This story launches Deny and Delay: Inside the Climate Disinformation Machine, a series on the effects of climate misinformation on democracy. Co-produced
The Kansas Sierra Club says electric utility Evergy is not moving fast enough to cut carbon emissions and close coal-fired power plants. A new report says customers would save hundreds of millions of dollars closing all coal plants by 2030.
Ricky Kharawala/Unsplash
Joseph Daniel, Senior Energy Analyst | February 11, 2021, 11:10 am EDT
Perhaps one of the most over-used Hollywood clichés is the non-committal partner. Often willing to espouse love for their significant other, yet unwilling to, as Beyonce would recommend, “put a ring on it.”
Sadly, electric utilities across the United States seem to have fallen in the same trope: More than willing to set big ambitious goals around climate but unwilling to commit to making good on those goals.
Utilities seem to have offered us a big box of Valentine’s chocolates but when two of my former colleagues looked inside, they found the box mostly empty.
Source: S&P Global Market Intelligence
Market forces, investor sentiment and existing policies have driven the decline of the U.S. coal fleet in recent years and will likely continue to prompt closures, but the last of the power plants may remain online well past the next decade without policy interventions.
Many utilities have pledged to hit net-zero emissions targets at some point, but details are lacking in the public sphere. U.S. President Joe Biden aims to decarbonize the power sector by 2035 and will likely need to deploy restrictions and incentives for power generators to achieve the goal. Coal will probably continue to be an easy target for elimination, as companies look at options ranging from battery storage to carbon capture to lower emissions.
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The number of companies that have set net-zero climate goals meaning that they’ll cut their CO2 emissions as much as possible, and any they still emit will be offset by projects that capture carbon has more than tripled over roughly the last year. Nestlé, the world’s largest food company, says that it plans to reach net-zero emissions by 2050. Unilever, another consumer product giant with hundreds of brands, plans to get there by 2039. Duke Energy, the North Carolina-based electric utility with a long history of using coal, plans to reach net zero by 2050. Even oil companies such as BP now say that they are aiming for the same thing. Others, including Amazon and Microsoft, plan to hit the goal much sooner.