On Thursday, the U.S. Department of Energy announced a provisional forecast Country’s carbon emissions for the previous year. Any reduction in emissions would put us on a path to avoiding some of the catastrophic warming scenarios that were still being considered at the beginning of this century. But if we are to have any chance of meeting the Paris Agreement’s goal of limiting global warming to above 2°C, emissions will need to fall dramatically in the near future.
So what’s going on in the US? Emissions continue to trend downward, but there are no signs that the decline will accelerate. And most of that decline is due to a single sector: changes to the power grid.
Off-grid, on the street
U.S. carbon dioxide emissions have been on the decline since about 2007, when they peaked at about 6 gigatonnes. In recent years, the pandemic caused emissions to drop dramatically in 2020, dropping below 5 gigatonnes for the first time since before EIA data began in 1990. Carbon dioxide emissions then increased slightly and in 2023 began to decline for the first time since the pandemic, with emissions once again clearly below 5 gigatonnes.
DOE’s Energy Information Administration (EIA) categorizes carbon dioxide sources into five different sectors: power generation, transportation, residential, commercial, and industrial. The EIA allocates 80% of U.S. emissions reductions in 2023 to changes in the electric grid, given that it is the only sector that has seen significant change over the entire 30 years the EIA tracks. This is not surprising.
Hydropower is in the rearview mirror, and after coal and nuclear power comes wind and solar.
What’s going on with the power grid? A few things. At the turn of the century, coal accounted for more than half of the United States’ electricity generation. Now it’s down to 16 percent. Within the next two years, wind and solar power, which accounted for 0% of electricity generation until 2004, are likely to replace it. The situation would be even better if there were no reduction in overall wind speeds leading to a reduction in wind power generation. But the biggest change has been the increase in natural gas, which went from 10 percent of electricity generation in 1990 to more than 40 percent in 2023.
The small contribution to emissions reductions was due to lower demand, which decreased by 1 percentage point compared to 2022. The electrification of transportation and home appliances and the growth of AI processing are expected to lead to a surge in demand in the near future, but that is unlikely. It still shows on the grid.
Electricity generation currently accounts for 30% of U.S. carbon emissions. This makes her the second largest contributor after transport, which accounts for 39% of emissions. The EIA assesses that transport emissions will remain unchanged compared to 2022, despite air travel returning to pre-pandemic levels and gasoline consumption increasing slightly. Emissions from transportation are expected to decline in the second half of this decade due to stricter fuel economy regulations, but emissions have only declined by about 10% compared to their 2006 peak. not.
buildings and industry
The remaining sectors (commercial, residential, industrial) have a more complex relationship with fossil fuels. Some of the energy is supplied via the grid, so its emissions are already taken into account. These are expected to decrease thanks to the decarbonization of the electricity grid, but for business and residential use, grid-dependent emissions are falling even more rapidly than that would suggest. This suggests that things like more efficient lighting and appliances are having an impact.
Separately, direct use of fossil fuels, such as in furnaces and water heaters, remained roughly flat over the 30 years studied by the EIA, but declined slightly in 2023 due to milder weather. (8% for residential use, 4% for commercial use).
In contrast, EIA only tracks the direct use of fossil fuels in industrial processes. These have declined slightly over the 30-year period, but have remained fairly stable since the 2008 economic crisis, with emissions remaining unchanged from 2022 to 2023. Similar to power grids, the main difference in this sector is due to the growth of power grids. Decrease in natural gas and coal.
Overall, there are two ways to examine this data. The first is that progress in curbing carbon emissions has been very limited, and in some areas no progress at all. A more optimistic view is that the technologies for decarbonizing the power grid and improving building electricity usage are currently the most advanced, and that the U.S. will focus its decarbonization efforts on areas where those technologies will have the greatest impact. This means that we are concentrating on
From both perspectives, it is clear that even more difficult challenges lie ahead, both in terms of accelerating decarbonization and in addressing areas where decarbonization will be more difficult. The Biden administration has been working to introduce policies that would encourage progress in this regard, but much of the impact will likely not be seen until the beginning of the next decade.
Exhibition image Yaolshen
