SO WE'LL GET THERE IN UNDER TEN:

Until recently, climate experts projected that it wouldn't be possible to decarbonize the electric grid until 2050--and that moving to fully renewable energy could raise the price of electricity for consumers. But the cost of wind, solar, and battery storage has fallen so quickly that in just 15 years, the U.S. could feasibly run on 90% clean electricity, with no increase in electric bills. And adding new renewable infrastructure could create more than half a million new jobs each year. By 2045, the entire electric grid could run on renewables.

"We wanted to look at how quickly could we replace the existing polluting generation with zero-carbon generation without raising electricity bills at all for customers," says Sonia Aggarwal, vice president at the nonprofit Energy Innovation, who served on the technical review committee for the new report from the University of California, Berkeley. "I didn't expect that we were going to get 90% by 2035. It's really exciting that this is the moment that we've reached in this country, where the costs have just changed so much that this is now within our reach, in a way that it wasn't even five years ago."

Since 2010, the cost of utility-scale solar power has dropped 82%, according to a recent report from the International Renewable Energy Agency. Onshore wind power has fallen in cost by 39%. While outside observers might have expected the cost of renewables to eventually level off, "it really is similar to the computer chip industry with Moore's law," she says. "We've just seen continual cost reductions."

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