Extra Effort on getting to Renewable Energy soon......

Today’s post: Wednesday, 12-10-2008

Just a few weeks ago, Al Gore said we should move to 100 % renewable energy in 10 years or by 2018.

In a report called “Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World”, various experts & analysts in the US Intelligence organizations and from other places state that renewable energy will NOT be commercially viable by 2025.

And, this report was supplied to President-elect, Obama recently a current news article said.

If we don’t take action, massive coordinated action on several fronts to come much closer to Al Gore’s goal than this new report suggests is likely, we are in very serious trouble. Costs from global warming will begin to destroy our economy while our economy starves for energy at reasonable costs. For example gasoline prices of more than $5 a gallon in today’s dollars will return as the world’s economy tries to recover from the current recession.

Given that we may already have more CO2 in our air than is safe, the status quo of simply drilling for more oil and building more coal fired plants world wide is extremely dangerous.

Yet, a prosperous economy needs more usable, effective, energy to achieve that prosperity and keep it – not less.

That’s why we need not just an effort comparable to the Manhattan Project; but an effort comparable to the entire United States effort to win World War II to start immediately to begin to tax coal and oil use commensurate with their real economic costs; & to regulate their use; AND to use the funds generated plus further investments to increase energy-efficiency and add renewable energy on a huge scale as quickly as we ramped up war production in World War II—or faster.

1. Wind power is already competitive in costs with fossil fuels.

That’s why T Boone Pickens’ plan, or at least the part that adds lots of wind powered electricity generation and new transmission lines to transport it needs to be immediately expanded and implemented in every place that has enough wind.

2. Large solar thermal farms are very close to being competitive with fossil fuels. And there are huge areas in the United States and even more in Mexico (and in other parts of the world) that work well to build them. Plus we also need to add the new transmission lines to these solar thermal farms to deliver their electricity.

We need to have the United States government act in some way to make immediate financing on favorable terms available to build these plants and the transmission lines.

And, we need to have every utility reachable by those lines be required to get perhaps as high as 60 % of their electricity from that source alone by 2030.

This is because the energy is there NOW on that large a scale to be harvested; and the heated media can be efficiently stored to deliver power for several hours after the sun heats it and sets.

3. We also need to increase the incentives enough and drive down the costs enough over the next few years to build both solar photovoltaic farms in favorable locations AND to add roof top solar to virtually every usable rooftop of every building standing AND to build roofs over most of our parking lots that also have solar photovoltaic cells on them.

4. We need to begin to scale up the successful experiments that produce usable biodiesel, ethanol, and jet fuel and chemical feedstocks from algae or other methods that do NOT compete with growing food so that most liquid fuels can be made from processes that remove CO2 in addition to adding it back to our air.

5. We need to stop burning coal for fuel and to convert the coal we have into cleaner burning liquid fuels and gas that can be added to biofuels or used to replace petroleum.

In the near term this will prevent the coal businesses in the United States from a collapse immediate enough to dislocate the economies of the communities where they now are. And, it will provide these fuels while biofuels are just beginning to ramp up.

6. We need to start planning to replace all the coal burning plants we have now with renewable sources such as wind or solar or with plants that burn biofuels and cleaner burning fuels made from coal.

(It may be possible to sequester the CO2 and other pollutants 100 % that burning coal releases. We should certainly research that.) But meanwhile we should be winding down our use of the kinds of coal burning plants we have now towards zero.

And, both here and in the rest of the world, we should act NOW to prevent new coal burning plants from being built and used.

It’s clear in China and everywhere immediately downwind from China that the air pollution alone from burning coal on a very large scale costs almost more in added medical costs than the value of the electricity it generates. And, adding lots more CO2 to our air instead of less makes ZERO sense. So absolutely NO new coal burning plants should be built anywhere.

7. One of the backers of the CleanTech for Obama group has pointed out that many already cost effective steps to energy efficiency can be taken throughout the United States to lower our energy use without harming our economy such as adding insulation, heat proofing buildings with peaked roofs, and weather stripping windows all of which can be done by people in the United States needing jobs.

This would provide a huge number of jobs if it were to be done in every community in the United States to every building that now needs it.

We should definitely come as close to making that happen as possible in the next 4 to 8 years.

We need the jobs now. And, it will save more in energy costs than the money to do it will cost our economy.

This can also be accomplished by raising the money to replace and properly dispose of energy-inefficient refrigerators; and to give all our homes and businesses an energy management system that will safely power down TV’s, video game players, and other devices that now use energy while they are NOT in use.

8. We need to set up national prizes and funds for the kind of venture capital that rolls out new technology that works; and we should do this to incentivize the development and rapid deployment of new energy technology generally.

This will create jobs here. And these companies can bring money here by selling these products to the rest of the world.

In particular, we need to do this for LED light bulbs that are available at the cost today of fluorescent light bulbs or less and which will fit all the sockets that have been used for incandescent bulbs. Such bulbs use even less electricity than fluorescent light bulbs, perhaps a full third as much in fact. And, they won’t poison our homes, businesses, and planet with mercury as using fluorescent light bulbs looks likely to do and very likely IS doing now.

GE is developing a kind of wallpaper that lights up walls and ceilings with an ideally dispersed light source that uses LED’s. That’s a superb idea. But for now, the glaring need is for cost effective and readily available LED light bulbs to replace incandescent light bulbs and fluorescent light bulbs in the light bulb sockets people have now. (Pardon the pun.)

Again, this is an energy efficiency method that will save huge amounts of energy that both creates jobs and continues to give us the light we need.

It does NOT sacrifice our prosperity or quality of life like purposely living in dimly lit rooms to save energy would do.

I believe each of these goals is doable by 2030. But they will only happen and make the intelligence community report look timid and incorrect if we take massive action to achieve them all.