The US has the land, wealth, expertise, technology, and natural resources to build a large amount of clean power, whether that be geothermal, offshore wind, solar or nuclear generation. While electricity demand in the US has remained relatively stable over the last few decades, it is set to grow in line with the increasing electrification of transport and other sectors. Clean electricity will be needed to replace dirty electricity plants and power a lot of other 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. 

The US, with its large economy, is well set up to make the upfront investments necessary to replace fossil power plants with clean power plants. In doing so it can also help scale up the build-out of clean energy around the world, standardizing and streamlining processes. 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). Due to the US’s large size, delivering clean power to places where it is needed can be a challenge, so infrastructure investment is needed too. Still, it’s important to remember that despite the need for investment, clean energy is cheaper than dirty energy overall. 

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)

• Renewable energy in the United States (Wikipedia)

• 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.