William Burke-White is Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School. He’s got a long string of other academic distinctions, and he has written extensively on international criminal law, international economic law, and human rights.

He’s also the author of forthcoming book How International Law got Lost, due to be published next year.

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It’s not so long since wind and solar power were seen as the Cinderella of the of the energy world. The didn’t have the heft of their two big, ugly polluting sisters, coal and oil. That might not be the case for so much longer.

The first article I saw on this was about UK electricity production. Remember that Britain was the first country in the world to have an industrial revolution, which was fired by its coal production, the world’s first real electricity generation plant was built in London in 1882, and of course coal fuelled the British Navy for much of the time it was conquering half the world.

That’s why it’s startling to read that coal, along with all other fossil fuels combined have been overtaken by renewables – mostly wind power – as the main source of electricity in the UK. In the first quarter of 2020,

In that period, 45 per cent of all the electricity was generated by renewables, while only 33 per cent was generated by burning fossil fuels. That’s a gigantic modal shift in quite a short time. Most of the balance came from nuclear power, by the way.

But the really striking thing is not the speed with which renewables are taking off, it’s the speed at which their price is dropping. Renewable energy in all the main world markets, including  the U.S., Europe, China and Russia, renewables are now cheaper than coal.