Bill McKibben Celebrates 2024: Climate Successes Can Motivate Us In 2025 – CleanTechnica

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Many climate activists are turtling right now with the pressing reminder that the US executive office is about to be filled by a climate denier, supported by a Congress that has shown little spark to advance new, serious clean energy legislation. Yet climate activist and Gandhi Peace Award winner Bill McKibben celebrates 2024 this week by assessing successes in the transition to clean energy and decarbonization. He reminds us that, when we go state by state and city by city, we’re “making gains everywhere we still can.” Texas and California are making real clean energy headway, he says — “things are ripping along” in these important large economies.

As McKibben celebrates 2024, though, he is prudently muted, acknowledging that the course ahead to cost-effective emissions mitigation strategies are anything but assured.

The rapid growth of AI, he says, is “causing despair among some energy experts” due to giant data centers that soak up huge amounts of electricity. McKibben quotes Arielle Samuelson of Heated, who paints a picture of how AI has been called the “savior” of the gas industry. That’s because energy demand for AI means “oil corporations are planning to build gas plants that specifically serve data centers.”

Last week, Exxon announced that it is building a large gas plant that will directly supply power to data centers within the next five years. The company claims the gas plant will use technology that captures polluting emissions — despite the fact that the technology has never been used at a commercial scale before. Chevron is also preparing to sell gas to an undisclosed number of data centers.

McKibben douses these Big Oil puffs of grandeur a bit.

“It’s important to remember that Big Oil is an industry that lies a lot.”

Wait — you’re saying that this article is supposed to highlight how McKibben celebrates the good things that happened in the transition away from fossil fuels this year? Here you go. Estimated time to operation for a large off-grid solar microgrid to power Big Data could be around two years (1–2 years for site acquisition and permitting plus 1–2 years for site buildout), though there’s no obvious reason why this couldn’t be done faster by very motivated and competent builders.

He refers us to a new report from Scale Microgrids, which ran 20-year powerflow models for thousands of site configurations supporting a 100–1000 MW 24/7 load and ran them them all through Lazard’s LCOE model to find the best performers. Paces then did a search for all the land in the US Southwest that could accommodate them (filtering for things like distance from natural gas pipelines, property owner type, minimum parcel size, etc.).

Here’s what they found:

• Off-grid solar microgrids are categorically faster than new grid interconnections (5+year queues) as well as off-grid colocated gas turbines (3+ year lead times).
• Off-grid solar microgrids today are near cost parity with natural gas and cheaper than other clean alternatives. Opportunities for further cost reduction are significant.
• Off-grid solar microgrids are enormously scalable, with >1,200 GW of datacenter potential in the US southwest alone.
• Between 0.4 billion tons (30 GW new datacenters) and 4.1 billion tons (300 GW new datacenters) of CO₂ emissions could be avoided between now and 2030 if every new AI datacenter was built using the 90% solar configuration. At approximately $50/ton CO₂ reduced, replacing gas-powered datacenters with off-grid solar microgrids represents a cost-effective emissions mitigation strategy.

McKibben celebrates a quiet acknowledgement from the big AI players, who “have promised in recent years that they would zero out their emissions.” The Biden–Harris administration isn’t publicly holding them to those goals, but most of these companies are in places like Washington and California filled with environmentally committed workers and investors.

McKibben realizes that this solution is partially flawed, of course.

“In a rational world we’d postpone the glories of AI long enough to power up all the heat pumps and cars from renewable electricity first. But if they get expertise building solar farms for their data centers, the experience may turn these behemoths into better crusaders for clean energy.”

Another 2024 gift to the US climate mitigation movement that McKibben celebrates this week comes from the Montana Supreme Court, which upheld, on a 6-1 vote, a lower court ruling that the state’s children have a “fundamental constitutional right to a clean and healthful environment.” It doesn’t stop there. The ruling “includes carefully analyzing state energy policies to keep them from damaging the climate.”

The landmark ruling resulted from “a remarkable trial, which featured a mix of young Montanans explaining how climate change was damaging their lives (breathing wildfire smoke, for one) and nationally renowned climate experts who volunteered their time to make a compelling case.” Montana seemed not to take the case seriously enough, according to McKibben, as it failed to put its lead climate-denier on the stand.

“Shamefully,” McKibben adds, the Biden DOJ has buried the federal equivalent, Juliana v. US, under a blizzard of writs, and Montana’s current commitment to using more gas will likely be unaffected by the state supreme court ruling. Still, McKibben celebrates the underlying good in the Montana ruling.

“But it is a clear moral victory that will cast a long shadow…. The Trump era will end someday, and we’ll need a new wave of smart and moral people to carry on the crucial fights—these are them!”

McKibben is also enamored of the 1.5 million Germans who have taken advantage of a new law to hang solar panels from the balconies of their apartments. The momentum has translated to Spain, where two thirds of the population live in apartments and installing panels on the roof requires the consent of a majority of the building’s residents.

Manufacturers say that installing a couple of 300-watt panels on balconies will give a saving of up to 30% on a typical household’s electricity bill. With an outlay of €400–800 and with no installation cost, the panels could pay for themselves within six years. Furthermore, as long as the installation does not exceed 800 watts, it doesn’t require certification, which can cost from €100 to €400, depending on the area.

As McKibben closes out one article this week, he admits that the clean energy gifts were more limited than he had hoped to offer, but he was “keeping a close eye on Albany, where Governor Kathy Hochul may still sign the crucial Climate Superfund bill before year’s end.”

Voila! Kochul made good on previous promises, which McKibben celebrates, too. He says it’s “very exciting news” that Hochul announced that she would sign the so-called “polluter pays” Climate Superfund bill. Activists have been pushing hard for the legislation.

• Scores of campaigners have occupied rooms in the state capitol.
• About twenty people, a great many of them elder members of Third Act, have been arrested for trespassing around the state Xmas tree—they’ve been singing carols as the cuffs go on.
• Campaigners also won a big victory in Albany last week, when Hochul signed a bill that should prevent backdoor attempts at overturning the state’s fracking ban.

Under the Superfund act, the world’s largest fossil fuel companies would be required to pay New York state billions for the damages caused by their products, raising $75 billion over 25 years. Fees would be allocated according to a company’s share of emissions from 2000 to 2018. By the turn of the millennium, climate science was so well established that “no reasonable corporate actor could have failed to anticipate regulatory action to address its impacts,” lawmakers wrote in the bill.

In concluding, McKibben celebrates by letting the release from the governor’s office speak for itself.

“With nearly every record rainfall, heatwave, and coastal storm, New Yorkers are increasingly burdened with billions of dollars in health, safety, and environmental consequences due to polluters that have historically harmed our environment. Establishing the Climate Superfund is the latest example of my administration taking action to hold polluters responsible for the damage done to our environment and requiring major investments in infrastructure and other projects critical to protecting our communities and economy.”