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Renewables and the failures of RE<C
IEEE Spectrum has an article on the necessary technologies for renewable energy to reverse climate change [ieee.org].
This article is particularly noteworthy, as it's written by Ross Koningstein & David Fork, two of the engineers on Google's RE<C initiative [google.org], which ran from 2007 to 2011, and reviews some of the data they worked with and the conclusions they came to, which have interesting implications for the viability of renewable energy programs.
At the start of RE<C, we had shared the attitude of many stalwart environmentalists: We felt that with steady improvements to today’s renewable energy technologies, our society could stave off catastrophic climate change.
However after reviewing the work done and the data available they come to some interesting conclusions:
Those calculations cast our work at Google’s RE<C program in a sobering new light. Suppose for a moment that it had achieved the most extraordinary success possible, and that we had found cheap renewable energy technologies that could gradually replace all the world’s coal plants—a situation roughly equivalent to the energy innovation study’s best-case scenario. Even if that dream had come to pass, it still wouldn’t have solved climate change.
A good article with some hard numbers, and interesting conclusions for how to handle the realities of the energy market which essentially pushes for a change in the approach to renewable energy research.
