No, Markk, it wouldn't necessarily have to take "decades upon decades." It could take 30 years to transition to 100% renewables, or if we fast tracked it we could get it done in a decade. What it takes is political will, and money. We have the money, but Republicans habitually obstruct any meaningful progress no matter how much it benefits our national interests. Total price tag would be about as much as we've spent on the war on terror over the past 20 years. The biggest thing holding us back is Right Wing political nonsense, mostly paid for by Oil lobbyists, that seeks to maintain the status quo, keeping us entirely dependent on oil that mostly comes from other countries, many of which are hostile to our interests.Markk wrote: ↑Fri Apr 15, 2022 2:00 amKevin,
Yes we could use the desert and solar power…some day, it will take first getting better technology, and years to plans and years to change just about every house, commercial building, and manufacturing to renewables…and that is Good, but it will take a decades upon decades.
You were stating about turning a big profit in electric investments, which I applaud as a capitalist…so I assume you went out with those profits and bought a electric car and converted to solar or wind at your house (if you have not already before that). Do you own a all electric house, if so…good for you.
Shifting U.S. to 100 Percent Renewables Would Cost $4.5 Trillion, Analysis Finds
Here's what it would take for the US to run on 100% renewable energyThe estimate represents the cost of replacing all fossil fuels and nuclear power with hydroelectricity, biomass, geothermal, wind, and solar. The price tag would drop to $4 trillion if nuclear were allowed to remain part of the energy mix, Greentech Media reports.
To achieve 100 percent renewable energy over the next 10 years, the analysis finds that there would first have to be a massive buildout of wind and solar capacity, costing $1.5 trillion. Next, the U.S. would need to add 900 gigawatts of battery storage, raising the price tag to $4 trillion. Lastly, the U.S. would need to double its transmission lines — from 200,000 miles today to 400,000 miles — to handle the new distributed power system, costing another $700 billion.
The estimate is based on current technology and does not factor in future innovation, according to Greentech Media. Analysts at Wood Mackenzie also found that the $4.5 trillion price tag stays the same whether the U.S. completes the transition in 10 years or 20.
“Total price tag is not dependent on timeline, just the cost per year, as we are assuming current technology,” said Dan Shreve, Head of Global Wind Energy Research at Wood Mackenzie and one of the authors of the report.
I'm convinced the Government needs to take control of our Health care system and all of our Energy needs. Leaving these up to the whims of for-profit capitalists means the American people get left out in the cold.It is technically and economically feasible to run the US economy entirely on renewable energy, and to do so by 2050. That is the conclusion of a study last year in the journal Energy & Environmental Science, authored by Stanford scholar Mark Z. Jacobson and nine colleagues.
Jacobson is well-known for his ambitious and controversial work on renewable energy. In 2011 he published, with Mark A. Delucchi, a two-part paper (one, two) on "providing all global energy with wind, water, and solar power." In 2013 he published a feasibility study on moving New York state entirely to renewables, and in 2014 he created a road map for California to do the same.
His team's 2015 paper contains 50 such road maps, one for every state, with detailed modeling on how to get to a US energy system entirely powered by wind, water, and solar (WWS). That means no oil and coal. It also means no natural gas, no nuclear power, no carbon capture and sequestration, and no biofuels.
Why exclude those sources? And what does that do to costs? More on that in a minute.
The road maps show how 80 to 85 percent of existing energy could be replaced by wind, water, and solar by 2030, with 100 percent by 2050. The result is a substantial savings relative to the status quo baseline, in terms of energy costs, health costs, and climate costs alike. The resulting land footprint of energy is manageable, grid reliability is maintained, and more jobs will be created in renewables than destroyed in fossil fuels.
Here's how it looks:
Sounds pretty great! So how should we feel about this?
Remember when I discussed scenarios that showed humanity limiting global warming to 2 degrees Celsius? I made a point of saying that the scenarios demonstrated technical and economic feasibility, but represented enormous, heroic assumptions about social and political change. (Which is another way of saying that purely as a matter of laying odds, they were unlikely.)
Well, the same goes here. No one can say any longer, at least not without argument, that moving the US quickly and entirely to renewables is impossible. Here is a way to do it, mapped out in some detail. But it is extremely ambitious. Let's take a look at some of what's required.
Electrify everything
The core of the plan is to electrify everything, including sectors that currently run partially or entirely on liquid fossil fuels. That means shifting transportation, heating/cooling, and industry to run on electric power.
Electrifying everything produces an enormous drop in projected demand, since the energy-to-work conversion of electric motors is much more efficient than combustion motors, which lose a ton of energy to heat. So the amount of energy necessary to meet projected demand drops by a third just from the conversion. With some additional, relatively modest efficiency measures, total demand relative to BAU drops 39.3 percent. That's a much lower target for WWS to meet.
Switching from liquid fuels to renewable electricity would also virtually eliminate air pollution, thus avoiding health costs to the tune of $600 billion a year by 2050. Meanwhile, moving everything to carbon-free electricity would avoid about $3.3 trillion a year in global climate change costs of US emissions by 2050. Estimating health and climate damages is notoriously difficult, of course, involving a number of assumptions about discount rates, the value of human lives, and second-order effects of better health. These figures are averages drawn from very wide ranges of estimates.
Still, the potential health and climate gains of a WWS-based system are one of the big stories here: they are enormous, enough that in and of themselves they "pay for" a clean-energy transition.
So how could the economy be electrified on this ambitious timeline? Brace yourself:
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