The U.S. has used up its wiggle room on emissions

Earlier this year, BloombergNEF made a dire update to its scenario for net zero.There is no longer a clear path to limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, that report said, so the new scenario under evaluation is instead consistent with a 67% chance of holding global warming to 1.75 degrees.

The research firm’s latest report, out today, focuses specifically on the U.S. economy and its country-specific plan to align with the Paris Climate Agreement, which would require a 40% drop in emissions by 2030. In it, the authors are definitive that whatever wiggle room the country had is gone: “There is no room for any further carbon emissions growth in any sector if the U.S. is to meet net zero by mid-century,” they wrote.

• The top line: The analysis points specifically to the energy sector as one where emissions must fall rapidly starting this year in order to meet climate goals. By 2030, emissions from the power sector must drop by 26% compared to last year.
• The nuts and bolts: Bridging the energy gap between the U.S.’s current path and the path to net zero will require the economy to “overcome its attachment to cheap natural gas,” the report said. Starting in 2027, that means dedicating the majority of U.S. carbon capture capacity to gas plants. Beyond that, though, a shift in policy will be required — given its usefulness, gas won’t be displaced on an economic basis alone.

Whether the need for speed in zeroing out power emissions will be at odds with the simultaneous load growth — from electrification, manufacturing, and especially data centers to fuel the artificial intelligence boom — remains to be seen. Companies like Microsoft and Google are already creating more emissions as a result of their AI ambitions, and the uptick in data center demand has prompted some utilities to start building more gas plants.

For the U.S. to be on the path to new net zero by 2050, the next five years are critical for ramping up technologies that are already scaled and commercially available — including both electric vehicles and low-heat processes in pulp and paper production.

By 2030, wind and solar power need to triple compared to 2024, rising to just over a terawatt by 2035.

Meanwhile, thanks to the urgent need for clean, firm power for everything from data centers to manufacturing, the net zero scenario will require that 50 gigawatts of new nuclear reactors come online by 2050.

That’s one area where data center power players may be speeding deployment. While building nuclear has been notoriously difficult in recent years, Microsoft and Google have both made moves in recent weeks to bring nuclear power to the grids that serve their data centers.

Microsoft inked a deal to bring the remaining reactor at Three Mile Island back online by 2028, and Google CEO Sundar Pichai said in a speech last week the company could use small modular nuclear reactors to power gigawatt-scale data centers.