Tuesday, August 5, 2014

Powering California with Renewable Energy

Some academics from Stanford released a study showing how California could generate all of the energy it needs with renewable power by 2050, but I think the map above shows why this is not likely to happen. Does anyone seriously think we will devote 2.8 percent of our land area to wind farms, or cover nearly 1 percent with solar panels? Obviously we could if we had to, but it would be very difficult to get the people of the state to go along with this, at least until that distant time when we completely run out of fossil fuels.

1 comment:

pootrsox said...

http://www.brightsourceenergy.com/ivanpah-solar-project#.U-E1omMl-8E

Trust me, no one lives out there, no one wants to live out there, and I cannot imagine that it is doing any environmental harm out there.

I've driven past it several times en route to or from Vegas/San Diego.

We need to become proactive in locating such projects in places like the Mojave so that we can then point to them as examples of successful renewable energy sources.