During last night’s State of the Union Address, president Obama essentially abandoned AGW proponents, and shifted the focus to energy, including uttering the greens most dreaded term: “clean coal”. He also set a bold goal that raised some eyebrows:
I challenge you to join me in setting a new goal: by 2035, 80% of America’s electricity will come from clean energy sources. Some folks want wind and solar. Others want nuclear, clean coal, and natural gas. To meet this goal, we will need them all – and I urge Democrats and Republicans to work together to make it happen.
I’m wondering if this idea from Standford might have been part of the thinking at the White House. In this presser, the implementation timelines are about the same, and both make references to the U.S. space program. Stanford mentions the moon landings, Obama mentions “…our generation’s Sputnik moment.”
From Stanford University:
The world can be powered by alternative energy, using today’s technology, in 20-40 years
VIDEO: A new study — co-authored by Stanford researcher Mark Z. Jacobson and UC-Davis researcher Mark A. Delucchi — analyzing what is needed to convert the world’s energy supplies to clean and sustainable sources says that it can be done with today’s technology at costs roughly comparable to conventional energy. But converting will be a massive undertaking on the scale of the moon landings. What is needed most is the societal and political will to make it happen.
If someone told you there was a way you could save 2.5 million to 3 million lives a year and simultaneously halt global warming, reduce air and water pollution and develop secure, reliable energy sources – nearly all with existing technology and at costs comparable with what we spend on energy today – why wouldn’t you do it?
According to a new study coauthored by Stanford researcher Mark Z. Jacobson, we could accomplish all that by converting the world to clean, renewable energy sources and forgoing fossil fuels.
“Based on our findings, there are no technological or economic barriers to converting the entire world to clean, renewable energy sources,” said Jacobson, a professor of civil and environmental engineering. “It is a question of whether we have the societal and political will.”
He and Mark Delucchi, of the University of California-Davis, have written a two-part paper in Energy Policy in which they assess the costs, technology and material requirements of converting the planet, using a plan they developed.
The world they envision would run largely on electricity. Their plan calls for using wind, water and solar energy to generate power, with wind and solar power contributing 90 percent of the needed energy.
Geothermal and hydroelectric sources would each contribute about 4 percent in their plan (70 percent of the hydroelectric is already in place), with the remaining 2 percent from wave and tidal power.
Vehicles, ships and trains would be powered by electricity and hydrogen fuel cells. Aircraft would run on liquid hydrogen. Homes would be cooled and warmed with electric heaters – no more natural gas or coal – and water would be preheated by the sun.
Commercial processes would be powered by electricity and hydrogen. In all cases, the hydrogen would be produced from electricity. Thus, wind, water and sun would power the world.
The researchers approached the conversion with the goal that by 2030, all new energy generation would come from wind, water and solar, and by 2050, all pre-existing energy production would be converted as well.
“We wanted to quantify what is necessary in order to replace all the current energy infrastructure – for all purposes – with a really clean and sustainable energy infrastructure within 20 to 40 years,” said Jacobson.
One of the benefits of the plan is that it results in a 30 percent reduction in world energy demand since it involves converting combustion processes to electrical or hydrogen fuel cell processes. Electricity is much more efficient than combustion.
That reduction in the amount of power needed, along with the millions of lives saved by the reduction in air pollution from elimination of fossil fuels, would help keep the costs of the conversion down.
“When you actually account for all the costs to society – including medical costs – of the current fuel structure, the costs of our plan are relatively similar to what we have today,” Jacobson said.
One of the biggest hurdles with wind and solar energy is that both can be highly variable, which has raised doubts about whether either source is reliable enough to provide “base load” energy, the minimum amount of energy that must be available to customers at any given hour of the day.
Jacobson said that the variability can be overcome.
“The most important thing is to combine renewable energy sources into a bundle,” he said. “If you combine them as one commodity and use hydroelectric to fill in gaps, it is a lot easier to match demand.”
Wind and solar are complementary, Jacobson said, as wind often peaks at night and sunlight peaks during the day. Using hydroelectric power to fill in the gaps, as it does in our current infrastructure, allows demand to be precisely met by supply in most cases. Other renewable sources such as geothermal and tidal power can also be used to supplement the power from wind and solar sources.
“One of the most promising methods of insuring that supply matches demand is using long-distance transmission to connect widely dispersed sites,” said Delucchi. Even if conditions are poor for wind or solar energy generation in one area on a given day, a few hundred miles away the winds could be blowing steadily and the sun shining.
“With a system that is 100 percent wind, water and solar, you can’t use normal methods for matching supply and demand. You have to have what people call a supergrid, with long-distance transmission and really good management,” he said.
Another method of meeting demand could entail building a bigger renewable-energy infrastructure to match peak hourly demand and use the off-hours excess electricity to produce hydrogen for the industrial and transportation sectors.
Using pricing to control peak demands, a tool that is used today, would also help.
Jacobson and Delucchi assessed whether their plan might run into problems with the amounts of material needed to build all the turbines, solar collectors and other devices.
They found that even materials such as platinum and the rare earth metals, the most obvious potential supply bottlenecks, are available in sufficient amounts. And recycling could effectively extend the supply.
“For solar cells there are different materials, but there are so many choices that if one becomes short, you can switch,” Jacobson said. “Major materials for wind energy are concrete and steel and there is no shortage of those.”
Jacobson and Delucchi calculated the number of wind turbines needed to implement their plan, as well as the number of solar plants, rooftop photovoltaic cells, geothermal, hydroelectric, tidal and wave-energy installations.
They found that to power 100 percent of the world for all purposes from wind, water and solar resources, the footprint needed is about 0.4 percent of the world’s land (mostly solar footprint) and the spacing between installations is another 0.6 percent of the world’s land (mostly wind-turbine spacing), Jacobson said.
One of the criticisms of wind power is that wind farms require large amounts of land, due to the spacing required between the windmills to prevent interference of turbulence from one turbine on another.
“Most of the land between wind turbines is available for other uses, such as pasture or farming,” Jacobson said. “The actual footprint required by wind turbines to power half the world’s energy is less than the area of Manhattan.” If half the wind farms were located offshore, a single Manhattan would suffice.
Jacobson said that about 1 percent of the wind turbines required are already in place, and a lesser percentage for solar power.
“This really involves a large scale transformation,” he said. “It would require an effort comparable to the Apollo moon project or constructing the interstate highway system.”
“But it is possible, without even having to go to new technologies,” Jacobson said. “We really need to just decide collectively that this is the direction we want to head as a society.”
Jacobson is the director of Stanford’s Atmosphere/Energy Program and a senior fellow at Stanford’s Woods Institute for the Environment and the Precourt Institute for Energy.
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Can’t wait for AMSU 2011 January temps… estimating about -0.2C so were back to 2008 again no trend once again LOL
minor typo – third paragraph, first sentence: Standford
Here is the last word on why Turbines are the “way to go”…. It may help sway some of you as to their efficacy…
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http://preventcancernow.ca/cancer-prevention-is-in-our-power
“Sure, some individuals may disagree with a field of solar panels on an aesthetic level. Others may get annoyed with the sounds from a local wind farm. However, with the province of Ontario’s regulation, which demands a minimum 550 metre set-back for the installation of wind turbines, these annoyances can generally be avoided. In time, renewable energy devices will become a welcomed part of our landscape, just as we’ve become accustomed to seeing telephone poles along our roads and transmission lines in country fields.
Cancer prevention is in our power. It’s in the kind of power we choose to light and heat our homes; play our stereos and recharge our cell phones. In fact, the choice of embracing renewable technology is a must if we’re serious about fighting cancer.”
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Got it folks? Put your cap in your head and keep your eyes lowered when you approach the great lady. She found a cure for cancer…
My best information as to here credentials is this…
Farrah has a degree in Political Science and Religion and a background in documentary film making.
It’s all in the turbines…
I wish I had credentials that allowed me to make these claims. I could be famous tooo!
Of course she works for this fellow (Gideon Foreman) who is always making egregious claims about coal pollution and wind turbines…
Mr. Forman holds a Master’s degree in philosophy from McGill University. He interned at The Nation – America’s oldest weekly journal – and studied creative writing at the Banff Centre for the Arts. From 1997-2004, he was Vice President of Strategic Communications Inc., a firm that provides political consulting and fundraising advice to the non-profit sector. In 1999, Strategic Communications was named to The Profit 100 as one of Canada’s fastest growing firms.
In 2004, he became Executive Director of the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment (CAPE). Under his leadership, CAPE won a gold medal at the 2006 Canadian Environment Awards. In 2007, he was the co-winner of a Virtuoso Award from the International Association of Business Communicators (London, England). He is currently a Judge for the Green Toronto Awards. His reviews and essays have appeared in The Globe and Mail, The Canadian Forum, and The Toronto Star, among other publications.
I think that proponents of wind power are the worst enemy of the technology.
Maybe President Obama could use a couple of evangelical supporters. Goodness knows that we don’t need them.
Excuse me — I gotta go heave!
“If someone told you there was a way you could save 2.5 million to 3 million lives a year and simultaneously halt global warming, reduce air and water pollution and develop secure, reliable energy sources – nearly all with existing technology and at costs comparable with what we spend on energy today – why wouldn’t you do it?”
Why? Because that “someone” would be lying through his blood-sucking teeth. He’d be spewing utter nonsense of the most dangerous sort–mere handwaving based on a combination of incomplete knowledge and wishful thinking. If this is the basis for Obama’s speech, we are all doomed.
What a pipe dream! It reminds me of any or all of the “futurists” and science fiction writers swearing that we would be living on other planets by 2000. In the 1940’s Dick Tracy, indeed had wrist radios that came to pass, but he was riding around in magnetic cars hat looked like the top of cherry picker platforms. Cities had moving streets and monorails, that futurists predicted by 1990 would be the norm. This all based on faulty data, which was either misinterpreted or made up of whole cloth. The Jetsons will be proud of us in 2035!
No nuclear, no coal or gas? What are these guys smoking? Oh, yeah, right. In California it is legal…
“I’m wondering if this idea from Standford”, should be Stanford.
Terence Corcoran of the National Post has a statement here
http://opinion.financialpost.com/2011/01/26/terence-corcoran-ground-control-to-major-obama/
. . . that ends this way:
“Mr. Obama on Tuesday launched himself anew — as President Sputnik, lost in space.
My take is that President Sputnik wants a goal-based legacy on the order of the Moon landing by which to be remembered. He’ll be remembered as a passable community organizer from Chicago and a failed President.
Before one gets to high up on the soap box… it might be wise to consider the base loading & efficiency problems with clean energy sources… esp wind & solar. As an engineer, having worked, hands-on in the utility industry for 30+ yrs., I appreciate the issue that conventional wind/solar conversion methods are at best, 20% efficient… so you will always need a backup power supply for base loading your electrical grid. Lets resolve that problem first before we get to carried away with grand ideas.
Cap & trade would have been a more efficient market friendly way to approach the need to convert to low-CO2 emission energy, but the Republicans are insisting on the Big Government approach.
I cannot even begin to approach this nauseous nonsense. Fractional energy sources that could not be relied upon to drive a lawn mower will power the USA in 25 years? Power sources so minuscule in industries such as manufacturing or transportation that we would be reduced to international beggars, slaughtered at the whim of countries that covet the resources that American industries were not allowed to utilize. Send these morons to China or Malaysia or Saudi Arabia or Venezuela where the silly crap they preach, instead of doing, can be the source of income. In a minstrel show.
It’s not like solar shuts down at sunset and wind turns on. There are many interruptions throughout the day and night. What is need is a network of Nuclear power stations so when it’s dinner time in the east, non-base power could transmitted from further west and reversed when it’s dinner time on the west coast. Even if this was feasible the Greenies would go for all the cement required or mining to make steel.
Why don’t these guys suggest a state, or smallish European country to use as a demonstration, first to see if it would work and second to get the bugs out before we spend Trillions and trillions.
Mike says:
Cap & trade would have been a more efficient market friendly way to approach the need to convert to low-CO2 emission energy, but the Republicans are insisting on the Big Government approach.”
Sorry, Mike, you’re…
Aah yes, clean coal, Australia p15sed $130 million up against the wall on that election promise before the bogan princess quietly abandoned it with nothing to show except a bunch of Greens living in the lifestyle they all aspire too.
To be fair on Obama, he did include nuclear.
This Nerd does even do that!
Typo
For does read doësn’t
I did a write-up on Jacobson & DeLucchi Wednesday at my website. Basically, they’re claiming they can run the whole world on electricity- planes, trains, automobiles, electric home heating; you name it, they say they’ll run it on solar and wind power (90% anyway).
But when you check their numbers, it turns out that they’re really talking about reducing power generation and use by 75%, to something that solar and wind might actually make a dent in.
I propose giving J&DeL a couple of PVC panels, a stack of batteries, and a nice dry cave to live in, while the rest of us continue with civilization. They should be fined if caught using nasty ol’ combustion to augment their solar powered electric heaters in the winter. But they’re free to harness all the unicorns they can catch.
I’m not sure what DeLucchi’s background is, but Jacobson is supposed to be an engineer and should know better.
I do pretend to be expert on the politics of the USA.
But I will think you will find a cogent set of views on the metter here:
http://www.nationalreview.com/planet-gore
Kindest Regards
In 2035, most if not all of incumbent senior congressmen/professors will have retired, and have no memory of what they said a quarter of century back. No worry whatsoever……….
We already know the downside of solar and wind in Europe but hears a little ditty from California:
http://spectator.org/blog/2011/01/25/wind-energy-deal-blows-away
Court rejects WIND FARM in California. What environmentalist and governments regularly get away with, won’t pass the stink test in a court of law!
Scrutinize the realities of costly and inefficient wind energy projects (and most alternative energy projects, for that matter) in public spheres where tough questions can be asked — like in court — and it’s amazing what you will learn. Such was the case with California utility PG&E, which had a $900 million deal in place to purchase a wind farm from Iberdrola, until an administrative law judge wanted it nixed. From the court decision:
“We reject the application because we find that the Manzana Wind Project is not cost-competitive and poses unacceptable risks to ratepayers. We find that the proposed cost of the Manzana Wind Project is significantly higher than other resources PG&E can procure to meet its RPS program goal. Moreover, it will subject the ratepayers to unacceptable risks due to potential cost increases resulting from project under-performance, less than forecasted project life, and any delays which might occur concerning transmission upgrades and commercial online date. As a proposed utility-owned generation project, ratepayers would pay a lump sum cost rather than a performance based cost for the Manzana Wind Project. Therefore, ratepayers would be at risk if the project underperforms. In particular, if the Manzana Wind Project fails to achieve production as expected for any reason such as construction delays or curtailments as a result of a collision with a California condor, shareholders face no risks while customers could incur increased costs. In contrast, under a power purchase agreement, project owners rather than ratepayers bear the risk of project performance….
“In short, although the project would contribute to the California renewable generation goals, given the availability of other lower-priced renewable projects in the competitive market that could impose far less risks on ratepayers, PG&E has failed to demonstrate a need for this project.”
So you’ve got every problem with wind energy in one judgment: high costs, unreliability, underperformance, and bird-battering. This runs counter to what environoiacs and alternative energy schemers tell us on a daily basis. What’s that matter — can’t California and the federal government find enough taxpayer dough to subsidize this boondoggle too, to make it “feasible?” A wind farm of this size should be the environmentalists’ dream.
The answer probably is, the government doesn’t want to be seen providing giveaways of this nature to the big bad utilities. They’d rather give subsidies to the renewables dealers — the little gremlins with the Green jobs — and then make the utilities buy the sporadic energy from them. And whatever you do, don’t tick off the ratepayers with higher electric bills, lest they discover the truth about alternative energy.
“Wind and solar are complementary, Jacobson said, as wind often peaks at night and sunlight peaks during the day.”
And what’s the weather like on your planet?
The world can be crime and poverty free and live in peace forever after by 2030.
Folks I am not joking. I have just completed a study at my local university and I can prove it can be done – all we need is the will.
Firstly, we have to reduce the world population which is estimated to reach 7 to 10 billion by 2050. This can be done by banning sex for a 5 year period under a UN accord. Once we have world population under control we can allow specially ballot chosen families to have children at half the rate of the global death rate until we reach a population level commensurate with available resources.
Then we must redistribute wealth. This can be done by a newly formed UN World Government Bureaucracy. The aim will be to give every living soul on earth the same amount of money and assets. Any-one found committing crime shall be shot into space. Any nation or sub nation carrying out any form of military action shall be obliterated.
Folks, I can show you that by 2030 we can live in harmony in a peaceful crime free world with a friendly World Government looking after us all. The time for greed, individual ambition and human endeavour is over. We have failed miserably with this survival of the fittest philosophy. Now is the time for collective enterprise and sharing.
I can prove it can be done so lets do it!
Has anybody even seen any “dirty” energy?
Whose Trillions would they spend? The world is almost on the knife edge of economic abyss.
I don’t think the Stanford nonsense was what President Obama had in mind in his State of the Union talk when he predicted 80% of US energy would come from “clean” energy sources. As Anthony wrote in his intro above:
Nowhere in the Stanford paper do they mention coal, except when they dismiss it, along with other fossil fuels, writing: “no more natural gas or coal”. Nor do they mention the word “nuclear” at all, which proves the Stanford guys are totally disconnected from reality and technology and are completely in thrall of the environmentalist religion.
Obama, on the other hand, while IMHO overly optimistic about the possibilities, and (fortunately :^) misinformed about how “clean” clean coal may really become, did include clean coal and nuclear and natural gas along with renewables wind and solar:
As I wrote in WUWT here and here, clean coal is an attractive fossil fuel for production of electricity with the potential added benefit of providing CO2 for agricultural use, rather than the brain-dead idea of trying to sequester it in old oil wells.
Bottom line, we will not get 80% “clean” by 2035, nor should we wreck our economy attempting such a goal, because there is no real environmental crisis. But, we can approach some percentage, such as 50% perhaps, and we should, but mostly via private initiatives and not with the government making the choices on political and ideological factors, as they did with ethanol.
What a wonderful idea!
Here’s an even better one. These genius academia folk should prove how easy this is by crafting a business plan and get funding from venture cap sources (check with Mr. Gore), then build their own infrastructure just like any other energy company. Should be easy, as they claim it’s cost competitive to fossil fuels. Just think — in thirty years or so they too can be multi-billionaires like Gates or Jobs and threatening the very existence of Exxon!
In the meantime, I’m not holding my breath.