A wind farm in Iowa. (NEWSCOM)
Where would America’s renewable energy come from?
By Eoin O'Carroll | 07.23.08
As Al Gore remarked in his landmark speech this past Thursday, the United States has the potential to generate all of its electricity from renewable resources within its borders.
Scientists have confirmed that enough solar energy falls on the surface of the earth every 40 minutes to meet 100 percent of the entire world’s energy needs for a full year. Tapping just a small portion of this solar energy could provide all of the electricity America uses.
And enough wind power blows through the Midwest corridor every day to also meet 100 percent of US electricity demand. Geothermal energy, similarly, is capable of providing enormous supplies of electricity for America.
According to the Energy Information Administration, the average American household in the US consumes about 920 killowat-hours of electricity per month.
So where, exactly, will all this energy come from? And how do we get it from there into our wall outlets?
That’s where my new favorite website comes in. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory, part of the US Department of Energy, offers a wealth of data about America’s capacity for all kinds of nonfossil, nonnuclear energy solutions, including solar, wind, . (A big hat-tip to the Sietch Blog for directing me there.)
The NREL’s site has hundreds of maps detailing America’s potential for various types of sustainable energy. Take this map of annual solar radiation, which I downloaded here.
As you can see, the greatest potential for large-scale solar is in the Southwest, much of it on federal land. Much of the rest of the country, with the exception of Alaska, a portion of the Pacific Northwest, and the Northeast, also has excellent solar capacity.
But the people in these regions won’t be left out. As you can see from this next map (which I downloaded here), those very regions that get the least amount of sunlight have the strongest winds. Much of the East Coast and the Great Lakes region has “outstanding” capacity, while the capacity on the northern West Coast and Alaska is classified as “outstanding” or “superb.” And much of the Midwest is “good” or “excellent.” 
Gore also mentioned geothermal energy, an often-overlooked resource that, unlike wind and solar, does not depend on the weather. Because geothermal plants can work continuously, day and night, they make ideal base-load plants.
This map (downloaded here) shows the estimated subterranean temperatures at a depth of 6 kilometers, or about 3.7 miles, below the earth’s surface.
Biomass energy has also gotten a bad rap lately, mostly because it has been accused of driving up global food prices. But there’s more to biomass than just food crops. Leftover residue from crops, timber forests, and mills can be turned into combustible fuels, as can methane emissions from landfills, manure, and sewage treatment plants.
Biomass energy is usually considered carbon-neutral. Carbon from the atmosphere is absorbed by biomass via photosynthesis, and the same amount is released back into the atmosphere when it is burned.
The following map, downloaded from here, shows America’s biomass resources.
Further down the road, hydrogen shows great potential. Now, despite frequent news reports to the contrary, hydrogen is not a source of renewable energy (except for some heavy isotopes used in nuclear power), but it is a carrier that can be used to store energy. It’s the most abundant element in the universe, but it is almost always found as a compound, such as water. Separating hydrogen atoms from these compounds requires energy – at least as much energy as you’re going to get from the resulting hydrogen.
So why bother doing it? Because if you can use renewable energy, such as wind or solar, to split hydrogen from compounds, then you’ve got a great storage medium whose delivery of carbon-free electricity is not dependent on the weather.
Take a look at this map of renewable-to-hydrogen potential, downloaded from here.
It’s no coincidence that this looks a lot like the wind-power map. NREL is currently working on a wind-to-hydrogen project, exploring the potential of using wind turbines to power electrolysis, that is, separating hydrogen and oxygen in water molecules, and then using the resulting hydrogen to power internal combustion engines that produce electricity.
As Mr. Gore pointed out, one of the biggest impediments to getting renewable electricity from solar and wind farms to our wall sockets is our aging transmission lines. In his speech, Gore cited a report – probably this one from the Electric Power Research Institute [PDF] – that says that our current grid system costs US businesses more than $120 billion a year. “It has to be upgraded anyway,” Gore said.
Upgrading our electric grid does not require any new technology. Nor does installing photovoltaic panels, or building solar thermal concentrators, wind farms, geothermal plants, and biomass converters. All it requires is money – about $1.5 trillion to $3 trillion, by Gore’s estimate – and political will.
And, as these maps suggest, the United States has enough potential within its borders to fulfill its energy needs – without any efficiency measures beyond improving the grid.
We could go even further than that. Imagine, just for a moment, what the world would look like if America were to become an exporter of energy. Many commentators, including T. Boone Pickens and Hillary Hillary Clinton, have said that the United States has the potential to become the Saudi Arabia of wind.
Saudi Arabia, it should be noted, has no personal income tax.
<< A town’s bold plan to harness offshore wind | MainComments
3. Ian Armstrong | 07.23.08
LOL, cute. Thanks for the response Eoin.
Thankfully I live in Marin County, California - where A/C is only needed about 10 days a year.
4. Mark Storm | 07.24.08
Hi Ian,
Nice article. Almost nothing is written on what CAN be done. Most press resolves around non-fact opinion of what can’t be done. We are shipping $700B overseas this year alone? Is there not a motivation to redirect some of this to US projects that provide long term benefits?
The future has to constantly be built. Nearly all the power plant generation equipment, appliances, home and commercial roof tops, Oil pipeline and natural gas pipelines will be replaced over the next 30-40 years as part of the natural lifecycle of equipment. Your article helps folks open their minds to the future. The future is almost never a linear extrapolation of the world we know today.
5. Mike Higgins | 07.24.08
Eoin,
You’ve done a good job of showing us where the best locations are for each of the popular renewable energies, and you’ve painted a rosy picture about the quantity of electricity that “could” be produced from these renewable sources. Then you state that all it takes is money - $1.5 to 3.0 trillion by Gore’s estimate - and political will.
First of all, do you have any idea how much money that is? … In Fiscal Year 2006, the total amount of taxes collected by the federal government was about $2.4 trillion. Since experience tells us that politicians always low-ball their estimates for any program in order to get it enacted, we can safely assume that this program will cost many times more that $3.0 trillion - the number Gore is willing to talk about.
Since the budget deficit for FY2006 was $248 billion, it is clear that the federal government can not even balance its budget with current collections. Where is the additional $300 - $900 trillion dollars on an annual basis over the next ten years going to come from? … The federal government will either take it from each of us forcibly through additional taxation, thereby further reducing our standard of living, or create it out of thin air (the favorite method of the politicians), thereby increasing inflation (just another name for a hidden tax on each of us) which will also reduce our standard of living.
All this is being done in the name of reducing the amount of a non-polluting gas that every human being creates when they exhale and every plant consumes when it inhales. The end result is a just another huge transfer of wealth from everyday people to bureaucrats, favored corporations and the intellectual elite, who feed on the fears of the people without producing any benefit for the everyday people.
I doubt that any of us would disagree with the assertion that renewable energy is a desirable goal. But nowhere in your article do you discuss how much land will need to be covered with unsightly solar energy farms and wind farms. Nowhere do you point out how inefficient solar energy and wind farms are today. As great as these ideas may seem, they are clearly not economical on the scale we all would wish them to be, otherwise they would be being built on a large scale without government assistance now.
Subsidizing their development makes no sense, as someday, when oil actually approaches its true physical limits, these renewable forms of energy will be economical to build and use. Until then, let’s first use up the cheaper fuels. After all, when oil is completely consumed, you won’t have the problem of growing CO2 emissions to worry about anymore. I see no reason to tax everyone today just to slow down the consumption rate of oil when everyone knows that we’re going to run out of oil anyway in a decade or two. What’s the point?
6. John | 07.24.08
Mike Higgins,
You have given an admirable summary of the muddled, short-sighted thinking that is leading us to environmental and economic disaster. Energy production and the infrastructure which distributes it is at the heart of modern industrial society. If that breaks down or falls short, economies break down. It’s that simple. Can it really be that all you care about is the prospect of higher taxes when the very integrity of the U.S. Economy is at stake?
You want to talk about standard of living? Do you have any idea how far the average standard of living would fall if due to an oil shortage large sectors of transportation, agriculture and the plastics and pharmaceutical industries shut down? And your solution is to ‘use up the cheaper fuels first’, as if the day the last drop of oil trickles out of the Saudi Arabian oil fields we can snap our fingers and instantly convert to alternative sources of energy? You contemptuously refer to the ‘intellectual elite’. Well I have a news flash for you, pal: that ‘elite’ is the only hope for our country to realize the true extent of the crisis we are facing because ‘everyday’ people don’t know jack about energy economics. Ignorance is not a mark of pride, let me assure you.
And lest you think I’m one of that elite, I make less than 30,000 a year. We should be ready and willing to make sacrifices, even painful sacrifices, to ensure a long-term future.
7. Loomis | 07.24.08
Correction: the EIA does not state that “the average American consumes about 920 KWhr of electricity per month”, according to the referenced link. The “consumers” listed in the EIA table must be residential customers which consist of families and other groups living in a single household, as well as individual Americans. The 920 KWhr figure given in the article would be recognized as much too high by anyone who has a working knowledge of US energy usage data.
Otherwise, this was a decent article with some nice graphics that illustrate the potential for expanding the renewable energy resource base. I do have issues with exactly how a widespread transition to renewable electricity production is going to be financed, but it is good to see the potential resources delineated in a map-style format.
9. Eric | 07.24.08
When I think about how much money is wasted in Iraq and Afghanistan (not just military costs, but other losses to the USA [workers leaving small businesses to serve their third tour, the tens of thousands of brain injured soldiers and that lifetime drain on their entire families and the economy]), how much new business would be spurred on by changing directions, and the incredible costs of our present system [do you know how much mercury is released by burning coal, apart from other pollutants, and the huge costs associated with the mining, transportation, and burning of coal?], it’s a no-brainer.
Going solar (especially), thermal, and wind power would be such a boon for the USA. We could revamp the car industry, revamp the utility industries, revamp manufacturing, redirect farm products, recreate urban congestion (roadways), reduce billions of dollars in pollution related disease (how much productivity is lost by kids growing up in the Bronx dumbed down their entire lives by pollution?), invent entire new industries. Forget whether it’s ‘good for the world or the world’s environment’, just think about what it would do to a foundering economy.
Imagine if all structures built hereon had some type of solar roof installed (solar panels, “solar shingles”). Al Gore is right in his basic premise that the greater demand for oil leads to higher prices, whereas the greater demand for solar products leads to lower prices.
Wake up and smell the green, America! And I mean the color of money!
10. Peter Black | 07.24.08
I’ve taken all of the NREL data (with the exception of the hydrogen potential map) and put them into a google map format on my blog which is dedicated to describing any and all information related to climate change that can be mapped.
I’ve also done some back end analysis to determine how much of these resources are on BLM lands and such, or summarized them by state. Please have a look over at: http://environmentaldefenseblogs.org/climateatlas
leave a comment or two! We’d appreciate it!
11. leoburg9 | 07.24.08
Its perfectly clear to me that we must switch at least 50% of our guns and bombs budget over to building the electric car we can plug into our solar powered roofs.
That would put generations to work on something useful. It should also get our troops off of Arab soil. That would give the terrorist no reason to attack US again.
12. john | 07.24.08
I was just thinking on my morning walk, as I passed by our municipal water tank: why not put a couple of windmills next to the tank (we are in a coastal town, and it was breezy up there), and then cover it and the tank with solar panels?
They’d have to be up to the weather, of course, and all the other engineering issues that new technology faces, but I am sure those could be surmounted. It’s the principle I am thinking of, that each community can generate a certain amount of their own municipal power just as individual homes can do. I’d love to see windmills beside the ubiquitous water tanks across America.
13. Bjorn Simundson | 07.24.08
Thank you Eoin, for producing this article.
In support of your points, despite the fears that people always have when large numbers are issued for emerging technological breakthroughs, I believe that you and Mr. Gore are indeed correct in that it will become imperative in the immediate future for us as a country to rally together and embrace new energy policies.
Our very way of life demands this change to happen. Think of it this way, when Nicola Tesla unveiled Alternating Current electricity at the turn of the last century, there were similar arguments and questions pertaining to its safety, usage, economic viability, etc. (Then again, people said that the earth was flat too, and see where that debate ended up.)
Also, you are indeed correct in the positioning of Hydrogen as a carrier rather than a source of energy, in that it is in essence a battery of sorts. Elementary chemistry classes prove this in their first quarter of study.
Where the serious benefits and immediate concerns are pertaining to a new energy usage paradigm is this; it is a matter of not only environmental and health issues which demand that our energy systems be re-engineered, but it is an immediate need for our very national security.
Imagine this, the world’s ability to produce oil is finite, the demand is infinite. China, India hold together roughly 1/3 of the world’s population, and are rapidly on the road from developing to developed economies. The demand on energy is already under pressure, and a large number of their manufacturing facilities, which require vast amounts of energy are just beginning to come on-line, not even to mention the car ownership growth, urban migration en-masse and the myriad other factors.
In the event that we have another shortage of oil for one reason or other, our system shuts down. OFF. It happened in the 1970’s and can happen again.
Check this out, if you can’t afford to put the diesel in the container ship to bring it across the ocean, it won’t go anywhere. If you don’t have a ready supply of diesel to power a train to cross the country, it won’t go anywhere either. Not to mention the inconceivable scale of the backlash that would trigger.
Imagine, walking to the grocery store, to find that it is out of frozen food, because the coal fired power-plant couldn’t get the coal it needed to fire the generators because the coal couldn’t get to the plant because the container ship couldn’t get diesel, which in turn, means that the freezers turned off when the electricity went down… I think you see where I’m going with this.
Therefore, in the interest of keeping ourselves from waking up one morning in a real-life version of the movie Mad-Max, we had better use our brains to become energy-independent immediately.
If we don’t, it’s just a matter of time before my aforementioned scenario becomes real.
This is a matter of immediate national security which trounces any nonsense about terrorism, nukes, or anything of that nature. This is FAR, FAR, more dangerous, and can cripple us literally overnight.
What we need to do is this:
THE DECLARATION OF ENERGY INDEPENDENCE.
Our forefathers had the nerve to declare their independence from a dangerous situation, are we not as brave?
14. Mike Higgins | 07.25.08
John,
I’m so sorry that you didn’t grasp the essence of my earlier post – I’m fighting for everyday people like you! … It will be a very, very cold day in **** before the federal government ever seriously considers eliminating the personal income tax for a carbon tax. Don’t be fooled by what you hear. Look at history and what the politicians have done.
Did you know that the House of Representatives just passed a housing bailout bill that also requires mortgage brokers to be fingerprinted and that everyone’s credit card records must be sent to the IRS. Our “leaders” are trashing our individual rights even as they bail out the financial elite (the bankers) and pay for it with hundreds of billions of brand new money instantly created out of thin air. Do you actually know how you are being fleeced by your own government right before your eyes while they keep you occupied with “saving the planet.”
John, when you finally awake to the deception and fraud that you currently believe in, you will realize what I’m telling you. Until then, I can simply tell you that you are being deceived into thinking you are doing good when you are actually sentencing yourself to poverty while you enrich those who are perpetrating the fraud upon you. I encourage you to look at the scientific research and the position or title of the person making the claims. Truth can be spoken by anyone. You don’t have to have an advanced educational degree or be a politician to speak the truth. A good place to start is the research paper supported by 31,000+ American scientists (including 9,000+ PhDs if titles are important to you), which you can find at http://www.petitionproject.org/.
If and when the carbon taxes come, they will most certainly be piled on our existing taxes, and who will bear the biggest burden? … Well, of course, it will be working people and retired people on fixed incomes. The rich won’t care. They have plenty of money to pay for the relatively small price increase of carbon-based fuels. Just ask Al Gore himself, whose electric bill is 19 times higher than the average home in his state. Do you really think they care that much? … You’ve heard the adage, “Follow the money.” When you do that you find the truth isn’t quite what you think.
15. Dennis Pfaff | 07.25.08
Thanks for the great post. I, too, am a big fan of NREL, including its extensive photo archives. Great for anyone covering or blogging about renewable energy, climate change and the like. By the way, take a look at my site, http://www.climatelawupdate.com. Feel free to comment on anything you see there.
16. William Hughes-Games | 07.25.08
Hydrogen falls down as an energy storage mechanism if you have to compress or liquify it. This takes huge amounts of unrecoverable energy. Why not instead store hydrogen in inverted floating tanks as was done in times past with producer gas in every almost every major city. This technology is perfectly feasible at any scale from city-wide to individual-domestic. Hydrogen is not very useful as a transportation fuel due to the need to condense it but as a storage medium in a static facility it is supurb. Note that if you are producing hydrogn, you are also producing oxygen. In a commercial facility this is a very valuable by-product, used in welding, steel manufacture, medicine and so forth.
17. Jonathan Cole | 07.26.08
This article is a good effort by someone with a modicum of knowledge to point a hopeful direction to the mess we are in and back it up with data. There are a few errors, though. First of all, hydrogen generated from renewables would be very poorly used in internal combustion engines which are about 20% efficient. That is why there has been so much attention paid to fuel cells that convert the hydrogen to electrical energy at 50-60% efficiency. However batteries are already on the market that will convert renewable energy to transport miles at 70-75% efficiency. Clearly the best way to utilize renewable energy in transport is as electric vehicles. And don’t let anyone tell you the batteries are not good enough. Batteries that can last for 15,000 cycles (40 years at one cycle per day) store electricity at 90-95% efficiency are already on the market and will soon be in electric vehicles. http://www.altairnano.com/. These batteries can be recharged in minutes and are completely environmentally safe. They can also be used in home and business based renewable enrgy systems. They have been in manufacture for less than 2 years, so they are still fairly expensive. But this electrical energy storage technology is the way toward the future.
As to the high costs of upgrading the grid, that is why distributed energy generation and utilization makes much more sense for renewable energy, than the centralized distribution paradigm that we have inherited from the past.
Low transmission losses and a much higher degree of reliability make many small power generators close to the point of use more practical and desirable. I have lived utilizing practical solar energy systems for the past 26 years. So doing this is already proven to be more reliable than the power company.
I note with interest how simple it is to take simple ideas and recount a thousand technical reasons why they cannot possibly work. I think Al Gore has made a mistake in the approach he is taking to the problems facing the world. He is under-reaching.
By closely coupling the crisis to global warming, he gives critics an easy target for slander. The fact is that the natural workings of the climate are so complex, that greenhouse gases in combination with fewer sunspots, more or less particulate matter in the atmosphere, melting ice, changing currents, etc., can push the climate toward warming or cooling under different circumstances and in different time frames. Climate change is definite, global warming may come and go.
However, the crisis of the widespread contamination of the natural world is not simply an issue of climate change. The unintended consequences of the combustion-based industrial revolution are a cauldron of unintended chemistry in the land, sea and air. The rapid rate of this change makes it difficult for many biological organisms to adapt and thus we are in an age of mass extinction caused in large part by the way we provide for our standard of living. There is some reason to suspect that human beings may not be exempt from this extinction trend.
So while some people like to show how smart they are by tearing down people like Al Gore, I suggest that, instead we work together to insure the survival of a habitable planet and a decent standard of living. With non-combustion renewable energy, elimination of waste, increase of efficiency and a more responsible attitude toward stewardship of the planet, we may yet make it through this serious crisis and come out stronger, richer, healthier and happier than if we stick our heads in the sand of denial.
Trackbacks/Pingbacks
2. River Bank Summer wallpaper, Eating healthier part of the energy equation, We could run America on Alternative energy « tangledwing | 07.24.08
Leave a Comment
We do not publish all comments, and we do not publish comments immediately. The comments feature is a forum to discuss the ideas in our stories. Constructive debate – even pointed disagreement – is welcome, but personal attacks on other commenters are not, and will not be published.
Please do not post any comments that are commercial in nature or that violate copyrights.
Finally, we will not publish any comments that we regard as obscene, defamatory, or intended to incite violence.
1. Ian Armstrong | 07.23.08
It’s such a rare thing to have someone publish an article on renewable energy without attempting to make me feel guilty about my “carbon footprint”. The idea of hydrogen as a storage mechanism seems great, on the surface anyway.
Thanks for publishing something that uses positive market forces to lay a convincing groundwork for renewable energy. I’m tired of being scolded.