all electricity generation in 2022. U.S. electricity generation by fuel type (BNEF) But renewable energy’s preeminence in U.S. energy-transition financing was supplanted last year by electric vehicles. Electrified transport, a category that includes revenue from the sale of EVs plus investment in charging infrastructure, stood at $57.3 billion in 2022, compared to $49.5 billion invested in renewables. Nearly 1 million EVs were sold in the U.S. last year, a 50 percent increase from the year prior, making up 7 percent of all new vehicle sales, Zindler pointed out. Getting more EVs on the road is critical to cutting emissions from the transportation sector, which replaced power generation as the country’s top carbon emitter in 2016. But it’s also a boon to drivers facing high fossil-fuel costs over the past year — ​“Electricity is just a much less expensive way to power your car than gasoline or diesel,” Zindler added. U.S. electric vehicle sales have boomed as fuel prices have spiked. (BNEF) EV and battery costs, hefty EV commitments from automakers and state-level clean car mandates have all helped drive U.S. EV sales, which still lag behind Europe on a per capita basis. Zindler highlighted other contributing factors, including that ​“the cars are cooler” and available in a range of makes and models, and that locations to charge them are proliferating. The Inflation Reduction Act sets the stage for even faster growth in years to come with its lucrative tax credits for new and used EVs that meet requirements for U.S. final assembly and sourcing of batteries and components from the U.S. or U.S.-friendly countries. That domestic manufacturing bonus has also spurred a boom in U.S. battery manufacturing, almost all of it centered on supplying the EV market. Commitments to making batteries and their components in North America grew to nearly $17 billion between the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act in August 2022 and the end of that year. [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/clean-energy/heres-the-good-and-bad-news-on-the-us-clean-energy-transition Published and (C) by Common Dreams Content appears here under this condition or license: Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/commondreams/