Power pivot: What happens in states where wind dethrones King Coal?
Laine Anderson scans the Wyoming prairie, a dusty expanse of sagebrush and prairie dogs scowling from atop their mounds. An antelope whips past the front of his truck. “They always cut in front of you,” Mr. Anderson says, shaking his head. It’s one of those mysteries.
Mr. Anderson doesn’t see this dry plateau near Medicine Bow as empty; he sees it as the future. The wide horizon is sliced vertically by slender towers. Below, workers hunch over machinery, assembling components. Giant propellers wait on the ground to be lifted atop the towers.
Before year’s end, says Mr. Anderson, the director of wind operations for the PacifiCorp utility, 132 giant wind turbines will stir from air racing down the Rocky Mountains. On a breezy day, they could power a medium-sized city.
The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) says the future that Mr. Anderson envisions, in one sense, has already come. For the first time, according to the agency, U.S. renewable power will provide more electricity in 2020 than coal power, which has reigned king of the country’s electric grid for more than 70 years. What analysts see as a pivotal point in the country’s energy supply has arrived much sooner than expected.
“This is a very exciting moment,” says Sonia Aggarwal, vice president of Energy Innovation, a clean energy think tank in San Francisco. “A lot of experts were saying we will reach this point sometime, maybe 2050. They didn’t think it would be this quickly.”
Like most historical inflections, no single path led to this juncture. Coal did not enter a downward spiral solely because of renewables, government regulations, or cheaper natural gas. It was all of the above. Wind and solar power did not begin to expand dramatically because of a newfound ardor for the environment, the demands of climate change, or cheaper technology. It was all of the above.
The moment demonstrates an underrated force of change. What seems an immutable trajectory can bend
“Built on coal”Harnessing the wind“There’s no perfect power”
