President Barack Obama is set to announce a new green goal tomorrow at the North American Leaders' Summit in Ottawa. Obama, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada and President Enrique Pena Nieto of Mexico are going to set a continent-wide goal of having half the electricity generated without adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere by 2025.
"It calls for the continent's power grid to draw 50 percent of its generation by 2025 from renewable energy, efficiency, nuclear power and fossil fuels with carbon capture and storage technology."
How close are the three nations to the goal? According to the New York Times:
"Canada is already far ahead in reliance on renewable energy at 81 percent. The United States is at 33 percent, most of that coming from nuclear plants, while Mexico is at 18 percent, according to Cameron Ahmad, a spokesman for Trudeau."
And Texas? We'd only be a fraction of that continent-wide standard. But at the moment, we're not even close. The federal Energy Information Administration's most recent data is from 2014. As the chart at the top of this post shows, about 80 percent of Texas power generation that year burned carbon fuels.
So to move close to hitting that continental target in Texas we'd need to add a lot of wind and solar -- some of that is already happening -- build more nuclear power plants -- incredibly unlikely -- or find better ways to get rid of the CO2 being produced by fossil fuels -- a possibility.
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