EnergyState-by-state plan to convert U.S. to 100 percent clean, renewable energy by 2050
One potential way to combat ongoing climate change, eliminate air pollution mortality, create jobs, and stabilize energy prices involves converting the world’s entire energy infrastructure to run on clean, renewable energy. This is a daunting challenge. Now, researchers for the first time have outlined how each of the fifty states can achieve such a transition by 2050. The fifty individual state plans call for aggressive changes to both infrastructure and the ways we currently consume energy, but indicate that the conversion is technically and economically possible through the wide-scale implementation of existing technologies.
One potential way to combat ongoing climate change, eliminate air pollution mortality, create jobs, and stabilize energy prices involves converting the world’s entire energy infrastructure to run on clean, renewable energy.
This is a daunting challenge. Now, however, in a new study, Mark Z. Jacobson, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University, and colleagues, including U.C. Berkeley researcher Mark Delucchi, are the first to outline how each of the fifty states can achieve such a transition by 2050. The fifty individual state plans call for aggressive changes to both infrastructure and the ways we currently consume energy, but indicate that the conversion is technically and economically possible through the wide-scale implementation of existing technologies.
“The main barriers are social, political and getting industries to change. One way to overcome the barriers is to inform people about what is possible,” said Jacobson, who is also a senior fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment and at the Precourt Institute for Energy. “By showing that it’s technologically and economically possible, this study could reduce the barriers to a large scale transformation.”
The study is published in the online edition of Energy and Environmental Sciences. An interactive map summarizing the plans for each state is available at www.thesolutionsproject.org.
A Stanford University release reports that Jacobson and his colleagues started by taking a close look at the current energy demands of each state, and how those demands would change under business-as-usual conditions by the year 2050. To create a full picture of energy use in each state, they examined energy usage in four sectors: residential, commercial, industrial and transportation.
For each sector, they then analyzed the current amount and source of the fuel consumed — coal, oil, gas, nuclear, renewables — and calculated the fuel demands if all fuel usage were replaced with electricity. This is a significantly challenging step — it assumes that all the cars on the road become electric, and that homes and industry convert to fully electrified heating and cooling systems. Jacobson said, however, that their calculations were based on integrating existing technology, and the energy savings would be significant.
