Your Daily Dose of Climate Hope: Interview with Kingsmill Bond, RMI Energy Analyst
The exponential growth of clean energy technologies over the last ten years was a shock to conventional wisdom- but this analyst predicted it. His name is Bond. Kingsmill Bond.
Kingsmill Bond is a senior principal at the Rocky Mountain Institute, where he analyzes the ongoing clean energy revolution. His RMI reports are available on Substack at Renewable Revolution.
“People say we're optimistic, but we're just reflecting reality.”
- Kingsmill Bond
In the interview below, this writer’s questions and comments are in bold, Mr. Bond’s words are in regular text, and extra clarification added after the interview are in bold italics or footnotes.
This interview is syndicated by both The Weekly Anthropocene and Your Daily Dose of Climate Hope.
One of the core insights of “The Cleantech Revolution” is that technologies beat commodities on costs. This reminds me of what Ramez Naam wrote about modularity and learning rates a while ago: you can keep learning how to make a solar panel better and better, but fossil fuels stay the same. Deposits laid down in the Carboniferous are not suddenly going to have more energy per liter, but batteries will continue to improve their energy density. We’re constantly seeing more innovation in cleantech, from perovskites and multi-layer solar panels to new battery chemistries like lithium iron phosphate, iron-air, and sodium-ion. Can you elaborate on that, how innovation makes technologies beat commodities?
Sure. We’re making a very empirical observation that these small, modular technologies continue to fall in price. It’s very hard to specify in advance exactly which innovations will drive prices down, but you can make the broad, general point that the prices are likely to continue to fall as innovation continues to take place.
Absolutely. And that has led to amazing things.
Can you discuss your “Three Xs” of the energy transition? It’s one of my favorite charts in your report, those three Xs of renewables beat fossil fueled electricity, obedient electrons beat fiery molecules, and efficiency beats waste.
The other general point, apart from learning rates, is that another characteristic of technology adoption is that it tends to follow a very well-established pattern known as an S-curve. All that we've done in this analysis is we've modeled forward using S-curves rather than linear change, which is the conventional approach. And when you model forward with an S-curve, that’s describing the future that we set out in that framework.
Which is that as solar and wind continue up their standard technology S-curve, they get large enough to put fossil fuels out of electricity generation. This is something which is not theoretical, this is happening, in countries and markets around the world, one after the next. It’s quite interesting.
We haven't yet published this but we've done an analysis looking at each of the provinces in China, each of the states in the United States, and each of the countries in Europe. And again, you see a very clean pattern of countries and provinces and states individually moving up the S-curve. And whilst each one is difficult and each one continuously faces barriers, thus far they they have continued to solve them in one area after the next. That's the explanation for why it's more reasonable to model with S-curves than with linear growth [of cleantech], which is what folks in the fossil fuel industry have been doing.
Electricity is moving up a deployment S-curve to push fossil fuels out of final energy demand. And again, this is something that is being led in this instance by China. Electricity's share of total consumption in China has been growing at roughly 10 percentage points per decade. That electrification of final end demand is then spreading from China to Southeast Asia. Southeast Asia is starting to leapfrog what's happening in Europe and United States.
So that's the second vector of change, electrification of final energy use. And then the third vector kind of follows from those first two, which is that these new energy technologies which are coming in are much more efficient than the old energy technologies.
In very broad terms, as the brilliant Oxford academic Nick Eyre says, you've got heat and work supply and heat and work demand.
What’s happening is that inevitably, the current system which converts heat supply into work demand, that is to say burning stuff to create electricity and transport, is losing two-thirds of the energy. Increasingly what we're seeing is that much more efficient technologies, solar and wind and electric vehicles, are replacing these old inefficient technologies. And that means that you get the third X taking place, efficiency replacing waste.
Spectacular.
In “The Cleantech Revolution”, you write that the era of peaking fossil fuels is here. Can you expand on that? How do we know that this is a peak and not a plateau?
If you look at countries leading the transition, renewables do indeed start by simply supplying the growth. But then eventually they get large enough to start to push fossil fuels out of the system. That has been happening right across the OECD. For example, in the UK, as wind got bigger, it pushed coal out of the system.
In Europe, as solar and wind come into the system, they push initially coal and now increasingly gas out of the electricity system. It’s happening in the U.S, where as these new technologies come into the system, they are pushing the old technologies out. It’s completely normal to see that. It would be very strange for a technology which is cheaper and local and less polluting not to push out the old technology.
How many gaslamps are there lighting our streets? Not many, because electricity is just much easier. It's just kind of the way it works. When a new, superior technology comes in, it does push out the old technology.
These clean technologies, because they're on learning curves and because they're huge and because they're universal everywhere, they just find solutions to substitute the old technology even where people haven't necessarily thought it would happen.
Yeah! We’re seeing rapid progress in what were formerly considered hard-to-abate sectors. I’m sure you saw how in the first six months of 2024, all the new steelmaking projects approved in China used electric arc furnaces. That’s amazing.
Yes. You need to be looking at the new stuff. Is the new stuff cleantech or is it fossil tech? For example, in the electricity system, this argument is won. At a global level, 90% of the new capacity that's being built is cleantech.
We’re seeing some unbelievable numbers coming out of China in recent months - their carbon emissions might have peaked last year, they’ve hit their 2030 emissions target six years early, EVs passed 50% of new cars sold. Their massive renewables buildout is doing exactly what you said, it continues to accelerate and is starting to push coal off the grid. You’ve long identified China as the main driver of the renewables revolution. What’s your take on the latest news?
Technology revolutions, as Carlota Perez the Venezuelan economist says, tend to have a center, and change spreads out from that center. What is confusing people is that normally that center is the U.S. But in this technology revolution, it’s China. The framework of reference needs to be the change that's happening in the world’s leading market, which in this instance is China.
That's not to say, of course, that the US and Europe can't catch up and overtake China. But at the moment, it's indisputable that the largest amount of solar and wind that's been deployed is in China. China leads in EVs, batteries, production of clean energy technologies. So that's what we need to be looking at.
It’s not really surprising. China lacks oil and gas. If you’re a country that lacks oil and gas and you’re seeking energy independence, you’ll want to use your local energy resources, and in China’s case that means coal and solar and wind and electrification of the energy systems. It’s not surprising that China was the country that really was the first to fully realize the importance of deploying these technologies.
Some are wondering whether geopolitical competition between the U.S. and China might be a net good for the cleantech transition - a “Green Race” to match the Space Race of the 1960s.
The Inflation Reduction Act might be an early example of this: it was pitched, correctly, as a way to not let China rule the roost. On the other hand, anti-renewables folks are saying that China’s lead in cleantech means the U.S. should double down on fossil fuels, where it has a comparative advantage. What do you think?
It would be a huge strategic error for the U.S. to double down on a technology that doesn’t have learning rates while their strategic competitor is dominating the technology with learning rates. It would be like doubling down on horses in 1900, or gas lighting in 1920. You simply cannot compete if you’re wagering on technologies that have reached the end of their learning curves and efficiency gains.
As we stand here in 2024, it becomes increasingly obvious that the future of the global energy system will be one of solar and wind and electrification. The U.S. has enormous strengths in its financial and technological leadership, and has already started to invest in many key areas of the energy transition. The U.S. certainly can lead.
It may well be that the future is one where we are using Chinese solar panels but running off American software, for example, in the same way as my iPhone is built in China but my software is designed in California.
There are so many areas where the U.S. can actually take leadership. There are so many areas of new opportunity in this energy transition. Every single area of energy supply and demand has to get reinvented.
What do you think of the potential for enhanced geothermal, injecting liquid down so that it heats up and then having it head back up to turn a turbine, to become a new cleantech superstar in the near future? I’m hoping that this might be one of those opportunities you just talked about for the U.S. to lead, because we have a lot of fracking engineers from the fracking boom and a lot of the same people are switching to enhanced geothermal. Startups like Fervo Energy and Sage Geosystems already making deals with U.S. grids. Do you think enhanced geothermal has the potential to join solar and wind and batteries as a major learning rate-driven technology?
Yes, potentially. There are several technologies which may be complementary to the modular technologies [e.g. solar, batteries] which are currently leading the energy system. I, for one, am a big fan of geothermal of any sort, and the latest enhanced geothermal is a good idea. If it works, that's great. That would be one area where certainly the U.S. could take leadership.
What’s your take on India’s cleantech buildout? I was just at their Pavagada solar farm earlier this year, it was amazing.
They’re building the Khavda project now, 30 GW. We could have a second China-level buildout here eventually, but much earlier in their development history. Do you think India will succeed in developing their own cleantech manufacturing base, or will they just buy all their solar panels from China?
If you go back to first principles, India is a massive importer of oil and gas and coal right now. They lack fossil fuel resources, but they’ve got massive renewable resources, 70 times as much renewable potential as fossil fuel production. From the Indian perspective, because costs have fallen so much, it makes much more sense to deploy solar and wind for electricity generation and to electrify their end-use sectors as quickly as they can. And I think that's what India will continue to do.
There is some debate about when peak fossil fuel demand will happen in the Indian electricity sector, but I think that misses the point. The real opportunity for a country like India with its huge renewable resources and its limited fossil fuel resources must be to exploit this new technology and actually drive growth and wealth on the back of it.
In countries like Pakistan where the grid has been unreliable, we’re seeing very rapid uptake of rooftop solar as people seek reliable power. Can you elaborate on the potential of decentralized clean energy as a development and resilience tool?
You're right. It's not just Pakistan, actually. We track about five or ten different markets where in the last 12 to 18 months there’s been a transformation of the electricity system because of the import of cheap Chinese solar panels. It’s giving individual householders freedom to get electricity. It's also giving businesses the capacity to get cheap and constant flows of electricity. And it's giving utilities new tools.
Right across the Global South right now, the capital cost of deploying cleantech is falling to below the capital cost of buying fossil fuel infrastructure. That means that a pivot moment is coming, in one country after the next, where it makes sense not merely from the climate and the energy independence perspective but also from the economic and even the capital perspective to deploy these clean energy technologies. That's why, as you say, there's extraordinary moments such as what's been happening in Pakistan, where suddenly they can deploy tens of gigawatts of Chinese solar in in a matter of months.
And that’s one reason why it’s vital for the U.S. to participate in this battle to deploy the energy technologies of the future in the Global South.
How can we do that? The Inflation Reduction Act is a start, obviously, but what do you think America's best options are moving forward? What would you say if you were called to advise the U.S. President on cleantech right now?
I think the first point is, don’t forget that the benefit of deploying a solar panel goes almost entirely to the person who is deploying it. Therefore, if you happen to buy that solar panel from China for $100, and the manufacturer in China makes a $5 or $10 profit, but then you end up getting $3000 of electricity from that solar panel, you’re benefiting much more from that solar panel than the person who supplied you with that solar panel.
The second point is, you have opportunities, consequently, to deploy this technology using local expertise, maybe Chinese panels, and American capital and know-how to make it happen.
The final point is what I mentioned earlier, which is that you need software and services to make these systems work. There's a huge opportunity for U.S. software companies to be the brains of the system, the intermediary, to make it all work.
I wouldn't get too hung up on the fact that a lot of solar panels are coming out of China. There's lots of other opportunities to get involved and make profit.
I agree with you in large part here. I'm a huge fan of renewable energy. I agree that the Chinese solar boom has been overwhelmingly a hugely good thing for the world. But what’s your take on concerns about Uyghur forced labor and other atrocities in the Chinese system? Of course, this is a problem for many products besides cleantech as well.
[Additional context: President Biden signed the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act into law in 2021 in an effort to ensure that goods made with Uyghur forced labor don’t enter U.S. markets. Biden has also raised tariffs on many Chinese cleantech products, both over related concerns and to protect the growth of U.S. cleantech manufacturing].
Well, I guess one answer to that is you need tracing. Another answer to it is to source your solar panels from other locations. Let’s be clear, the economics of deploying solar, even at higher prices for a panel than the very low Chinese prices, are very good. There are clearly answers to it.
Nuclear is having a little mini-comeback in the U.S. recently, with the long-delayed Vogtle reactor in Georgia coming online and new reactor designs breaking ground in Tennessee and Wyoming. It’s still tiny compared to renewables, but it has some passionate backers. Do you think it’ll become a major player, or will it stay on the margins?
Again, look at the facts of the case. Solar and wind are on learning curves. The debate is whether there will be 30,000 or 40,000 terawatt-hours in 2050. Nuclear has demonstrated negative learning curves [i.e. building nuclear is getting more expensive over time], and the debate is whether nuclear will be 3,000 or 4,000 terawatt hours in 2050.
So maybe it works. Maybe it doesn't. And good luck to the folks trying to make it work, but it's still a bit of a long shot.
In the new RMI report, “The Battery Mineral Loop,” you and your colleagues write that battery minerals are not the new oil, that recycling, efficiency, and new battery chemistries could eventually lead us to a circular loop of battery minerals with no new mining needed. After a one-time investment in additional mining, we might eventually get to a point where we need no additional new mining to supply clean energy. Could you expand on that?
Recycling of valuable minerals is just the way the world works. We’re constantly recycling our gold, for example. So it's not surprising that the highly concentrated minerals which are to be found in batteries are going to get themselves recycled, and all you have to do is assume a certain amount of technological improvement [i.e. future batteries will continue the trend of using less minerals] to make up for the inevitable losses in the system. And then you will have these batteries continuously being recycled and the minerals reused.
We did this very detailed analysis to look at that framework or narrative in detail. We certainly found that the combination of recycling plus continuous improvement in battery chemistries, which has been ongoing for years now, plus general efficiencies across the system would mean that we only need a one-off extraction of battery minerals of around 125 million tons. Compare that with the amount of fossil fuels that we need to run our transport system, which is over 2,000 million tons a year!
What are your thoughts on sort of how all these clean electrons are most likely to get arbitraged? There’s power lines moving electrons through space, and batteries moving electrons through time. There’s potential for long-distance high-voltage power lines, like the Morocco-to-Britain Xlinks project or the Australia-to-Singapore Sun Cable. Will batteries eventually become so good that everyone will be able to generate and store all the power they need locally, or will we get a “World Grid” of long-distance power lines?
As with all things in the energy system, it will be a combination of all of these technologies. For example, in some areas, there are countries like Singapore, which doesn't have a lot of space, and countries like Australia that do have a lot of space. So therefore, a cable between Australia and Singapore makes a lot of sense. The cable between Morocco and the UK makes a lot of sense. Cables between the highly insolated [very sunny] central western parts of the United States and the East and West Coasts make a lot of sense. There are certain places in the world where the economics of building cables are really good and getting better.
And of course, the analogy here is with the initial build-out of the telecom cables and the internet. Telecom cables since the 1850s and Internet cables in the 1990s, which suddenly made all kinds of new things possible. And at the same time, people had local services store data. So it'll be a combination of both.
Can you share your take on the potential and the pitfalls for solar in sub-Saharan Africa? Will that end up being mostly off-grid and decentralized, since investing and building grid-scale projects in Africa can be difficult?
In sub-Saharan Africa, the first point to be made is that the current fossil fuel energy system has let these folks down. You’ve got over 600 million people without access to electricity. We need to find solutions to it, and we need to find them quick. This of course is where these cleantech solutions come into their own, because they are by definition distributed.
If you look at specific countries where the government has put into place the right policies, you're seeing incredible exponential growth of solar and wind. Namibia or Morocco or Kenya, they’re leapfrogging the U.S. already in terms of share of electricity coming from solar and wind.
The way it’s almost certainly going to happen, unless things change, is the same way we’re seeing in Pakistan. China will be providing its solar panel surplus at advantageous terms, enabling these countries to get energy independence and electricity.
What’s at stake for the renewables transition in the upcoming U.S. election? Even if Congress keeps the IRA cleantech tax credits in place, Trump could essentially shut down U.S. offshore wind by executive order, for example. And in a worst-case scenario, a Republican trifecta could repeal the IRA. China's going to keep making solar panels no matter what happens in the U.S., but…how badly could Trump screw up the American and global cleantech revolutions, to put it in very blunt terms?
Well, for the U.S. specifically, I’d defer to my better-informed U.S. colleagues. But in global terms, the answer is pretty clear. In the U.S. or indeed any given country, the leadership can hold back change for a while. But what that would do in this instance is cede leadership to other countries. It would mean that the U.S. is put further back in the race to the top to successfully make and deploy the clean energy technologies of the future. It would be a great shame for the U.S. to miss out on this technological revolution because you had folks at the top who were trying to slow it down.
There is a second question, of course, which is to what degree could they slow it down, given that the economics of clean tech is already superior to that of fossil fuels? Many people point to the fact that coal demand continued to fall during the last Trump presidency because of the economics. I think that's a very fair point, that you can slow down change, but you can't completely stop it.
One thing that's been really encouraging lately is that some very, very conservative states like Texas, are still building lots and lots of solar and wind and batteries because the economics are in favor of it.
The risk nonetheless remains. This is a race between many countries that are seeking to dominate the energy technologies of the future. If you deliberately handicap one of the participants, that is going to damage them.
On the positive side, there’s been some fascinating speculation recently on big projects we could accomplish with cheap renewables, like Casey Handmer’s proposal for mass solar-powered desalination in the U.S. Southwest.
Morocco is already setting up some solar power desalination, and the potential is immense. What do you think? What could we actually do with all these cool, new, obedient, clean electrons ready to work? Just how many of the world's problems could this solve?
I love this framing. I think it’s very accurate. If you look back at the early days of the Internet, that’s what people were thinking about in 2000 - what could we do with really, really cheap storage and transmission of data?
All kinds of new technologies and new opportunities have materialized and will continue to materialize. From our calculations, we will end up in 2030 with solar at 20 to 30 dollars per megawatt hours, and batteries at 50 dollars per kilowatt-hour of capacity. And these are the prices being achieved today in China in 2024, but I’m talking the global average number.
So when we get really cheap, clean energy technologies, that's when, as you say, we will find solutions to problems which today in 2024 seem really quite difficult.
This is one reason why we’re laser-focused on change in sectors where the economics work today. That is to say for the first 60 or 70% of electricity generation, for light transportation. These are sectors where cleantech already works today and which make up more than half of global energy demand.
We remain extremely optimistic about the disruptive capacity of clean energy technologies. People have this focus on endgame problems. How do we solve the last 20% of electricity? How do we solve flying, or steel? And that's what my great colleagues at RMI are working on every day to solve. But that doesn’t stop the disruptive system change that's taking place as a result of us solving the easy-to-solve sectors.
What are the key policy and investment choices that can make the cleantech revolution happen even faster? RMI has launched the GridUp tool for state and local leaders. What else would you really like decision makers to know to accelerate the cleantech revolution?
Many people have gone through the kind of very detailed solutions that are required. For example, making it easier to build grids. Making it easier to deploy cleantech solutions at a local level.
But actually, I want to go one step further than that and say that the role of government here is now to remove the artificial roadblocks that are sustaining and propping up the fossil fuel systems.
It’s not nearly as difficult as you imagine. You’ve got the gravity of economics on your side. Energy independence is encouraging people to adopt clean energy. What’s blocking change is outdated regulatory structures which were built for the fossil fuel system. So that's what people need to be going out and changing. It's very difficult, complex, hard work, but it's also completely feasible if you've got lots of clever people working at it.
If there was one thing that I think would really make a massive difference, it would be to remove these barriers and make electricity cheaper as a result of that remove these barriers, and make electricity cheaper as a result of that. Because the decarbonization of the electricity sector is already happening quite quickly, with solar and wind coming in. What’s not yet happening is electrification. And one of the main reasons why is because electricity is still relatively expensive. And one of the reasons why it's expensive is because we're not maximizing the ways we could reduce costs. We're not putting into place the right regulatory and pricing structures. We're not having time of use pricing. We're not having location-based pricing. We're making it difficult for people to set up local systems. Remove those roadblocks, and you'll get cheaper electricity, and that will speed up electrification, which is the second key vector of change [after decarbonizing electricity].
What you’re describing is basically the Abundance Agenda, the YIMBY movement. The movement to make it easier to build the new, cleaner generation of technologies.
Yeah. And people say that this is an intractable problem, but it’s not. China’s done it. The fact that the world's largest electricity consumer has done this means that it can be done by other countries.
And Germany, even in the last few months, Germany has sat down and said, “We need to make it easy to build grids, harder to block change.” And of course they’ve done that within the democratic process! There's still an awful lot of red tape that you can remove.
I wholeheartedly agree with this. This is a lot of what I try to write about. I'm trying to help steer the environmental movement, which is used to being in favor of red tape because it constrains pollution, to realize that the age of cleantech is upon us and we need to build things.
Yeah. And it’s difficult for folks in the environmental movement, as you say, because they're kind of used to a different approach. But in this particular instance, you need to be asking yourself how many tons of pollution and carbon dioxide will be prevented if this solar project goes through? The answer will frequently surprise you. These cleantech technologies can save huge amounts of emissions, and that needs to be set in the balance against the environmental costs that they may have locally. [Cf. Bill McKibben’s landmark Yes in Our Backyards article].
Yes, absolutely. And they also have huge benefits locally just by reducing air pollution and lowering electricity prices.
There are two other relevant issues I wanted to talk about.
Please do.
The first is the Global South story. The standard narrative is, and it came out once more recently from Exxon’s 2024 report, that the Global South lacks energy, needs more energy, and that will be fossil fuels. Obviously we completely agree that the Global South lacks energy and needs more energy, but we think they will actually deploy the energy solution that suits them. And for 85% of the Global South, they're in the sweet spot where they've got huge amounts of renewables, and they are energy importers or just basically self-sufficient in fossil fuels.
So therefore, for most folks, the answer in 2024 and onwards is actually to deploy clean tech and use it as a way to develop their countries and become wealthier. And furthermore, this is actually happening.
From our calculations, we’ve literally just done this, 60% of the Global South has passed the inflection point of 5% of their electricity coming from solar and wind. And we’ve seen that once you pass 5%, you're on the way towards 20%, 30%, and eventually towards 80% in an S-curve.
33% of the Global South has already seen peak fossil fuel demand, which already happened in the OECD in 2007 and in China we think this year.
And then finally, and possibly most surprisingly, 20% of the Global South has already leapfrogged the U.S. and the West in terms of deployment of clean energy technologies. The Global South is not the impediment to the energy transition. It will end up being a driver of it.
That is absolutely spectacular.
What was the other issue that you wanted to talk about?
Well, my very brilliant colleague, Daan, who did the minerals report, just put out a report looking at reducing energy supply and demand to a very, very simple framework where you have either heat-type sources like coal or oil, or you have work-type sources like solar and wind. And then you have either heat-type uses, like heating a building, or you have work-type uses, like electricity or transport.
His observation is that at the moment, we're sending a lot of heat sources into work uses [e.g. burning fossil fuels to turn a turbine to generate electricity], and there’s a natural physical limit to the efficiency of doing that. As we transition to work sources providing work uses, there will be a massive surge in efficiency. We haven’t seen such a surge in efficiency since the period after the Second World War.
This is spectacular. Reading your reports always makes me excited about the future. And talking to you in person really does the same thing.
My pleasure. You know, there’s one overwhelming point that I think could sway the whole debate [on cleantech deployment]. Which is, the U.S. was built on a can do attitude. You know, we in Europe, certainly in England, always look to the U.S. for getting stuff done at scale. Here we have the world’s largest technology shift. I would love for people to say to me, instead of “Here’s 10 reasons why it can’t be done,” to hear “Here’s how we’re doing it.”
Because that’s kind of what you expect from the U.S., that they can do brilliant technological solutions to get stuff done. And I believe that that will happen. It would be nice to see more of it.
That is a brilliant conclusion. Thank you so much.
Thanks very much.
Wow! This was a great read! So encouraging!
Great article, living up to the name of climate hope!