Scientific American [1] has just published a comprehensive article on how to switch the United States substantially over to sunlight. The headline: “By 2050 solar power could end U.S. dependence on foreign oil and slash greenhouse gas emissions [2].”
The cost of this immense clean-energy-producing plan would be $420 billion. That’s a HUGE amount of money. Where could we EVER get that sort of money? Oh, yeah. The U.S. has already spent that much on the Iraq debacle. [3] For the amount of money that we’ve wasted in Iraq, we could have already funded a great way to wean ourselves from mideast oil.
Now, specifically, what could $420 Billion buy if one spent it wisely? It’s an incredible investment that would pay for itself over and over. Here are the highlights of the plan, according to the Scientific American article:
Solar plants consume little or no fuel, saving billions of dollars year after year. The infrastructure would displace 300 large coal-fired power plants and 300 more large natural gas plants and all the fuels they consume. The plan would effectively eliminate all imported oil, fundamentally cutting U.S. trade deficits and easing political tension in the Middle East and elsewhere. Because solar technologies are almost pollution-free, the plan would also reduce greenhouse gas emissions from power plants by 1.7 billion tons a year, and another 1.9 billion tons from gasoline vehicles would be displaced by plug-in hybrids refueled by the solar power grid. In 2050 U.S. carbon dioxide emissions would be 62 percent below 2005 levels, putting a major brake on global warming.
The plan would include photovoltaic farms, pressurized caverns for storing the solar power, concentrated solar power (using numerous mirrors to focus the light as heat) and long-distance direct current transmission systems (because most of the solar power would be produced in the desert Southwest, far from major cities.
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