The January 2008 edition of Scientific American headlines "A Grand Plan for Solar Energy:  By 2050 it could free the U.S. from foreign oil and slash greenhouse emissions.  Here's how..."

The article proposes a plan which combines photovoltaic arrays and concentrating solar power plants, with excess daytime energy stored in the form of compressed air underground for use to drive electric generation at night.  The authors include the earlier proposal for building a superconducting direct current transmission grid to distribute renewable energy across the nation with no power loss in transmission.  They calculate these solar power plants in their plan could, by themselves, generate 69 percent of the U.S.'s electricity and 35% of its total energy by 2050.  They calculate that $420 billion in subsidies from 2011 to 2050 would be required to fund the system infrastructure and make it cost-competitive.  I can justify this as less expensive than the alternatives, e.g., the economic impact of unabated global warming, the capital cost of developing equivalent nuclear power - against which their solar system is dirt cheap by comparison, and the costs of developing carbon dioxide-sequestering technology and infrastructure for fossil-fuel-burning forms of electric generation.  All these more expensive alternatives also have much larger "risk factors" associated with them which increase their marginal cost.

I will do a review of the article and fold it into my Solar Energy Chapter of the Energy Plank of the Renewable Deal when I have the time to attend to it, but thought you would like to know about this so you can look at the article itself without waiting on me if the information in it seems immediately useful in your work.

I have been doing some significant expansion of some of the Renewable Deal support essays and energy plank chapters.  When I have time to take a breath (I suffer from the delusion that such a time will occur in the predictable future) I will send these forward to Ray to update on the <earthrestoration.com> site.  At the moment I am in a bum's rush of preparation to take off for Texas on Friday morning.  I will be gone until the 17th or 18th, home over the weekend, and off again to California on the 23rd for the rest of the month of January, doing organic agriculture-related stuff like inspections and conferences. -Lance

The January 2008 edition of Scientific American headlines "A Grand Plan for Solar Energy:  By 2050 it could free the U.S. from foreign oil and slash greenhouse emissions.  Here's how..."

The article proposes a plan which combines photovoltaic arrays and concentrating solar power plants, with excess daytime energy stored in the form of compressed air underground for use to drive electric generation at night.  The authors include the earlier proposal for building a superconducting direct current transmission grid to distribute renewable energy across the nation with no power loss in transmission.  They calculate these solar power plants in their plan could, by themselves, generate 69 percent of the U.S.'s electricity and 35% of its total energy by 2050.  They calculate that $420 billion in subsidies from 2011 to 2050 would be required to fund the system infrastructure and make it cost-competitive.  I can justify this as less expensive than the alternatives, e.g., the economic impact of unabated global warming, the capital cost of developing equivalent nuclear power - against which their solar system is dirt cheap by comparison, and the costs of developing carbon dioxide-sequestering technology and infrastructure for fossil-fuel-burning forms of electric generation.  All these more expensive alternatives also have much larger "risk factors" associated with them which increase their marginal cost.

I will do a review of the article and fold it into my Solar Energy Chapter of the Energy Plank of the Renewable Deal when I have the time to attend to it, but thought you would like to know about this so you can look at the article itself without waiting on me if the information in it seems immediately useful in your work.

I have been doing some significant expansion of some of the Renewable Deal support essays and energy plank chapters.  When I have time to take a breath (I suffer from the delusion that such a time will occur in the predictable future) I will send these forward to Ray to update on the <earthrestoration.com> site.  At the moment I am in a bum's rush of preparation to take off for Texas on Friday morning.  I will be gone until the 17th or 18th, home over the weekend, and off again to California on the 23rd for the rest of the month of January, doing organic agriculture-related stuff like inspections and conferences. -Lance