Ezra Klein notices something important:
The center of our decarbonization strategy is an almost unimaginably large buildup of wind and solar power. To put some numbers to that: A plausible path to decarbonization, modeled by researchers at Princeton, sees wind and solar using up to 590,000 square kilometers — which is roughly equal to the land mass of Connecticut, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Ohio, Rhode Island and Tennessee put together. “The footprint is very, very large, and people don’t really understand that,” Danny Cullenward, co-author of Making Climate Policy Work, told me.
Obviously that is not going to happen. Which is why we need something else: most likely that will eventually be nuclear and geothermal, but over the next 15 years it means natural gas. This is also an important point:
The old theory was that we would price carbon, and the market would take care of the planning for us. But we never passed a national carbon tax or cap-and-trade plan. Other countries rely on much more centralized planning by the national government, but our federal government doesn’t have that authority or that capacity. What we’re betting on now is coordination, in part greased by money. But it needs to happen at a scale and speed unlike anything in our recent history. We are already failing to build infrastructure on budget and on time. How will the fractured systems struggling to deliver those projects now begin building more projects, and building them at a far-faster pace?
What the Biden administration is trying to do is just very hard within the US system. Building long-distance transmission lines is a nightmare because there are so many possible stumbling blocks, and building solar farms is getting harder and harder because of local opposition.
Geothermal energy would be good too. In Poland the big proponent of the geothermal projects was ultra-fundamentalist, ultra-catholic priest father Rydzyk. Because of this association, the geothermal energy became so toxic no one is even trying to touch it. A proof that a lot of politics is not really about climate change, green energy or whatever, but tribal signaling.
ReplyDeleteThe energy source I wish more people talked and thought about is tidal - clean, incredibly reliable, with massive energy output potential, and little to no political / ideological baggage.
ReplyDeleteA plausible path to decarbonization, modeled by researchers at Princeton, sees wind and solar using up to 590,000 square kilometers — which is roughly equal to the land mass of Connecticut, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Ohio, Rhode Island and Tennessee put together.
ReplyDeleteDoing the math, 590,000 square kilometers is 227,800 square miles. If this is an estimate for the entire GLOBE, that's actually far less less space than I would have expected.
Consider that the Sahara desert covers 3,552,000 square miles - over fifteen times the area. Obviously we can't turn the entire Sahara into a colossal solar plant, and we couldn't efficiently or safely transfer all that power around the world if we did, but we don't have to - aside from only needing to use a small portion of the Sahara, there are also many unused deserts all around the world, spaced fairly well for regional power production.
In North America, we have the Great Basin Desert with 190,000 square miles - almost enough by itself to achieve (presumably) GLOBAL decarbonization via solar. Straddling the border between the US and Mexico is the Chihuahua Desert, covering 175,000 square miles. The Colorado Plateau offers another 130,000 square miles. The Sonoran Desert, again split between two countries, boasts 120,000 square miles. The Mojave covers a still respectable 50,000 square miles. The Columbia Plateau offers another 30,000 square miles.
All told, that's almost 700,000 square miles of desert, much of it at ideal latitudes for solar generation, and all of it benefiting from little rain and cloud cover year round. And if the 227,800 square mile total is, in fact, a global figure, we can multiply that by the rough percentage of global power usage the US accounts for (~17%), and arrive at a rough estimate of ~39,000 square miles to decarbonize America. That's about 5% of the combined desert areas mentioned above, and that isn't even a comprehensive listing of all North American deserts.
We of course can't and ~shouldn't~ convert entire deserts into vast solar fields, but we can certainly convert small segments of those deserts, in the neighborhood of a few percentages of total area. And we can supplement that with wind power elsewhere, and even with solar ~outside~ of deserts. We have lots and lots of undeveloped land in this country, to the point that we can spread out our solar installations across a relatively most actual area dispersed across large regional areas, without undue impact on either the environment or on populated areas.
typo - "Across a relatively MODEST actual area, dispersed across..."
ReplyDelete