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America could get to 75% renewable energy quite quickly

Billions of solar panels and millions of wind turbines
The good news is we are already getting these.

With An ‘All-Out’ Federal Renewable Energy Strategy, How Long Before We Could Be 100% Renewably Powered?, Forbes, Mark Rogowsky, Internet Entrepeneur, 22 Aug 13,  Probably 20-30 years to get to 70-80%, but 80 years to get the last 20-30%.

Let’s clarify that the assumption here is that the United States actually decides to do this per the hypothetical. That means that for whatever reason, the politics has shifted massively from where it currently stands. There are a lot of roadblocks to 100% renewable energy, but relatively few toward mostly renewable energy — assuming you’ve solved the politics problem. Here’s what you need:

An integrated long-distance grid
You’ll be carrying a lot of wind from the Midwest, possibly from offshore in the East, and tons of solar from the Southwest long distances. So you’re going to want much better long-distance power lines, maybe even with superconducting trunks. This will let you use Arizona’s 5 pm sun to power Florida’s air conditioners at 8 pm. Is this trivial? No. Is it technologically impossible? Absolutely not.

Millions of electric cars
We use a lot of non-renewable fuel for transportation. We’re going to need electric vehicles to fix that. Please don’t get me started on hydrogen, unless you want to throw away 1/3 of the renewable electricity in making it and then also develop an infrastructure to dispense it nationally. Let’s just note we get 10% of our liquid fuels from renewable sources today (ethanol and biofuels). Once we get most people on electric vehicles, we can use range-extenders (like the Chevy Volt and BMW i3) and battery swapping (like the Tesla Model S) to get people long distances. And let’s acknowledge that millions of gas-powered cars will exist 20-30 years from now even if we “Moonshot” this goal with national will. We are going after the first 80% of non-renewables….

Oh, those EVs will be frequently grid connected during the day, by the way. They’ll gather excess urban solar power and feed small bits of it back to the grid when needed for high peak demand. People will limit how much they “give back” based on their commute needs and all of this will be seamless. Given that the electricity will be free/nearly free to those that participate, getting enough to join in will work just fine.

Billions of solar panels and millions of wind turbines
The good news is we are already getting these. The bad news is before our “Moonshot” program, it wasn’t happening fast enough. In Germany, residential solar is $2.20 per watt installed, in the U.S. it’s more than 2x as expensive. First, we need to have a national permitting standard that makes getting residential and small commercial systems installed cost next to nothing. ….

To make renewables work better with intermittency, the grid improvements will help a lot…….

Efficiency will be rewarded at all levels…….

The good news is that if you listen to the doomsayers who claim this will cost us trillions, I’d say that feels like a bargain. The average person is buying 400 gallons of gas for $1500. The electricity to replace that will run them at least $1000. That’s more than $50 billion just at the pump. The end cost of the electricity — which will be free of inflation by the way — will be below the current national average per kilowatt price by a few cents once we’ve bought all those panels and turbines (even accounting for storage). Probably save another $10-20 billion as consumers right there — and that savings will grow over time.

Then there are the savings from not burning coal and making people ill from it (not to mention mining it) or from tailpipe emissions (lower than ever, but not gone). Urban asthma rates suggest billions in healthcare savings are a given, perhaps much much more.

Of course, this doesn’t even consider the possibility other countries will follow suit and as a result the global temperature rise will be mitigated, limiting the dislocations caused by increases in sea level. Nor does it contemplate the possibility of a reduced military presence once U.S. foreign policy doesn’t need to be so focused on the free flow of Persian Gulf oil. http://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2013/08/22/with-an-all-out-federal-renewable-energy-strategy-how-long-before-we-could-be-100-renewably-powered/

August 23, 2013 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | renewable, USA