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Tuesday, August 19, 2008

100% renewables in the US in 10 years

Just thinking about rate of renewables roll out and i came across an article mentioning Al Gore's challenge to America. I need to see if there are details behind the proposal because the ability to achieve such a goal--100% renewables in 10 years--would say a lot about the place for CCS in the global energy economy. Namely, there wouldnt be one.

Labels: ccs, energy and efficiency

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1 Comments:

At 3:43 AM, Anonymous said...: Our best choice for renewable energy that can replace the coal plants that now provide base load power to the grid, is solar thermal with heat storage. I would bet that most Americans have not even heard of this and it is crucial to creating a clean energy grid that is affordable and safe.

Here's an excellent article on solar thermal and it's benefits, written by Joseph Romm
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2008/04/14/solar_electric_thermal/index.html

Solar thermal can store heat in molten salts, water or oils. Molten salt retains well over 90% of it's heat for 24 hours. Solar thermal plants can put out steady energy day and night. They are perfectly suited to the daily energy demand cycle. Using less than 1% of our southwest deserts, we could power the whole country.
This is less land than now used by the coal industry!

It is quicker to get up and running than nuclear or coal.

These plants can be run as base load, follow on or peaker power.
No other renewable can do that.

More info here: http://solarsouthwest.org/

and here:
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=a-solar-grand-plan
This proposal emphasizes concentrating PV, rather than the solar thermal but talks about both.
This proposal seeks to provide a 69% solar powered grid by 2050 using less tax payer money than we spent to build the internet over the same time period of about 35 years.