What Does a 100% Renewable Energy World Look Like?

Each January, I put a lot of thought into making resolutions, mainly because I want to fulfill them. Typically, I’m so busy over the holidays that I don’t make my resolution on New Year’s Day, but a week or so later, after I’ve had some time to think about it.

Settling on this year’s resolution hasn’t been hard though. It’s simple: Lose the 10 pounds I gained when my wife was pregnant with our first child over two years ago and the few more I padded on top last year while waiting for our second child.

And let me take a chance here to give an unsolicited endorsement to Lose It!, a  free application for the iPhone loaded with enough calorie information to make me think twice about snatching animal crackers from my eldest daughter’s plate.)

Still, with all the thought I put into them, I’m still like most people in that I’m good at some resolutions (13 years ago I ended my pack-a-day cigarette habit for good) and not so good at others (I resolved to lose this weight last year).

Anyway, resolutions get me thinking broadly about all sorts of topics, including alternative energy. What if we all resolved to go cold turkey on fossil fuels to save the planet from the global warming and free ourselves from oil-driven political entanglements? What would the energy system look like?

Stanford University’s Mark Z. Jacobson and University of California’s Mark Delucchi wondered the same thing and detailed what our energy supply would look like in 2030 in a recent issue of Scientific American.

One of their findings is that there is no question there is enough wind, water and solar potential to more than meet global needs for energy. Solar itself could produce 30 times the world’s needs, wind and water at least five times world needs each. The pair figure that the world will need 3.8 million wind turbines that collectively would cover less than the land area of Manhattan with room for pasture between the turbines, 90,000 sizeable solar farms covering a lot more area, up to 1% of Earth’s land mass, and a significant number of geothermal and tidal systems.

What struck me as most interesting is the dynamic of shifting to alternative energies and the inherent way that actually lowers demand.

Here’s an example: As I detailed in a new Special Report for Cabot Green Investor about the car of the future and the stocks that should benefit, over 90% of the energy that goes into our cars in the form of gasoline is wasted in some form or another. Much of it is because of the nature of combustion, which sends 80% of its energy out in the form of heat that is useless for running the car.

Electric cars are the opposite in that they are much more efficient, using 80% of the energy for moving the car and wasting just 20%.  That ultimately means less input (equivalent energy amounts of gasoline and electricity) is needed to get the same output (moving the car).

Or consider water: In California, 20% of the energy created in the state is used to move water from one place to another. Some of that can’t be eliminated of course, since people need drinking water, but a lot of the energy expended would disappear under an alternative energy scenario.

The typical 500-megawatt coal fired electrical plant needs 2.2 billion gallons of water a year to create steam for its turbines. From the Rockies westward, some 130 billion gallons of water annually are channeled to coal plants. Getting rid of those plants immediately lowers the overall need for as much energy without cutting end-use levels.

Overall, in Jacobson and Delucchi’s view, a Green energy world in 2030 would only need two-thirds of the energy that the world currently uses with its reliance on fossil fuels to power the same things. Interesting stuff.