A Clean Energy Path for 145 Countries

Every time I mention Stanford's Mark Jacobson to someone and they've never heard of him, I'm always surprised. This is a guy who should be a household name, if climate change got the kind of attention it should. 

As I've written occasionally before, Jacobson is an energy scientist who, with his colleagues has formulated plans for how all 50 states could make their energy grids carbon-neutral.

They've done the same for 145 countries. (That's an article digesting the study; the study link is here.)

Here are some key quotes with all emphasis added:

The energy-producing technologies considered include only onshore and offshore wind electricity, solar photovoltaics for electricity on rooftops and in power plants, concentrated solar power, solar heat, geothermal electricity and heat, hydroelectricity, as well as small amounts of tidal and wave electricity. The most important electricity storage technology considered was batteries, although pumped hydroelectric storage, existing hydroelectric dam storage and concentrated solar power electricity storage were also treated. We found that no batteries with more than four hours of storage were needed....

We found that the overall upfront cost to replace all energy in the 145 countries, which emit 99.7 percent of world carbon dioxide, is about $62 trillion. However, due to the $11 trillion annual energy cost savings, the payback time for the new system is less than six years....

The new system may also create over 28 million more long-term, full-time jobs than lost worldwide and require only about 0.53 percent of the world’s land for new energy, with most of this area being empty space between wind turbines on land that can be used for multiple purposes....

It did not include bioenergy, natural gas, fossil fuels or bioenergy with carbon dioxide capture, direct air capture of carbon dioxide, blue hydrogen or nuclear power. We concluded that these technologies are not needed and provide less benefit than those we included.

Finally, our findings contend that a transition to 100 percent clean, renewable energy in each country should occur ideally by 2035, and no later than 2050, with an 80 percent transition by 2030.

Now if only we had the political will to make it so.