Pedal to the Metal
Neva Espinoza is EPRI Vice President, Energy Supply and Low-Carbon Resources.
Countries and companies have pledged to reach unprecedented levels of carbon reduction in the years and decades ahead. Achieving bold goals requires fundamentally transforming how economies around the world make, move, and use energy.
However, the net-zero energy transition requires carefully balancing the aspirational and achievable to help ensure affordability and reliability for all. At the end of the day, navigating the transition before us comes down to considering practical realities of the road ahead.
Today's power sector is grappling with unprecedented change. The proliferation of data centers, AI, crypto mining, and economy-wide electrification are driving increased U.S. electricity demand. Renewable energy incentives are accelerating the addition of solar and wind resources, while new U.S. Environmental Protection Agency rulings, combined with carbon dioxide reduction goals, drive toward the retirement of firm, dispatchable generation.
At the same time, longer, more extreme, and wider-reaching weather events are challenging a system with less reserve generation capacity than it has had in decades. This triad of diverging pillars — low-carbon electric supply, increased demand, and extreme weather — presents new challenges to electric system reliability and resilience.
In this time of change, there are growing calls to accelerate the shift to low-carbon electric supply. Speed is important, but one practical reality is that bringing together the technologies and framework to support decarbonization takes time. Attempting to evolve electricity supply and demand at today's pace of change without innovation in related areas will lead to reliability challenges.