Tony Seba, a leading academic from Stanford University, says it doesnt matter. He says the plunging costs of technology will sweep away political inertia and the resistance of vested interests. So much so that by 2030, he believes coal, oil and gas generation and usage will be all but obsolete.
Sebas claims are not new. We reported on them last year, and more recently when he talked about God Parity and the decline of centralized generation, but 18 months after completing his book, Clean Disruption, Seba is now more convinced than ever that he is right.
Its happening, he told RenewEconomy on the sidelines of the Paris climate talks. When you look at the industry from a technology cost curve and the adoption of the market of technologies such as solar and electric vehicles, and energy storage, and the astonishing progress in self driving cars, its actually happening more quickly than I predicted.
Sebas predictions are based around observations of what has occurred in other major technology breakthroughs such as digital photos, the internet, mobile phones and then smart phones. Once costs fall below a certain point, the growth is both exponential and unstoppable.
In technology, those kind of adoption curves are not unusual, Seba says. We went from film cameras to digital photos in a couple of years. What the resource-based industries dont get is that technology adoption happens in an exponential manner. It never happens in linear fashion. So it may take a long time to get to a critical point. But once it does, it happens so quickly.
Which is why Seba is not that concerned with the outcome in Paris, and the fact that it will likely fall short of the ultimate goal a binding agreement to limit global warming to well below 2C.
His views contrast with those of Elon Musk, the founder of electric vehicle and battery storage developer Tesla, who said this week that he wants a global carbon price, because without it the transition may take twice as long.
Both agree that the transition to renewable energy and battery storage could happen within 15 to 20 years, they just disagree on what would drive that transition. And Musk is a lot more conservative on the shift to clean transport.
One thing that Seba and Musk do agree on is the need to remove fossil fuel subsidies, which some would suggest includes the lack of a carbon price.
If they achieve that, that is a huge goal, Seba says. Some of these targets will be pretty irrelevant. 2C is not a target. Zero emissions is a target. We cannot control 2C, but we can control zero carbon.
Seba notes that many critics of renewable energy dismiss the technologies because they contribute so little on a global scale right now, just a few per cent of total electricity in the case of wind or solar.
Youll get mainstream media and politicians and even well-meaning folks complaining that it has taken solar so long to get to 1%. What they dont see is that getting to 1% is the hard part.
Solar has been doubling installed capacity for years. But it started from a small base, so you ask yourself how many more doublings do you need to get to 100 per cent?
In the case of solar, all we need is seven more doublings and that could happen in 13 or 14 years. Clearly, though, many vested interests see this as a threat, which is why they are, with the help of regulators, pushing back on policies removing carbon prices, cutting renewable energy targets, reducing feed-in tariffs, raising fixed charges, and other means designed to slow the uptake.
It is called regulatory capture, and the fossil fuel industry has perfected it, Seba says. Because of this regulatory capture, governments and regulatory bodies will push back, but they cant stop it.
Thats because the regulators and the vested interests will lose control. For more than a century, energy generation has been centralized and all the decisions were made by big banks and regulatory agencies. Consumers had no input.
That is now changing. The uptake of solar PV is consumer driven, and it will be the same with electric vehicles and battery storage.
When something is consumer driven and distributed, it is different. The conventional industry either doesnt understand that, or doesnt want to understand that, Seba says.
But some people are listening. Seba is now in hot demand from large super funds including some in Australia which are seeking his advice about the changes that will take place.
This, says Seba, is underlying some of the major divestment decisions. Getting out of fossils is not a moral decision, it is a smart decision. Any money you put into a new plant you will lose, because it is not going to last 40 years.
Seba says that the unsubsidized cost of solar PV on the rooftops of Ikea, WalMart and malls and factories is going to fall below the cost of transmission very quickly, in every single market in the world.
That means that you can generate coal, gas or nuclear, and invest in fusion. If you can do that for zero, you will still not compete with rooftop solar.
Still, Seba says that a grid will survive, even if the economics of solar and storage will make it very cheap for those who want to leave the grid to do so.
I dont think most people will. There is resilience in the network. For instance, 80% of us live in cities. But that means that networks also need to be valued appropriately, because as the technology costs fall, consumers will make an economic choice, and the existing business model will be obsolete.
You cannot compete with zero marginal cost technologies. That is what killed Kodak.
So, why doesnt this register with mainstream media, and why is there such demonization of wind and solar technologies? At RenewEconomy, we cant remember mainstream media defending fixed landlines and film cameras with quite the same vigor.
Seba points to the fossil fuel industry revenues of some $8 trillion a year. That buys you a lot of advertising, and a lot of PR. In the U.S., it can buy elections. But it is just noise and propaganda. That is not unlike what the tobacco industry did.
Climate sceptics get ready to take center stage
Climate sceptics are taking a relatively low profile at these talks, choosing to lob in criticism from a distance. But next week will be their time in the spotlight, or at least on a red carpet.
Marc Morano, the founder of Climate Depot, is hosting an invitation only red carpet event in Paris, showing his film Climate Hustle, the counterpunch to Al Gores An Inconvenient Truth which supposedly provides interviews with 30 renowned scientists that lays out compelling evidence that devastates the global warming scare.
The film is produced by the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, which has gotten cash from fossil fuel interests including ExxonMobil and Chevron. Morano promises on his website that the film is set to rock the climate talks. As for invitation only it turns out that all media has been invited. At least there will be champagne.
Progress in the talks, by the numbers
As for the COP21 talks, an updated draft text of the proposed Paris Agreement was released, revealing there was still a lot of work to resolve differences, which are flagged as bracketed text.
The bad news? The number of disputed brackets have increased in number from 1,617 to 1,718. Even at this late stage, rather than reduce disagreements, negotiators are raising new specific issues of contention. This would seemingly suggest that negotiations are moving backwards.
The good news? Bracket creep is a feature of multi-lateral negotiations, particularly in the early days. The actual size of the package had reduced from 54 to 50 pages, and the number of words is down 8 per cent, and the large blocs of discord has fallen to 205 from 228.
There are no brackets around the implementing body for the new Paris Agreement, and much progress has been made on the transparency system and framework that will guide the agreement. Still, that is bound to leave plenty of work for the French to do in the second week of the negotiations.
Fossil award for Denmark
In the not too distant past, Denmark was an inspiration for many clean energy and climate change advocates, setting ambitious targets and rolling out wind energy.
But since the election of a minority, right-wing government, things have changed. The Danish Environment Minister, Lars Christian Lilleholt, said in Paris he is in favor of scrapping his countrys ambitious national carbon reduction target of 40 per cent by 2020, and he has also slashed the climate finance budget in half.
And thats what earned them the Fossil of the Day award at the Paris climate talks on Friday.
This article originally appeared in RenewEconomy. It is republished with permission.
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