Mark Jacobson talking:
our plans are to change the energy infrastructure in each and every state in the United States, and in fact, ultimately, every country of the world, to infrastructures run entirely on wind, water, and solar power for all purposes. So that is electricity, transportation, heating and cooling and industry. Right now, fossil fuels and nuclear power and biofuels are powering our energy infrastructure for all purposes. And the emissions associated with the burning of the fuels, primarily — from burning of fossil fuels and biofuels in particular — these emissions are causing both air pollution and global warming. And these are almost entirely the cause of both of these problems. Air pollution causes 4 million to 7 million premature deaths every year worldwide including about 62,000 in the United States and about 12,000 in California. Global warming of course is a growing and rising problem. In terms of costs, the air pollution mortality in the United States alone costs the United States about $500 billion per year or three percent of the GDP of the U.S. And in 2050, it is estimated that the U.S. emissions alone will cause $3.3 trillion of global climate damage and the rest of the world will cause a total of about $15-20 trillion per year of damage. And so we’re trying to — the only way to solve this problem is to change the energy infrastructure, that’s electrify everything, pretty much, and produce that electricity from clean energy such as wind, water and solar power.
in our plans, we do it state-by-state. And we first develop a plan, and we say, this is like how many wind turbines we need, how many solar panels do we need, how much rooftop areas do we have, how much land area do we require, what would be the cost, how much storage do we need? How many jobs would be created as result? And it would, in the United States, create a net of about 2 million jobs to do such a transformation. And then we have — once we have developed a plan, then we educate the public about the plans, educate policymakers, and try and hope that people will then take these plans and run with them and actually start implementing these changes.
in California, actually, a lot has been happening. Governor Brown in January actually announced that the state will go 50 percent renewable, mostly wind, water, and solar power, by 2030. We had proposed 80 percent by 2030 conversion and 100 percent by 2050. So Governor Brown, his proposal for 50 percent by 2030 is sixty percent of what we think is needed. But the Senate of California just within the last two days actually advanced that proposal and approved a 50 percent by 2030 conversion for most sectors of the energy economy.
But we need really aggressive measures. I mean we can’t just have small changes. There are changes going on. Right now, Iowa, South Dakota, they have 30 percent of almost of all of their electric power from wind. But we need to change not only electricity, but transportation, heating and cooling industry and electricity is only on the order of 20 percent of total energy anywhere. But states are making progress. New York has made progress by implementing some policies that would get us toward — closer to a renewable economy. And there are some states like Washington state that already have like 73 percent of their electricity is already from clean energy, mostly because they have hydroelectric there. But we need much more aggressive measures because the Arctic sea ice is expected to disappear within anywhere from 10 to 30 years and that would cause positive feedbacks that would accelerate climate change. So we can’t wait 20 years for some new energy technologies to come around. We need to use existing technologies today, implement them, and get the ball rolling in terms of the transition.
There’s all sorts of, kind of, false beliefs about renewable energy, but things have changed. Wind is, right now, not only one of the fastest — between wind and solar — are the fastest growing new sources of electric power in the United States, but wind is actually the cheapest form of electricity by far in the U.S. today. The unsubsidized cost without the subsidies is about 3.7 to five cents per kilowatt hour. Subsidies are another 1.5 cents to drop those costs per kilowatt hour. That compares with natural gas which is six to eight cents per kilowatt hour. So wind is one half the cost of natural gas. Utility scale solar is about the same as natural gas now; it’s also around six to eight cents per kilowatt-hour unsubsidized.
it turns out that people today can actually control their own power in their own homes. You can put solar panels — I mean wind turbines may be only in a few locations in your back yard, but you can combine solar panels on your roof top with batteries and Tesla has a new battery pack that you can put in your garage that can — where you can store electricity during the day that from the solar, and then use it — use that electricity when there are peak times of electricity because that is when the price is much higher. But people can do other things. They can weatherize their home, they can use energy efficient appliances. There are a lot of things that people can do to reduce energy use and go towards 100 percent renewable energy. Using heat pumps instead of gas heaters. Getting electric cars instead of gasoline cars.
— source democracynow.org
Mark Jacobson, professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Stanford University, and the director of its Atmosphere / Energy Program. Jacobson is also the co-founder of The Solutions Project.