Climate Climate & Energy

The numbers add up for solar power, whether you’re in Seattle or Albuquerque

The New York Times published an article yesterday titled "Silicon Valley Starts to Turn Its Face to the Sun":

"This is the biggest market Silicon Valley has ever looked at," says T. J. Rogers, the chief executive of Cypress Semiconductor, which is part-owner of the SunPower Corporation, a maker of solar cells in San Jose, Calif.

"The solar industry today is like the late 1970s when mainframe computers dominated, and then Steve Jobs and I.B.M. came out with personal computers," says R. Martin Roscheisen, the chief executive of Nanosolar, a solar company in San Jose, Calif.

Why all the excitement? You need only look at a few numbers and a graph to get the picture.

ILSR, spinning like a top

This is really, really sad. A group, the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, which has done stalwart work on relocalizing the economy, has let their pro-local passion overcome their principles.

Now they simply embarass themselves, beating the drums for corn ethanol, using flackery techniques that would do any corporate PR shop proud. Let's start in:

Some numerical comparisons

My last post argued that based on the figures Scientific American projected for a slow, partial phaseout of fossil fuels, we could do a full, fast, near-total elimination for between 170 and 240 billion dollars a year -- somewhere less than a third, possibly even less than a quarter, of our military budget.

I'd like to offer some other comparisons to put those numbers into perspective: We spent $840 billion buying fossil fuels in 2004, according to page 72 of the 2006 Annual Energy Review (10 Meg PDF). So a 95% reduction in U.S. fossil fuel use will pay back a $170 billion annual investment by a nearly 5 to 1 ratio, and a $240 billion a year investment by well over a 3 to 1 ratio. Yes, the time value of money reduces this a great deal -- but you still end up with a return exceeding that of the stock market during the bubble.

Another comparison: we sometimes talk about needing a commitment equal to what it took to win WWII. U.S. war spending grew from less than 2% of our national GDP just before Pearl Harbor, to around 5% immediately after, to around 37% at the peak of WWII defense spending. Yet in the scenarios under discussion, we advocate spending between 1% and 2% of the 13.3 trillion dollar U.S. GDP to fight global warming. So we are not talking about anything like a WWII-level commitment economically. And we don't have to shoot anybody, or get shot by anybody, or drop any bombs.

It's about green jobs, clean air, and a cure for our fossil fuel addiction. I think the politics are doable. If the public backs this strongly enough, they can walk right over any of the fat cats who try to get in the way.

A third of our military budget could cure our carbon addiction

Scientific American's grand plan to provide a bit over a third of U.S. energy from solar sources provides insight into what it would cost to phase out all or most U.S. greenhouse emissions. Bottom line: a lot less than current military spending.

The total cost of the SciAm plan: $420 billion over the course of that 40 years, or slightly over ten billion dollars per year -- less than current fossil fuel subsidies, less than the new subsidies "clean coal" would require.

The authors suggest phasing out fossil-fuel powered electricity over the course of forty years, using a solar dominated electricity grid. They suggest Compressed Air Electricity Storage (CAES) and thermal storage to compensate for the intermittent nature of solar electricity, and High Voltage Direct Current (HVDC) transmission lines to move solar electricity from where it is generated to where it is needed.

However, we can't wait 40 years, and we especially can't wait 40 years for a 35% reduction in emissions. So suppose we tripled the investment, and spent over the course of 20 years. That would be about $1.26 trillion, or $63 billion a year over twenty years -- a rounding error in the Pentagon budget.

Unfortunately, it is not that simple. The "Grand Plan" saves a lot of money via slow implementation, giving the technology time to develop. Implementing it more quickly, with less mature technology, would cost more, probably requiring more solar thermal and less photovoltaic power (unless PV prices drop a lot faster than SciAm projects). So we can double to ~$2.5 trillion, or $126 billion per year. This is still a fraction of our military budget.

Nearly all of world’s oceans tainted by human activity, says study

Human activity has tainted all but 3.7 percent of the world’s oceans, and 41 percent of the world’s waters have been heavily impacted, says a new study in Science. A graphic map illustrates in all-too-clear terms that the briny deep has taken a terrible toll from 17 human threats, including climate change, overfishing, fertilizer runoff, […]

The fourth IPCC report is still going strong a year later

I was at a meeting earlier this week and was talking to one of the coordinating lead authors of the recent IPCC working group 1 report on the physical science of climate change. He remarked that he was quite surprised that how little substantive criticism the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report had received since its release just about one year ago.

The reason, he thought, was that the skeptics were "in the room" with the writing team. What he meant was that the scientists writing the report knew that the denial machine would go over the report with a fine tooth comb looking for any "gotcha" mistakes to use to discredit the IPCC. Because of that, the IPCC report was extremely carefully worded so as to make virtually every statement in the report bulletproof.

In fact, it is quite amazing to me that essentially none of the IPCC documents produced over the last 18 years has been found to contain any substantive errors. The trolls, of course, will come out with their litany of "errors" that the IPCC contains (I suspect a few will appear in the comments to this post), but when you look closely, the trolls are almost always misrepresenting the IPCC's statements.

In fact, that's the most common attack on the IPCC: make the claim that the IPCC said something ridiculous (which it didn't actually say), then disprove that ridiculous statement, and then use that as evidence that the IPCC's reports cannot be trusted. "The IPCC says that 2 + 2 = 5, but that's just hogwash. We know that 2 + 2 = 4. Thus, climate change is a hoax." Yeah, right.

California bill would require climate change to be taught in schools

Science textbooks approved for California public schools would have to cover climate change, and science teachers would be required to put warming in their curricula, under a bill approved by the state Senate and heading to the Assembly. Says state Sen. Joe Simitian (D-Palo Alto), who introduced the bill, “This is a phenomenon of global […]

Prince Charles, Richard Branson compare climate crisis to war

Prince Charles warned in a speech on Thursday that if a “courageous and revolutionary” approach to tackling climate change is not undertaken, “the result will be catastrophe for all of us but with the poorest in our world hit hardest of all. In this sense it is surely comparable to war.” Also this week, Virgin […]

General Motors vice chair is not a climate-change believer

General Motors Vice Chairman Bob Lutz is not only cranky, but willfully ignorant: D Magazine reports that Lutz declared to journalists that global warming is a “total crock of shit.”

Jiminy Cricket this is creepy