Year-to-date, a .8% drop in electricity generation has decreased consumption of all fossil fuels. Coal use is down a small .1%, natural gas a large 6.8% and oil a whopping ~25%. Hydro and wind are up ~5% and almost 39%, respectively. This fall in electricity use is poised to be the first annual decline since 2001 and may be a deeper decline. The EIA projects electricity use to fall again in 2009, hopefully allowing grid operators to postpone building new fossil fuel power plants until Carbon Capture and Sequestration (CCS) technology can be integrated or the plants can be replaced by renewables. And with the whole electricity pie shrinking, wind power can significantly grow in market share in 2009 even if its growth is 25-40% slower than this year, as recent announcements suggest.

The climate implications of these September numbers are an even deeper cut in emissions than I projected after the Short Term Energy Outlook last week. It now appears US emissions in 2008 may be almost 3% below their 2007 level. Achieving 1990 levels by 2020 seems to be getting easier and easier — as long as we base economic recovery on the deployment of efficiency and renewables. We’ll see if Obama & Co. aim to cut emissions further toward the 1Sky goal of 25% below 1990 level by 2020 (as I’m sure Al Gore urged him to last week) if emissions fall a good deal further.

Onwards in the sustainable energy transition-

I’ve been advocating climate neutrality on campuses for a long time and want us to move to wind and solar as quickly as possible – but 100% carbon-free in 10 years may be too much of a stretch for a system that relies on coal, natural gas and oil for over 70% of its electricity. Can we really retire the hundreds of billions we spent on that infrastructure in such a short time?

My optimistic case is for us to maintain our amazing growth rates for solar and wind at ~30% per year – which would send their contribution to the grid from ~1% to ~10%, thus making ~35% of the grid zero carbon (nuclear and hydro being the remaining ~25%). An aspirational goal may be to grow even faster, at a clip of 40% per year — but even that would not achieve the Gore standard, since it would bring zero carbon sources up to ~70%. And that would be incredible! Look at Europe, who has been in the lead in climate responsibility. Their renewables goal is for less than half of electricity by 2020 (two years later).

It always feels good to set pure goals like 100% carbon neutral in a short time frame, but maybe a better goal could have been 50% of the grid by climate neutral by 2020. Then maybe we could retrofit our coal and natural gas plants with carbon capture and storage by 2035 and have 100% carbon neutral electricity by then… We’ll see. I don’t mean to discourage difficult goals and dreaming the impossible. But to maintain the effort to stabilize our climate, we have to keep morale up for many decades. And picking a goal that may not be reachable could set us up for failure and burn out. Al Gore is doing awesome work, and I hope I am being pessimistic on this. The announcement may be intrinsically beneficial and productive as a conversation piece even if we don’t choose it and achieve it. What do others think?

I also wanted to share the good news that Texas is supporting transmission lines for an acceleration of their wind power projects to provide for the state’s metropolitan areas. The state, which already produces more than twice the wind power of its nearest rival California at 5.3 GW, approved a $4.93 billion project for 18.5 GW of transmission from the windy and rural western part of the state to central and eastern cities. This will help Boone Pickens send the electrons from his largest wind farm in the world when it comes online in a few years. Now if Congress gets off its laurels to renew the renewables Production Tax Credit, wind will definitely begin to rival hydro as a major source of US electricity within a few years. Pressuring the Presidential candidates to push for such action ASAP could be a good opportunity to test their leadership abilities. Here’s to continued progress ahead toward the inspirational energy vision of Gore and other voices for climate responsibility throughout our country.