High tension power lines stretch across the desert landscape at sunrise near Boulder City, Nev., on Wednesday, Aug. 19, 2020. Credit: Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images Many scenarios for averting the worst effects of climate change involve electrifying just about everything that now runs on fossil fuels, and shifting to an electricity system that runs mostly on wind and solar. Can this be done reliably and with existing technologies? Yes. That’s one of the main findings of the Electrification Futures Study , an ambitious project of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory that started four years ago and has now issued its final report . The transformation to a highly electrified economy is an opportunity for consumers and businesses because of the potential for cost-savings and for developing and selling new generations of products, said Ella Zhou, a senior modeling engineer at NREL and a co-author of the report. “This offers useful information literally for everyone, because electricity touches all of our lives,” she said. We deliver climate news to your inbox like nobody else. Every day or once a week, our original stories and digest of the web’s top headlines deliver the full story, for free. In […]
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