The Green New Deal: A Goal, Not a Date

Much has already been written and said about the climate policy parts of the Green New Deal, the policy package recently unveiled by Senator Ed Markey and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Most of the commentary—including my own email traffic with many colleagues—falls into two camps. One group, which tends towards energy industry professionals, tends to belittle the goal of a 100% renewable power grid by 2030 as technically impossible and hopelessly expensive—a “green dream,” in Speaker Pelosi’s words. The other group, the Green New Deal’s advocates, avoids questions of feasibility and cost and instead emphasizes the many benefits of clean energy investment and the potentially catastrophic costs of not taking action to moderate climate change.

So let’s get something out of the way immediately. As someone who’s worked on electric power issues his whole career, I think I can say with some authority that achieving absolutely all electricity from renewable energy by 2030 is probably infeasible and certainly costly. It isn’t just the number of renewable energy projects we’d need to build, although this would be a gigantic effort all by itself. We would also have to build a large number of new storage facilities, including hydroelectric dams that would flood areas and could cause large environmental damage. We’d also need a fair number of new transmission lines. The federal government would have to sign, or at least back, some whopper-size power contracts with Canada, which has some large hydroelectric options. And this is just what we can guess as major issues at the outset.

But this doesn’t mean I think the energy goals of the Green New Deal should be scrapped. Just the opposite. Getting hung up on whether 2030 or any other date is realistic for a carbon-free power sector is focusing on the wrong question. There isn’t any doubt in my mind that the U.S. can eventually achieve this goal, nor any doubt that the sooner we do it the better. Should John F. Kennedy not have set a goal to get America to the moon when his advisors told him that the idea was, at that time, completely unachievable? Should we have not entered World War II if someone had told us it would take seven years to defeat Hitler, instead of four?

The benefit of setting a goal is that it focuses resources and attention on how to get to that goal. If we adopted this goal, we would accelerate research and development efforts on new forms of electric storage technologies and carbon capture and sequestration, which is exactly what we need to do to address the carbon crisis in any case. It would prompt us to do more inter-regional and national transmission planning, which has become nearly dormant in the U.S. after many years of federal neglect. It would send the right signals to the investment community, the energy industry, and other nations around the world. And it would reverse our current federal policy.

Let’s get started now putting our best energy technologists, utility experts, and power system planners to work on plans that are ambitious, affordable, and achievable. At a bare minimum, this would reverse the direction of our current disastrous federal climate non-policy and unquestionably lead to better health, environment, and economic outcomes. And who knows? We might even surprise ourselves and discover some faster ways to save carbon than we ever thought possible.

Peter Fox-Penner is the Director of Boston University’s Institute for Sustainable Energy and a Professor of Practice in the Questrom School of Business. He is the author of Smart Power and Power After Carbon (Harvard University Press, 2020).