The other day, reading about how solar energy has been bailing out Texas’ stand-alone electricity grid in scorching temperatures, I was struck by this image.

“Texas could be the Saudi Arabia of renewable energy,” said Andrew Dessler, director of the Texas Center for Climate Studies at Texas A&M. “We got rich selling hydrocarbons, but politicians in Texas don’t want to get rich selling electrons.” 

It is a paradigm-changing image, isn’t it? The Saudi Arabia of renewable energy. As opposed to the Saudi Arabia of oil and gas, which is helping to rapidly heat up our world and – given Russia’s attack on Ukraine – heating up inflation, too.

Then I read a story about how Burlington, Vermont, a city of 42,000, has run on 100% renewable energy since 2014. It was the first US city to do that, and it took only 10 years to achieve. And it has quite amazingly low electrical bills.

So I wondered – are there other US cities that are also running totally on renewable energy. And it turns out, yes, there are – at least three other US cities and one US island