That big glowy thing? Yeah, it’s pretty warm…

Scientific American has the latest in what amounts to a uniquely powerful, detailed, must-read case for a solar energy future in America.

In a nutshell: For about $10 billion a year for 40 years, the US can become energy independent and reduce its carbon emissions 62 percent with solar power as its prime source.

It’s a bargain, if you consider the $400 billion already down the tubes after only five years of war in Iraq — with $200 billion more budgeted and no end in sight. For that price, we could phase out dirty coal and build an entirely new clean energy economy, and then some. And the best part? We have the technology to do it today.

The article starts out with a stark wake-up call. The truth about solar:

Solar energy’s potential is off the chart. The energy in sunlight striking the earth for 40 minutes is equivalent to global energy consumption for a year. The U.S. is lucky to be endowed with a vast resource; at least 250,000 square miles of land in the Southwest alone are suitable for constructing solar power plants, and that land receives more than 4,500 quadrillion British thermal units (Btu) of solar radiation a year. Converting only 2.5 percent of that radiation into electricity would match the nation’s total energy consumption in 2006.

Scientific American goes on to detail its “solar grand plan” that would provide 69 percent of America’s electricity and 35 percent of its total energy (which includes transportation) with solar by 2050.

Here’s what we need to do:

• Devote huge tracts of land to photovoltaic panels and solar heating troughs.
• Erect a direct-current (DC) transmission backbone to send solar energy efficiently across the nation.
• Invest $10 billion a year of federal funds over the next 40 years — $400 billion in all — to complete the 2050 plan.

Here’s the good news:

• The technology is ready.
• Solar plants consume little or no fuel, saving billions of dollars year after year.
• The infrastructure would displace 300 large coal-fired power plants and
  300 more large natural gas plants and all the fuels they consume.
• The plan would effectively eliminate all imported oil.
• The plan would reduce greenhouse gas emissions from power plants
  by 1.7 billion tons a year
• Another 1.9 billion tons of emissions from vehicles would be displaced by plug-in hybrids refueled by the solar
  power grid.
• In 2050, U.S. carbon dioxide emissions would be 62 percent below 2005 levels.

Here’s the bad news:

Without subsidies, the solar grand plan is impossible.

And we saw what happened to the energy bill that the President just signed. Support for solar energy — stripped out. Subsidies for the oil industry — put back in.

Read the article anyway, and forget political realities! It’s a powerful piece of analysis that shows, yet again, how economical and practical a clean energy future could be. One of the article’s authors, Ken Zweibel, gets to have the last word:

In the end, the most important thing the article may contribute to is lifting the veil on alternatives to conventional energy. Are we really constrained to existing options? Is there really so little choice?

We think not.

source: solveclimate.org

This article really confirms what we’eve been talking about: the technology is ready, are we? sort of a thing. Imagine a significant portion of our money not going to war or corporation, for once. We’re almost there, we just need that extra push. It’s really important that everyone realize how feasible alternative energies are and wake up and smell the lobbyists running our lives.