The Renewable Energy Challenge...

Today’s post: Weds, 7-23-2008

Last week, Al Gore challenged the United States to produce every kilowatt of electricity through wind, sun and other renewable energy sources within 10 years.

His Alliance for Climate Protection estimates the cost of transforming achieving this at $1.5 trillion to $3 trillion over 30 years in public and private money. But he says it would cost about as much to build greenhouse gas-polluting coal plants to produce that much electricity.

In 2005 in the United States, coal produced slightly more than half of our electricity generation while nuclear power accounted for 21 percent of it, natural gas 15 percent, & renewable sources, including wind and solar, about 8.6 percent.

It was recently predicted that world energy demand will grow 50 percent over the next 20 years.

This means that even if we meet his challenge in 20 years instead of 10, we will need to produce about 129 percent of the electricity we produced in 2005 from renewable sources alone.

Since, in my estimation, the 5 percent or so we got from hydroelectric sources in 2005 is likely to go down, perhaps falling as much as in half due to drought conditions from global warming already in place, that means solar, wind, & geothermal will need to go from the 3.6 percent or so it did produce in 2005 to something like 131.5% of all the electricity we produced in 2005 to achieve his goal. This means a 100 fold increase in electricity from solar, perhaps 20 times as much from geothermal, & about three times as much from wind.

The good news is that each one of these increases may well be doable, particularly as new technologies ramp up & the costs come down per unit with the much increased production AND as the costs of the alternatives begin to double once or twice in that same time period.

(T. Boone Pickens, Texas oilman and wind-power booster T. Boone Pickens, an oilman for over 20 years said that this is ..”one problem we can’t drill our way out of.” And, he warned that “….oil could cost $300 a barrel in 10 years as supplies drop, if the nation continues to "drift" on energy policy.”)

And, if these increases come to pass we will also need, as Al Gore & his group emphasizes, to sharply increase & improve our national electricity distribution grid to get the electricity from where it’s generated to where it is being used.

Gore said that:

“The nation's electric grid is still not sufficiently developed to move solar power from sunny states out West or wind power from windy states to power-hungry markets.”

The other piece of good news is that when oil goes over $300 a barrel, it will then be cost effective to use the coal we no longer burn for electricity production to make gasoline, diesel fuel, & jet fuel. Then by adding alcohols & biodiesel from nonfood biofuels to that plus producing new cars to be electrics & plug in hybrids and retrofitting existing vehicles to operate as plug-in hybrids, we can also totally stop using oil to run our cars, trucks, & buses.

(This will also give today’s coal producers and coal producing regions an economic role in the transition instead of simply bankrupting them by using no coal at all.

Oil companies have lots of money now & still have time to invest in owning some of the new energy producing companies plus it will take more than 20 years to wean the whole world away from using oil. So they have plenty of cushion now, IF they act in time.)

The bad news is that NOT doing this over the next 20 years guarantees gasoline will hit $20 a gallon, food prices will also triple, & fires, floods, and droughts will get even worse world wide. We may even have our coastal cities begin to need to invest in dikes or relocate to higher ground. This will be caused by burning the coal, natural gas, & coal NOT converting to carbon free sources will add to the CO2 that is already in the process of causing these exact climate changes.

The other piece of bad news is that neither the man on the moon analogy that Gore used in his speech nor the Manhattan project analogy New York Times columnist Tom Friedman uses are as large in scope or scale as Gore’s challenge or the very real problem it aims to solve.

To get the job done will require massive action by almost everyone in the United States over the initial 5 or 10 years to adequately get this huge change into place.

The only historical precedent of comparable size is the effort the entire United States made to win World War II. Virtually everyone in the country was involved and made strong and focused efforts to get the job done and did so over a several year time period.

The other thing that will be necessary, according to Jim Owen, a spokesman for the Edison Electric Institute, which represents investor-owned utilities that produce 70 percent of the nation's electricity. He said this.

"We cannot do the job with renewables and energy efficiency alone," he said. "We have …. to include nuclear. And we frankly think that nuclear should be increased."

I agree with Al Gore that we can get to his goal of using renewables only. But it may well take longer than 20 years. And to begin to approach replacing all coal, oil, & natural gas for generating electricity in 20 years, let alone in 10 years, I suspect Jim Owen is correct. It will be necessary to produce the speed of this change we look to desperately need, to at least double our generation of nuclear power over the next 20 years.

John McCain looks to plan to carry on the other policies of the Bush administration that helped get us into this mess. So I plan to vote for his opponent. But I think his nuclear policy is a good idea. I hope Obama adopts it in addition to doing his best to make exactly the changes Gore suggests.

Can we make all these changes in 10 years?

I personally suspect it will take 20 years if we do an excellent job with all the national effort we can muster.

But that’s the WRONG question. Since it’s desperately needed and clearly the right thing to do, we need to ask instead:

1. Presuming making these changes IS doable within 10 years, what are some of the ways we might get it done?

(Gore pointed out that the United States gets more than enough solar energy to the job alone & the mid-Western United States gets enough wind to do it with wind alone. So it is doable in theory at least.)

2. How can we make as much progress right away as we can?

We’re 30 years too late in starting; & the results of that are beginning to hurt us economically. So we need a FAST start.

3. And, if we cannot get there in 10 years, how can we get it done in as close to 10 years as possible?

By the way, gasoline in the United States will very likely go to nine or ten dollars a gallon as this transition happens.

The key thing to remember is that this transition will cause the price of gasoline to go DOWN once that happens and to provide alternatives that cost LESS than gasoline to power cars and trucks.

If we don’t do as Gore suggests, twenty dollar a gallon gasoline plus rationing plus gas lines will result. And, world wide economic depression or collapse is possible.

(Drilling for more oil would mean $18 or $19 dollars a gallon instead of $20.)

If anything, I think Gore UNDERSTATED the problems that will occur if we fail to do as he suggests.

Former Rep. Bob Barr, Libertarian presidential candidate: "None of us can walk away from this issue without agreeing with him that we do have a very serious problem, and it's only going to get worse unless we do something about it. ... I hope to be a part of that, and I would like to see the free market take the lead, not the government."

Gore believes in the entrepreneurial businesses we have to rise to this challenge. And, I think he knows that many already are. But he understated how important it is to have government support and speed this process as a part of the solutions he recommends.

Businesses CAN help do the job. But they respond much more and dramatically faster to incentives for doing the right thing than they do from penalties for doing the wrong thing. So, to get the job done, I think we need to dramatically boost the incentive side more than Gore suggested.

One good effect of the recent run up in gasoline prices is that they begin to make it cost effective to put the changes Gore recommends in place.

Rep. Jay Inslee, D-Wash.: Gore “…. pointed out that the only way we have a chance to drive down oil prices is if we become free of the slavery of oil. If we can give Americans choices of electrical cars or ... biodiesel cars, then and only then do we have a chance of dealing with this cost issue. That is why $4-a-gallon gas is not an enemy of action, it's an ally of action."

The other thing that Gore said that I like is that if we do this in the United States and take the lead in it, it will have two very desirable effects.

It will at least partly restore the United States in the eyes of people in other countries to being thought of as a country that takes the lead in making good things happen.

And, as the methods we use and the positive economic effects of these changes happen and begin to be copied and emulated, we will also help solve these problems world wide.