Global Warming...New Report...and it ain't happy news

Energy consumers will pay €100 billion over the next 20 years to subsidize domestic PV installed before the end of 2011.

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Well, it's the Bavarian government opposing those two power lines in our second chamber, most of those are Bavarians, some Upper and Lower Franconians, too, plus one Swabian.

The cost to shift to renewables is not the same as the cost to shut down 22 nuclear reactors. The cost involves building a lot things that have nothing to do with nuclear reactors including new plants that don't use renewables.

Of course there is a cost to shut down the reactors but you can't count every other cost to the electric infrastructure as you are doing.

Come on Hawk. You can't expect these people to actually count the cost of doing business into the cost of doing business. You are being unreasonable.

Studies Back Feasibility of a 100-Percent Renewable Energy Supply

Two recent studies lay out compelling scenarios under which virtually all of the world’s energy needs could be met with renewable energy sources by 2050. But despite their similar end goals, the energy futures foreseen in these two reports—published by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and a team of university scientists, respectively—are vastly different.

A wind turbine in South Africa. Will there be more of them in 2050?
WWF’s The Energy Report, published last week in collaboration with Ecofys, a Dutch think tank specializing in renewable energy, concludes that it is technologically and economically feasible for 95 percent of all energy to come from renewable sources by 2050. The authors argue that such a transformation would even be cheaper than relying on conventional, carbon-intense energy sources.

Meanwhile, Mark Z. Jacobson from Stanford University and Mark A. Delucchi from the University of California at Davis have written an ambitious two-part paper titled “Providing all global energy with wind, water, and solar power,” soon be published in Energy Policy. The study concludes that the electrification of all energy sectors can lead to a fully renewable energy supply by as early as 2030, or—if political and social obstacles are taken into account—by 2050.

These are only the latest in a long list of studies claiming that our future energy demand can be satisfied almost exclusively using renewable energy sources, such as wind, solar, or hydropower. Other examples include papers by the European Climate Foundation (ECF) and the European Renewable Energy Council (EREC) that present pathways toward a 100-percent renewable energy supply for Europe by 2050. And in January 2011, the Berlin-based German Advisory Council on the Environment (SRU) presented the German Federal Environment Minister with a detailed report on how to achieve a fully renewable electricity supply in Europe’s largest economy within four decades. A similar report was published by the German Federal Environment Agency (UBA) in July 2010.
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Studies Back Feasibility of a 100-Percent Renewable Energy Supply

The WWF report, for instance, estimates that despite the huge investment needed to promote renewable energy, renewables will provide a positive cash flow after 2035,

German politicians, meanwhile, can only look across the Atlantic and shake their heads. Washington has no formal or comprehensive energy or climate policy, but the United States’ natural gas bonanza has led to cheaper power prices and falling greenhouse-gas emissions in recent years. Berlin has reams of pro-renewable energy policies, but prices and emissions are climbing. Germany’s energy dilemma is particularly important now, because the European Union is trying to sort out its own climate and energy policies through 2030. The choice, essentially, is whether the Europe wants to be more like Germany, or less.

Dieter Helm, an energy economist at Oxford University who has advised the European Commission, said German leaders assumed that oil and gas prices were going to continue to increase, which meant that developing cheap supplies of renewable energy would give their companies a competitive advantage over the United States. That assumption has turned out to be almost entirely wrong. Flat oil prices, America’s shale gas revolution, and the stubbornly high cost of renewable energy have instead left German firms reliant on more expensive forms of energy than their U.S.-based competitors.

Good point. They would be self-sufficient, rather than draining off the grid.

Here in S. Korea, they're investing pretty heavily in renewables. I can guarantee you that if it weren't economically feasible, Korea wouldn't spend a dime on it.

15 years ago, German politicians agreed to wean the country off fossil fuels and nuclear energy. The shift has been expensive and mistakes were made, but it has put Germany on a path to a cleaner, greener economy.