| Water once kept the lights on in Zambia. But the African democracy has endured near-total darkness for several months now, reports The Washington Post's Chico Harlan from Lusaka, Zambia. For decades, a mighty dam on the Zambezi River supplied the country's energy needs with virtually no planet-warming emissions. An epic drought has turned the Zambezi into a trickle of its former self. That's switched off much of the country's electric grid for days at a time. "It's a weird way of living," said Sarah Mwila Bwalya, 37. "People are living in depression." Zambia's ordeal highlights the vulnerability of hydropower, the world's most widely used form of renewable energy, to climate change itself. By 2050, according to a study by researchers at the World Wildlife Fund, 32 percent of today's dams will be located in places with medium to very high risk of water scarcity thanks in part due to climate change. There are no easy solutions, said Zambia's president, Hakainde Hichilema. "We were swimming in happiness that we were largely green," Hichilema said in an interview at his office last month. "The drought has told us that even when we were largely green, it was a risk." Zambia will now double the capacity of an existing coal-fired power plant over the next two years. The use of charcoal for cooking, and associated deforestation, is soaring. But Hichilema said the country is also planning an "explosion" of green energy projects and electricity generation. Zambia is a microcosm of the global energy transition. As electricity demand soars, countries are scrambling to source power from as many places as possible. In the United States, everything seems to be on the table: new wind, solar, nuclear plants and enhanced geothermal are being built, alongside natural gas plants and even delayed retirement of coal plants. These investments will reverberate for centuries as they help decide if the world can keep warming below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) — despite planet-warming pollution growing at the fastest rate in history, mostly from burning coal, oil and gas. There is a bright spot: solar power is now the world's cheapest and fastest-growing source of energy. As favorable economics supercharge its growth, solar is now on track to be the single biggest source of electricity on Earth by the mid-2030s. "When technologies get cheap enough, they are like water flowing down a mountain," Kingsmill Bond of RMI, a U.S.-based clean energy think tank, said in Canary Media. "You don't know exactly how the water will find a way down the mountain, but you know that it will find a way." Write me at climatecoach@washpost.com. I read all your emails. And join me on Thursday at 1 p.m. Eastern time for a live chat on The Washington Post website: I'll answer all your questions on the climate risks to real estate. | 
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