(Hey Volties! The following was going to be a column on Vox, but they decided they wanted something newsier, so I’ll be doing something about Biden’s pledge over there, soon. In the meantime, enjoy this writeup of a fun new paper, or listen by clicking play above. We’ll get back to Battery Week next week.)Climate change can sometimes seem like an intractable problem, so it is useful to remember periodically that progress is possible — indeed, that we are making progress, and know how to make more.This is especially true of the electricity sector.Electricity is the focus of some of our biggest ambitions. Climate policy analysts (and Joe Biden) agree that we need to decarbonize the electricity sector entirely by 2035 — that’s what Biden’s Energy Efficiency and Clean Energy Standard aims for, if he’s able to pass it. That’s an incredibly ambitious target for the next 15 years, but a look at the last 15 years shows that rapid change is possible.The US electricity sector is decarbonizing faster than expectedTo illustrate the point, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory senior researcher Ryan Wiser undertook a simple project. He went back 15 years and looked at the US Energy Information Administration’s 2005 projections for the electricity sector, to compare them with what actually happened. Specifically, he looked at the EIA’s business-as-usual (BAU) scenario, its projection of what would happen if 2005 policy were frozen in place. (He also looked at other projections, to make sure EIA wasn’t an outlier.) Here’s the top-line conclusion:Fifteen years ago, many business-as-usual projections anticipated that annual carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from power supply in the United States would reach 3,000 million metric tons (MMT) in 2020. In fact, direct power-sector CO2 emissions in 2020 were 1,450 MMT — roughly 50% below the earlier projections. By this metric, in only 15 years the country’s power sector has gone halfway to zero emissions. [my emphasis]Not bad!Of course, as Wiser acknowledges, this is about the rosiest possible lens through which to look at this data.2020 was an unusual year; the pandemic drove demand (and emissions) down. Using 2019 numbers instead, the decline from BAU is 46 percent.If you measure how much power sector emissions fell from 2005 to 2020 in absolute terms — rather than relative to expectations — the decline is 40 percent. Measuring absolute decline with 2019 numbers gets you 33 percent. If you look at total energy-related emissions — not just electricity but all energy — they are down 39 percent relative to BAU. It’s evident that electricity is making the fastest progress.Nonetheless, no matter how you look at it, in terms of emissions, we’re doing much better than BAU in the electricity sector. Here’s a breakdown of emission declines in the electricity sector (and its component subsectors), relative to BAU projections and absolute levels, for both 2020 and 2019.(Look how much difference 2020 made in transportation — that’s the pandemic talking.)That’s how electricity GHG emissions did. Let’s look at a few other metrics.Coal died while natural gas and renewables grewFour big trends in the sources that power the electricity sector helped push emissions below BAU. First, coal died — just absolutely plunged relative to expectations. Second, natural gas boomed, thanks to the shale revolution, and stayed much cheaper than expected. Third, renewables boomed, thanks to policy support that drove rapid cost declines. And fourth, demand stagnated, thanks to declining manufacturing and energy efficiency.Here’s a graph that shows, on top, how supply and demand sources came in relative to EIA’s 2005 BAU, and on bottom, how they performed in absolute terms.You can see the four stories plain as day: coal plunged, natural gas and renewables boomed, and demand stagnated. Here’s another way of looking at the data:Electricity bills have not increased …The dynamic in electricity prices is interesting. EIA’s 2005 BAU projec