How would a 100% renewable world look and feel?

This is the opening question in Our Renewable Future: Laying the Path for One Hundred Percent Clean Energy, a 2016 book by David Fridley and Richard Heinberg on the pros and cons of transitioning to 100% renewable energy. 

A few weeks ago, I spent my time looking for any articles, reports, or blogs that would give me the cut-and-dry basics on biofuels. I wanted to know whether or not biofuels could help fight climate change, how the economy or policy influenced biofuel use, and what the social impact of biofuels was on local communities. 

Our Renewable Future is a handbook that helped me begin to answer these questions. The book intentionally reads a bit “text-bookie” in order to provide an accessible overview of renewable energy and potential avenues to restructure our energy system. Its breakdown of the technical and economic complexities of energy can help readers make connections between their individual energy usage and the global energy economy. 

Any shifts in energy sources will require shifts in energy usage patterns at the individual, regional, and national levels, a recurring theme throughout the book.  Many of our production or consumption habits continue to rely on fossil fuels. Thus, a good percentage of our existing infrastructure – be it transportation, food, banking, or housing – also relies on fossil fuels. A transition away from fossil fuels will require a societal transformation that affects how we live, move, and communicate. 

To achieve this transition, the authors suggest that our society decentralize and embrace local energy solutions. I am familiar with the initiative of “buying local” but the idea that we also “power local” intrigues me. In other words, rather than depending on nationally operated electricity grids or imported oil, we could build infrastructure to produce the energy we need closer to home. Community-based models, the authors argue, could provide many benefits like promoting equity, providing long-term and reliable energy availability, and democratizing the energy market. 

Transitioning to 100% locally sourced renewable energy will not be easy. 

Fridley and Heinberg use wind and solar as examples to explain two major obstacles facing a renewable energy transition. For one, a transition to wind and solar will be expensive. A rapid build-out of either will likely require some sort of government subsidy to support private enterprise. Second, manufacturing solar or wind equipment currently requires fossil fuels. This means making a renewable energy transition will require copious amounts of fossil fuels, and in turn, an increase in carbon emissions (at least in the short term). 

Going local will also require readjusting energy’s economics and policy. Unless we’re more willing to invest smartly (to avoid another economic crisis) and compensate for a short-term increase in carbon emissions, a society that relies entirely on wind and solar remains unlikely.

Until we overcome these larger systemic stumbling blocks, it will be difficult for local energy sources to emerge. 

After reading Fridley and Heinberg’s book, I know that all energy sources have their own set of advantages and disadvantages. I still can’t tell you exactly how biofuels make your car run (to this day, I wonder if I ever will), but I can begin to answer my inquiries about the economics and politics of renewable energy. 

But I still have some questions that remain unanswered.  What are the real-life impacts of a 100% renewable energy transition, and eventually, the world? Will renewable energy actually translate into jobs and strengthen local economies? Will those jobs and gains translate into opportunities for marginalized communities and actually promote equity?

That those questions remain unanswered highlights one of the weaknesses of this book.  Throughout, the cultural and social aspects of the energy transition are often lost. I think a more holistic approach would ground the technical definitions and statistics with stories of how the economic and political challenges are actually experienced by communities and individuals. 

Our Renewable Future: Laying the Path for One Hundred Percent Clean Energy is a great starting point to learn about the technical aspects of energy transitions so we can go on to address the socio-cultural. I would encourage readers of this book to take this handbook as a resource to inform future conversations about the social and cultural implications of energy transitions.