Justifying $15 Trillion for Renewables

"Yesterday I received a joint press release from a group of renewable energy trade associations. It touted a new report from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) on the potential growth of renewable energy by 2050. The report has already garnered an impressive array of headlines, such as "Renewable Energy Can Power the World" and "Renewable Energy Key to Solving Climate Change". The headline from the Financial Times was characteristically more concrete, "World faces $15,000 bn renewable energy bill." Unfortunately, although the final report, rumored to run 1,000 pages, might support all of those conclusions when it is issued at the end of the month, the 25-page "Summary for Policymakers" falls far short of inspiring such confidence. Heaven help those policymakers if the summary is all they actually read.

I'm not even sure if "read" is even the correct verb to apply to this document. Once I got beyond the introductory paragraphs it seemed to degenerate into jargon and bureaucratese that was very hard to parse into plain meaning. The report's genesis as the product of pure consensus is readily apparent. Or as Andy Revkin of the New York Times' Dot Earth blog kindly put it, "it doesn't take readers much beyond what is already well established." That's a shame, because we don't need yet another report telling us that we are swimming in enough renewable energy to power our civilization umpteen times over, if we can merely muster the willpower to reach out and tap it. What we urgently need is a roadmap that describes a path--or preferably several possible paths--through the brambles that separate the energy status quo of 2011 from its ideal low-carbon state of 2050.

For example, we need to understand just how renewables will supplant the petroleum that currently provides around 94% of all transportation energy, at least in the US. That demand might be met by biofuels, although the report points out that the first-generation biofuels that supply nearly 3% of global road transport fuel today, but are still the only kind available on a commercial scale, have serious shortcomings. Closing the gap between 3% and 94% would require a true revolution in next-generation biofuels from sources such as cellulose and algae, yet after reading the Summary for Policymakers we are no wiser about when and how this will occur. I might note that such developments are rarely amenable to precise timetables, as the EPA is learning to its chagrin."

http://energyoutlook.blogspot.com/2011/05/justifying-15-trillion-for-renewables.html

If we can spend trillions on war, surely we can spend a few more bucks on research to find solutions to these problems?

Algae-based biofuels in particular have great potential. If we can make them viable, we can end this ethanol madness once and for all, and enjoy $1/gallon gasoline again.

That seems to be the flavor of the month in the effort to malign renewables.