As scientific advancements soldier on and the political battle in America continues to wage over how to power the country as the decades wear on, the U.S. government has made a pledge that America’s energy sources will be entirely renewable by 2060.
The promise was made in a paper published by scientific journal Climatic Change.
In the paper, it says American utility companies have taken the lead on the journey away from fossil fuels and towards renewable sources of energy.
Researchers who authored the paper wrote that private utility companies were actually far more ahead of schedule than individual state government energy goals would suggest.
“Many people feel the transition on the policy side isn't going fast enough,” paper co-author Matthew Burgess, a fellow at Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) and University of Colorado Boulder assistant professor, said in a statement. “But the private sector is moving faster than we thought. A lot has to do with technology, costs going down, natural gas replacing coal, and renewables replacing fossil fuels—policy is not the only lever.”
If the private sector continues on its current pace and hits the marks it has set for itself, America’s energy grid would run solely on renewable energy by 2060, the paper states.