The following is the opinion and analysis of the writer:
Mike Carran
As the United States launches missile strikes into Iran, Iran is retaliating. Insurers of tankers carrying oil shipments through the Strait of Hormuz are canceling coverage for those tankers. Oil supplies are being tightened, and oil prices are spiking, with Wood Mackenzie estimating oil prices are likely to hit $100 a barrel.
Locally, gasoline prices have gone up around $0.20-0.30 a gallon, with higher prices expected according to the U.S. Energy Information Agency.
Perhaps the conflict will end quickly; perhaps we are entering another drawn-out war in a volatile area of the world. Oil price shocks happen so often that most of us have grown used to them. They’ve never been predictable or stable. We also know that burning those fossil fuels creates carbon pollution that damages both our and the planet's health and makes the climate a source of danger, not comfort. All of these are good reasons to quickly adopt a more stable way to power our lives and our economy.
Every day, the sun lights the world and provides enough power to meet the entire globe’s annual energy needs. Wide adoption of solar panels, which capture a tiny fraction of that power, has caused prices to fall by over 90% in the last decade. More adoption means prices will continue to fall, an immutable law for all transformative technology. That is not and cannot be true for fossil fuels because they aren’t a technology; they are a way to set things on fire. Heat from that fire can be converted to energy, but the process is so inefficient that most of the energy is pushed out of a tailpipe or through the roof of a building.
Critics, often funded by fossil fuel companies, have said solar power isn’t consistently reliable because the sun doesn’t shine at night, but that issue can be overcome by storing daytime sunshine in utility-scale batteries (BESS) for use at night. Prices have declined for those batteries, and, like solar panels and wind turbines, they will continue to decline.
Other ways to store energy are under development, and eventually, batteries may not be the cheapest way to store unused daytime solar energy. A gravity battery can utilize daytime solar energy to lift a very heavy weight—like a giant block or a stack of weights—up to a higher position. When power is needed, the weight is allowed to fall, and that downward motion spins a generator to make electricity for nighttime use. It works a bit like a reverse elevator: Lift the weight to store energy, lower it to release energy. Other promising technologies are on the horizon. It simply isn’t true that the problem of intermittent sunshine and wind can’t be overcome. Communities in deep-red Texas already are powered by renewables. Arizona should be, too.
If solar is cheaper (it is) and power can be stored (it can), why don’t we adopt it right now? Largely, it’s because fossil-fuel companies took a page from tobacco companies. First deny the problem exists, then require more "studies" and demand absolute proof, then say you’re solving the problem. Tobacco companies pretended to solve the problem of their product causing cancer by putting filters on cigarettes. Fossil fuel companies are touting carbon removal fans. Cigarettes still cause cancer, and according to an MIT study, carbon removal doesn't work. We have to switch to renewables. Doing so isn’t too expensive, too unreliable, too optimistic. Renewables are reliable, clean, efficient and less expensive.
We no longer need to set things on fire to get energy. We have an energy source millions of miles away, and we have a safe, inexpensive way to harness that energy. Arizona is the best location for harnessing it. It is time to make the change.
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