The wind and solar boom is here
(Second of two parts)
The Ghawar oil field takes up a lot of space – about 3,000 square miles, around the size of Rhode Island and Delaware combined. But it soon might sound crazy to use that much sunny land for drilling oil. Bond estimates that if you put up solar panels on an area the size of Ghawar, you could generate more than 1 petawatt-hour per year – more than you’d get from the oil buried under Ghawar.
But the oil will one day run out, while the sun will keep shining over Ghawar – and not just there, but everywhere else, too. This is the magic of the sun, as Bond explains: Only Saudi Arabia has a Ghawar, but with solar power almost every country in the world with enough space can generate 1 petawatt-hour of power (and without endangering the planet to boot).
It’s important to note that there remain hurdles in the way of a renewable energy future. The most obvious one is the infrastructure required to take advantage of all this electric power – more robust power grids, for instance, and the transformation to electric power of everything from cars to container ships.
These problems are considerable but solvable. In his upcoming book, “Electrify,” Saul Griffith, an inventor (and MacArthur fellow) who is a co-founder of an organization called Rewiring America, argues that “many of the barriers to a clean-energy future are systemic and bureaucratic, not technological.”
Griffith says that the transformation will be an economic bonanza – many analysts predict huge job creation and savings in energy prices from a switch to renewables. But if we want it in time to avert some of the most catastrophic predictions about a warming climate, we need to push the changes along even faster. Among other things, Griffith calls for a complete overhaul of our energy policies in order to reduce some of the regulatory costs of expanding renewable power.
What kinds of costs? Many small, unforeseen things. For instance, in much of the US, installing rooftop solar panels requires an extensive and expensive permitting process that substantially increases the price. Through streamlined rules, other countries have managed to greatly reduce such costs.
This won’t be easy; the fossil-fuel industry is actively battling the rise of renewables. But at most, it can only slow things down. A carbon-free energy economy is coming whether oil and coal companies like it or not.