Clean energy plants that do not emit greenhouse gasses while generating electricity can play a major part in reducing global greenhouse gas emissions. They will be needed to replace dirty electricity plants and power a lot of other low-carbon climate solutions, so building out a huge amount of new clean power plants must ramp up early on over the course of the transition period. 

One obstacle to building clean power plants is that they require a relatively large amount of initial investment (compared to fossil energy which has high fuel, maintenance, and decommissioning costs, for example). This obstacle can be overcome with direct government investment, subsidies, mandates, and other forms of innovative financing. Another challenge is the fact that some clean plants – solar and wind, for example – are ‘intermittent’ and so don’t match up with demand on their own. This can be solved with a rollout of flexible technologies such as energy storage, having geographically diverse wind and solar generators, and complementing these sources with clean baseload generation (e.g. geothermal and hydropower).  It’s important to remember that despite the need for investment, a clean energy-based system will be cheaper than a dirty system overall. 

If wealthier countries build large amounts of clean power quickly, it would also reduce the cost of energy and improve scalability, which will help the rest of the world move faster as well. Majority world countries would benefit greatly from more clean energy generation, which is both cheap and relatively climate resilient – yet financial assistance from wealthier nations to make the necessary up-front investments and move away from dirty sources is urgently needed. The faster we shift away from coal and gas to building clean electricity plants, the better chance we have of reducing the impacts of the climate crisis.

Discard 1 card from your hand, then add 1 Clean Energy token to your player board for each Grid tag in this card's stack.

• Renewable Energy (US Office of Energy Efficiency & Renewable Energy)

• Rapidly scale up zero-carbon electricity generation (Systems Change Lab)

• Support clean energy initiatives in your community, for example those that install solar panels or support community energy projects.

• Join, or spend some time with, or support an organization or local group that is pushing for the buildout of green energy, such as the Sunrise Movement.

• Ask your political representatives to support the buildout of clean energy generators and crucially, the infrastructure to support them, including batteries and other flexible tech.