100% Renewable Energy Is Feasible and Affordable, According to Stanford Proposal | Singularity Hub

100% Renewable Energy Is Feasible and Affordable, According to Stanford Proposal | Singularity Hub

The proposal is straightforward: eliminate combustion as a source of energy, because it’s dirty and inefficient. All vehicles would be powered by electric batteries or by hydrogen, where the hydrogen is produced through electrolysis rather than natural gas. High-temperature industrial processes would also use electricity or hydrogen combustion.
The rest would simply be a question of allowing existing fossil-fuel plants to age out and using renewable sources to power any new plants that come online. The energy sources in the road map include geothermal energy, concentrating solar power, off-shore and on-land wind turbines and some and tidal energy. All but tidal energy collectors are already commercially available.
“The greatest barriers to a conversion are neither technical nor economic. They are social and political,” the AAAS paper concludes.
Common political wisdom has it that, while clean energy is a nice idea, powering our economy with wind, water and solar power would require an enormous amount of land allotted to production and would push energy prices up beyond the reach of average consumers.
But according to Jacobson and his colleagues, the reverse is true. Less than 2 percent of United States’ land mass would support all of the wind, solar and hydroelectric power generation required to meet energy demand. That includes the space between concentrating solar arrays or wind turbines.
Clean energy would save an average American consumer $3,400 per year than the current fossil fuel regime by 2050, the study lays out. That’s because the price of fossil fuel rises regularly, but with clean energy — where raw materials are free — once the infrastructure is built, prices would fall.