How the US cut climate-changing emissions while its economy more than doubled

Because natural gas is a more efficient fuel than coal, it has been a win for climate in comparison, even though it’s a fossil fuel. The US has reduced emissions from electricity as a result.

Significant improvements in energy efficiency, from appliances to lighting, have also played a role. Even though tech gadgets seem to be recharging everywhere all the time today, household electricity use, per person, plateaued over the first two decades of the 2000s after rising continuously since the 1940s.

Costs for renewable electricity, batteries fall

US renewable electricity generation, including wind, solar and hydro power, has nearly tripled since 1995, helping to further reduce emissions from electricity generation.

Costs for solar and wind power have fallen so much that they are now cheaper than coal and competitive with natural gas. Fourteen states, including most of the Great Plains, now get at least 30 per cent of their power from solar, wind and battery storage.

While wind power has been cost competitive with fossil fuels for at least 20 years, solar photovoltaic power has only been competitive with fossil fuels for about 10 years. So expect deployment of solar PV to continue to increase, both in the US and internationally, even as US federal subsidies disappear.

Both wind and solar provide intermittent power: The sun does not always shine, and the wind does not always blow. There are a number of ways utilities are dealing with this. One way is to use demand management, offering lower prices for power during off-peak periods or discounts for companies that can cut their power use during high demand. Virtual power plants aggregate several kinds of distributed energy resources — solar panels on homes, batteries and even smart thermostats — to manage power supply and demand. The US had an estimated 37.5 gigawatts of virtual power plants in 2024, equivalent to about 37.5 nuclear power reactors.