Al Gore's Challenge - What will it take?

Can the US produce 100% of our electricity from renewable energy and truly clean carbon-free sources by 2019?

Al? Are you sure that's tobacco you've been smoking down on the farm? Isn't this waaay too costly? Coal, natural gas, and rail industries won't like this idea one bit. Besides, it takes forever to site, license, and build new nuke and wind plants.

I figure it would cost about $1 - $2 trillion. (hmm, about the same as the Iraq war). The 10-year timeframe is only plausible if we can cut through lots and lots and lots of red tape quickly, and rally lots of people - not just in the US but around the world.

So what would it take to become 100% non-carbon emitting?

1) Retire the 1,400 (300 GW)coal fired generators plants that provide 50% of our electricity. Many of them work perfectly fine, and will still owe lots of money to banks even in 2019.

2) Build 300 new large nuclear units and quadruple our current nuclear power supply. (will require tremendous streamlining of the regulatory process and adoption of a standard design.)

3) Retire 9,000 natural gas and oil-fired generating peaking plants (500 GW)

4) Install about 500,000 wind turbines (20 times current capacity) plus an average of 2 kW of solar plus localized storage in every commercial and residential building in the US to replace the gas units.

4) Keep the hydro plants we do have running where they are, and continue to face the challenge of possible salmon extinction in the northwest

5) Keep all the 1970's era nuclear plants that we now have that provide 19% of our running or upgrade/refurbish them to ensure continued/extended operation

6) Increase incentives for demand response and energy efficiency to reverse anticipated demand growth and flatten peak power use.

7) Hire armies of people - nuclear and electrical engineers, construction workers, solar installers, linemen, etc. etc. We may have to import them from India, France, Canada, China, and other places as we don't yet have enough skilled workers to meet this need - and that means allowing more work visas.

8) Materials - we'll need concrete, high quality steel, silicon, copper or better conductors, uranium, and transportation for these materials.

9) Say no to coal, oil, natural gas, and NIMBY interests. Put wind turbine and solar manufacturing sites in West Virginia and Wyoming (or give them all Wii's or scholarships or something).

10)Open Yucca Mountain.


So we build 800 GW new capacity, plus new transmission lines to move the power around to where it needs to go, and decommission all the old plants - we're looking at $1 trillion at the low end.

The biggest challenges will be securing enough wind sites (including off of cape cod), getting wires from the wind to uses, making solar truly ubiquitous, and finding ways to store energy for peak times. The wildcard is if we have some breakthrough new generation source such as tidal or massively efficient solar or fusion - but it's unlikely that we can broadly commercialize any brand new technology within ten years.

I'm skeptical, but behind it 100%. If we pull this off, we'll have a cleaner, safer, healthier, smarter, more independent nation.

Sources: EIA, and Al Gore's speech on Youtube and everywhere