A plan to save the world

I am tired of this waffling and 'dithering' on a real climate plan. Dick Cheney accused Obama of dithering on Afghanistan after he thought about the issue for 3 months. What do you call it when you won't address a problem for 21 years (see the first senate hearing on the subject in 1988)?

Last week I did out a little math on how much it would cost us to actually replace our fossil fuel power plants with renewables. It was quite simple really, just took a bit of looking up on the Energy Information Administration website, which has everything you ever wanted to know about power in this country. The next step was to find out how much power plants cost, and I used a base calculation for a 500MW plant:

• Geothermal plants are relatively cheap: ~$575-1,500 million or so
• Wind Power plants may be a little cheaper, at $1000/kw installed, or $500 million/500MW

I could go further, but I'll stick with just these two, because wind alone has to capability to power the whole country (see this map). For my calculations, and ease of reading I've used a conservative ballpark estimate for the cost of one 500MW plant, $1 billion.

Now for the part about how much power we need to generate:

I got this info from the EIA, and did my calculations in terms of 500MW plants. In total, we currently have the equivalent of 627.682 coal plants, 116.596 petroleum plants, and 815.06 natural gas 500MW plants in this country. Mind you, this is our total capacity, not what we actually use. Bottom line, if we wanted to replace all of our fossil fuel plants we would need 1559.338 new 500MW plants.

Now let's think first about the space it would take up. Wind power would obviously be the more expansive option, so at an average footprint of 2.02 km per plant (based on upper estimate of what is necessary for 1000 turbines), we would need to cover 3155 square km's (1218 square miles) or roughly the size of just 1.7% of North Dakota, one of the most promising states for windpower.

The more important consideration will of course be the price tag. At $1 billion dollars a plant, the whole plan would cost us $1.559 trillion dollars. Granted, this is a lot of money, so I should provide some scale. Let's compare this amount to how much we are about to spend in Afghanistan. At ~$1 million/soldier/year over there, the new surge is going to raise total cost $30 billion to ~$100 billion/year. If we can spend $100 billion on that unpopular war, what is to stop us from spending the same amount building renewable power plants? At that annual cost, we could build enough plants to replace all fossil fuels in 15.59 years.

Now here there are two big bonuses, which are how this could actually be passed.

1. This would create a ton of jobs, especially in the midwestern and southwestern states (wind and geothermal resources respectively) and would be the equivalent of a massive stimulus. Wind plants could also be placed along both the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, so most states could get a piece of the action if they wanted to.

2. Unlike war, renewable energy pays itself back, and then some. Wind power plants break even (generating as much total revenue as the cost to build them) in about 7 years, and geothermal plants would be only slightly longer. Thus, if the government subsidized this project next year at with same Afghanistan budget we could be carbon neutral with regard to electricity, and fully paid off by 2030. After 2030, the renewable plants would be providing net revenue to the country, eventually doubling the initial investment. I know this is a bit of a pipe dream to think that we would actually start right now, but hey, don't say that we can't. I am so tired of hearing people say that the cost of a switch to renewables is unimaginable or unrealistic. I have imagined it, and it is completely realistic. We just need to set priorities. One of them might not be spending as much as the rest of the world combined on our military (~$680 billion/year). Seriously, the war in Iraq has already surpassed $1 trillion, and will eventually get to $3 trillion by the time we actually finish up there. It sounds like hyperbole, but with that budget, we could replace all of our fossil fuel power plants twice.