The Problem With the Plan to Power the World

Scientific American laid out a plan to power the world entirely with renewables by 2030. Sensing weaknesses in the plan, skeptical commentators closed in like a pack of wild Eeyores. It'll never work they said, trotting out opinions, facts and figures, and links to more sensible solutions.

Here's a sampling:

• "Jacobson & Delucchi have convincingly shown that powering the world with their combination of measures is infeasible."
• "Pure garbage. Jacobson has written similar trash in the past."
• "This paper is an irresponsible piece of nonsense that would generally be found for order in the back pages of some pulp fiction magazine. The sad part is the editors for some reason chose to not only publish the claptrap but to endorse it."
• "Even over 20 years, that figures out to $50,000 per year per family to finance this brave new world. Mr. and Mrs. America, can you spare $50,000 a year in additional energy costs? I don't think so. Ain't gonna happen." --fwegert

But really, how do you haul something on a grand scale in from the ether of intuition to create a viable, working plan? Where do you start? How does a person wrap their brain around big huge propositions like this? I think Jacobson and Delucchi do a good job staking out the boundaries of a solution, if not the substance of a solution. With something this big, there are so many layers and variables, so many twists and turns, unforeseeable and breaking developments along the way, it seems there is a sensibility in grasping the end vision, then clearing all hurdles to move to that vision.

Consider fwegert's $50K a year calculation. How does it account for the "free" fuel that exists after implementation, year upon year upon year? Avoided health care and other costs external to the standard economic and financial calculus? The value of putting people to work creating strategic wealth?

The additional energy costs required should we continue on our current path of energy use, if a curve really does exist that charts the peaking of world oil production, and if it were to collide with an exploding demand curve (even if that collision comes a generation or so down the road, and is not imminent or happening now)? (That is, if that collision of oil supply and demand doesn't represent total collapse of the economy?

How do you calculate $50K a year within an economy that doesn't exist?) And the other layers, known and unknown, that ought to be properly considered. If you simply try to count the beans in the here and now, you may have missed the larger, future context in which you will be operating. Not to be critical of the critics.

The critics are key to rounding out and refining any serious plan, to punching holes and ferreting out fissures, so that they can be patched, and the plan strengthened. Maybe Jacobson and Delucchi are off their rockers. Or maybe they offer us a tight framework to do the big thinking: a theoretical maximum, a backstop against which to chart our efforts.

Like assuming ice is frictionless to solve a physics problem, allowing us to discount what are in the end negligible real world constraints that might have kept us from getting on with solving the problem.

Photo: Jesse Estes on flickr