Americans’ support for renewables plunged in past decade — poll - E&E News by POLITICO
Americans’ support for renewables plunged in past decade - poll - E&E News by POLITICO
Large majorities of Americans support renewable energy, but their support for wind and solar power has diminished significantly over the past 11 years even as new laws spur billions of dollars toward low-carbon energy projects, according to a new survey.
Eighty-three percent of Americans support solar energy, down from 91 percent in 2013, and 70 percent of Americans support wind energy, compared to 84 percent in 2013, according to the analysis released Monday from Stanford University and the clean energy group Resources for the Future.
Support for fossil fuels also has fallen. Eighteen percent of Americans now back coal power, down from 21 percent in 2013. Thirty-eight of Americans support natural gas to provide electricity, compared to 48 percent in 2013. The decline in support for wind, solar and gas is statistically significant, according to the research.
Even though support for renewables has fallen, “Americans perceive the Biden administration to be doing more about climate change than they perceived the federal government to be doing at the end of the Trump administration,” the report says. That likely is from passage of laws like the IRA, as well as actions such as rejoining the Paris Agreement, it said.
Related Knowledge Center: ENERGY BASICS: renewables
Renewable energy sources — once the fuel of the future, then practical in specific, narrow applications — are increasingly economic mainstream sources of power generation. Hydropower was long the mainstay of U.S. renewable electricity generation, although wind power surpassed hydro for the first time in 2019, and solar continues its rapid growth. The continued growth of wind and solar, with their fluctuations, is tied in part to improvements in storage technology: batteries.