Patricia Hidalgo-Gonzalez saw the future of energy on a broiling-hot day last September.
An email alert hit her inbox from the San Diego Gas & Electric Company. “Extreme heat straining the grid,” read the message, which was also pinged as a text to 27 million people. “Save energy to help avoid power interruptions.”
It worked. People cut their energy use. Demand plunged, blackouts were avoided and California successfully weathered a crisis exacerbated by climate change. “It was very exciting to see,” says Hidalgo-Gonzalez, an electrical engineer at the University of California, San Diego who studies renewable energy and the power grid.
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This kind of collective societal response, in which we reshape how we interact with the systems that provide us energy, will be crucial as we figure out how to live on a changing planet.
Earth has warmed at least 1.1 degrees Celsius since the 19th century, when the burning of coal, oil and other fossil fuels began belching heat-trapping gases such as carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Scientists agree that only drastic action to cut emissions can keep the planet from blasting past 1.5 degrees of warming — a threshold beyond which the consequences become even more catastrophic than the rising sea levels, extreme weather and other impacts the world is already experiencing.
The goal is to achieve what’s known as net-zero emissions, where any greenhouse gases still entering the atmosphere are balanced by those being removed — and to do it as soon as we can.
Scientists say it is possible to swiftly transform the ways we produce and consume energy. To show the way forward, researchers have set out paths toward a world where human activities generate…
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