A Democratic plan to move the nation to a 100 percent renewable energy future to combat climate change would take the combined land mass of Texas and West Virginia to achieve, the conservative Manhattan Institute said in a report issued Wednesday as a counterpunch to environmental groups’ “Keep it in the Ground” movement.
The report examines a scenario of using renewable energy to reduce carbon emissions 80 percent by 2050, which would require a chunk of land equivalent to Texas and West Virginia combined to build all the energy infrastructure necessary, including wind farms and solar arrays, as well as the necessary doubling of existing transmission lines.
With the extreme technical and regulatory challenges such a plan would face, it also would be met by growing opposition in rural America, the study showed. Instead, the nation should embrace a plan that relies on zero-emission nuclear power plants and low-emission natural gas plants to reduce carbon emissions.
The report was released the same day the government’s Energy Information Administration found carbon emissions to be at their lowest level since 1991. The independent agency found that carbon emissions that many scientists blame for causing man-made climate change, have fallen by 2.5 billion metric tons in the first six months of the year.
The emissions drop was the result of a switch from coal to natural gas power generation, one of the biggest drops in coal use since last year. Renewable electricity also rose with record high amounts of wind coming online and the return of hydroelectric power plants as a result of easing drought conditions, the agency said. Energy demand was also down due to warmer-than-usual weather conditions.
Emission levels are projected to fall by double that amount by the end of the year, marking a 24-year annual low, according to EIA’s short-term energy forecast.
With the government’s data in mind, the Manhattan Institute’s findings offer further relevancy since Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party platform have endorsed a plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent by 2050 by promoting renewable energy sources.
“The platform also says that ‘America must be running entirely on clean energy by mid-century,'” the report’s summary said.
The report also pointed out a New Republic op-ed written by environmentalist Bill McKibben that said the “domestic economy can be run solely on renewable energy, adding that the U.S. should mobilize to fight climate change with the fervor that the Allies used to defeat Hitler in World War II.”
The study, written by senior research fellow Robert Bryce, concluded that would be a next-to-impossible technical undertaking, resulting in land and environmental degradation while facing increased opposition in rural communities that would have to shelter the burden of hosting the new power plants.
“The U.S. would have to install about 1,900 gigawatts (1 gigawatt is equal to 1 billion watts) of wind capacity — 26 times the existing U.S. amount and four times the global wind capacity — if it plans to rely primarily on wind energy to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent,” the report found.
The rapid expansion of renewable energy to meet the emission goals also would have a devastating effect on the nation’s bat and bird species, including the national bird, the bald eagle.
Instead, natural gas and nuclear power plants must remain a substantial part of the energy mix to reduce carbon dioxide emissions within the 2050 time frame.
Bryce does not exclude renewables, but warns that they cannot be relied upon to meet the majority of the nation’s energy needs while reducing emissions.
“If large-scale cuts in carbon dioxide emissions are to be pursued, the only energy sources with relatively small footprints that can provide large volumes of low or zero-carbon energy at reasonable cost are natural gas and nuclear,” the report said.
However, natural gas is the only one of those two resources making energy inroads. Nuclear power plants are aging and many utilities are proposing to close facilities as a result of financial losses and other issues. The nuclear industry has been lobbying for assistance by the states and federal government to keep the power plants online, underscoring the need for the plants if lowering greenhouse gas emissions is a true priority.
