A Stanford research team believes that we could power the planet entirely with renewable energy by 2050--if we mandate that all new energy production plants use renewable energy by 2030 and convert existing plants by 2050.
In this happy-go-lucky prediction all new energy production plants use renewable energy by 2030, and then converting older existing plants by 2050. In the new world order, almost everything would run off electricity. Ninety percent of the production would come from windmills and solar energy plants (already very well established technologies) and the remaining 10% would come from hydroelectric power, geothermal, and wave/tidal power. Mobile things--cars, trains, ships and such--would run on hydrogen-powered fuel cells, and aircraft would burn hydrogen fuel. The hydrogen itself would come from green-electric generation processes.
The only minor problem is somehow beating back the fossil fuel industry to a point of nonexistence. Existing businesses who rely on coal, oil, gas (and their byproducts, like the airline industry's need for aviation fuel) are reluctant to develop radical revolutionary innovations towards this objective as our World is driven by Inertia. We're all used to the current way of things and a large scale transformation on a “global scale” coupled with powerful lobbying drops all necessary motivation to make this dream come true… but we can always keep dreaming and we will check back in 2050!
No comments:
Post a Comment