“ And solar was the fastest-growing electricity source for the 20th year in a row.
It now provides 7% of the world's electricity”
replies(6):
It now provides 7% of the world's electricity”
Now, their prices have gone down, their generation per unit has gone up, and much more is known about how they behave long-term.
The world has a LOT of power generation. It will take time to replace. But with every time that some existing power generation source shuts down due to age, or expansion occurs somewhere, it will inevitably be done with solar/wind. It's just more cost effective now.
In the end it is not environmental concerns that will cause solar and wind to become commonplace. It's just economics. Slapping down something that generates power for 20-30 years with no input fuel is just way more economically feasible than anything that requires fuel. They still have maintenance costs, but it's nothing by comparison. They can completely undercut other sources of power.
Transport is a good example. A long distance truck can take up to 300 gallons of diesel. It will drive quite far on that. But that's over 1000$. A well utilized truck goes through well over 100K$ of fuel per year. That's a lot of money.
Enter electric trucks. Yes they have range limitations (depending on their battery size). But they don't use up 100K $ worth of electricity per year burning over 1M $ of fuel over it's lifespan. Not to mention all the maintenance and parts associated with keeping diesel engines going.
Solar/wind/battery power has essentially no marginal cost. Electric trucks powered by that still have some marginal cost but it's a lot lower than that of a diesel truck. And even at current grid prices (typically determined by the cost of fossil fuels), it's probably earning itself back. What happens when diesel trucks follow the same cost curve that EVs went through? You don't need to be a genius to figure out that there are going to be a lot of truckers and trucking companies that can't afford to stick with diesel for very long when everybody starts decimating their fuel expenses.
That's just trucks. The same kind of economics are happening across pretty much every sector that can feasibly be electrified. It's not all happening at once. But probably in hind sight in a few decades it will have happened very quickly. One moment everybody was mostly burning diesel, petrol, methane, and coal and a few short decades later all of that is gone because it became way too costly to continue doing any of that.
Rail at best connects major cities, and a few minor ones. It is largely at capacity for the industries it serves, and moving retail freight to big box stores simply isn't possible. There are no knobs to turn or levers to pull to change that.
US freight railroads used to carry a larger variety of goods and serve a larger variety of customers than they do today. They were never in the business of delivering finished goods directly to retail stores, but they did transport a large amount of single-carload and less-than-carload deliveries between factories and warehouses. This is why if you visit older industrial areas you will see train tracks everywhere, including in the middle of the street and sometimes directly into buildings.
When the trucking industry was deregulated in 1980, trucking companies undercut railroads on low-volume high-profit routes, leaving the railroads to focus on low-value bulk goods like coal. The total volume of freight actually went up, but both revenue per unit and gross revenue fell. The railroads struggled to justify the cost of maintenance on now less busy lines, so they abandoned many of them and neglected the maintenance on others. That made it impossible to win back the lost business from the trucking industry even as the cost of trucking skyrocketed. Everyone is now worse off except for the owners of the trucking companies.
As for Switzerland, they invented a special kind of shipping container and that can be loaded/unloaded from a train or truck with no need for a crane. This allows them to make carload and intermodal deliveries without building any new infrastructure.