\n William Driscoll<\/a><\/p>\n
The U.S. could nearly eliminate its carbon emissions and air pollution by 2148 if it maintained a pace of adding 43 GW of renewables per year, set during the first seven months of 2025, and achieved \u201cnear-electrification\u201d of each energy-using sector.<\/p>\n
That finding and results for 149 other countries are presented in\u00a0a paper<\/a>\u00a0by Stanford University Professor Mark Jacobson, published in the journal RSC Sustainability.<\/p>\n The \u201cmost substantial and encouraging finding,\u201d the paper says, is the \u201crate by which China is transitioning its energy economy.\u201d<\/p>\n China, which added renewable generating capacity at an annual pace of 397 GW during the first ten months of 2025, could at that pace eliminate carbon emissions and air pollution by 2051 with near-electrification of all energy sectors.<\/p>\n Whether China will electrify transportation, buildings and industry by 2051 is \u201can uncertainty\u201d but \u201csome recent data appear encouraging,\u201d the paper says, noting that more than half of the vehicles sold in China in 2024 were battery-electric vehicles, and that China is \u201calready the world\u2019s largest market\u201d for electric heat pumps and \u201chas the manufacturing base to ramp that up.\u201d<\/p>\n Given that the U.S. and China have comparable land sizes and the U.S. economy is larger than China\u2019s, the paper says that China\u2019s progress \u201csuggests that the main barriers\u201d to the U.S. achieving a renewables buildout as large as China\u2019s \u201care social and political, not technical or economic.\u201d<\/p>\n China is installing renewable generation at a rate \u201calmost two orders of magnitude the rate it is installing new nuclear,\u201d and \u201cis also not distracted much by carbon capture, direct air capture, blue hydrogen, biofuels, or biomass.\u201d<\/p>\n Canada, although it is already producing 16% of the renewably-generated electricity it needs to reach 100% renewables across all energy sectors, would reach a 100% standard \u201cbeyond the year 2350,\u201d based on the \u201cslow rate\u201d at which it has recently increased renewable generation.<\/p>\n A \u201cpotential benefit\u201d of the study, the paper says, is to provide countries with \u201ca realistic sense of their progress\u201d so they may then determine \u201cif faster progress is necessary.\u201d<\/p>\n The examples set by China and several other countries of the 150 countries analyzed \u201csuggest that the world as a whole can succeed in a rapid transition if all countries make a strong social and political commitment to a transition and focus, like a laser, on clean, renewable energy.\u201d<\/p>\n The paper is titled \u201cProjections of when each of 150 countries may eliminate air pollution and carbon emissions from all energy.\u201d<\/p>\n This content is protected by copyright and may not be reused. If you want to cooperate with us and would like to reuse some of our content, please contact: editors@pv-magazine.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\tPopular content<\/p>\n
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