Another Analysis (More Detailed) Of Gore’s Call To Action on Renewable Energy

September 8, 2008 in analysis by nils | Add your comment

Wicked Barrel, by batintherain (Creative Commons license)

My very basic analysis of Al Gore's call to action for "100% carbon free electricity" yesterday had the virtue of being dead simple. Jerome a Paris of The Oil Drum did a more detailed analysis back in July, based on wind energy generation, that reaches a similar conclusion to mine:

The short answer is: while 100% is probably unrealistic, it's not unreasonable to expect to be able to get pretty close to that number (say, in the 50-90% range) in that timeframe, and it is very likely that it makes a LOT of sense economically.

As you'll notice Jerome has made somewhat different assumptions from mine, particular in regard to the total electricity demand. As I mentioned, I plan to drill down more into my analysis and take it from the "zero-order" to "first-order". I'll also revisit my assumptions to make sure we're comparing apples to apples.