Issue Position: Energy for the 21st Century

Issue Position

World wide, we have a 35 year supply of Oil, 70 year supply of Uranium, 85 year supply of Natural Gas, and 155 year supply of Coal - at current rates of consumption. You like Nuclear? We only get 5% of our energy from Nuclear - increase it to 50% and we would have only a 7 year supply. Oops. OK what do we have? We have enough solar to supply over 1,000 times current consumption for as long as we are on the planet - over a billion years. We have enough wind energy available for over 10 times current consumption. Therefore, oil, coal, natural gas, and nuclear are essentially irrelevant and inconsequential in comparison to wind and solar. However, to make wind and solar work we need two additional elements - transmission and storage - to bring energy to where it can be used, or save it for when it is needed. The most practical transmission will be - when it is ready - superconductive transmission lines, buried underground. The most practical storage is pumped-hydro, where two reservoirs are used and the water is pumped from the lower to the upper reservoir when there is more sun and wind than needed, and used to generate electricity by reversing the process.

Just to let everyone know, within 10 years most cars in the United States will be converted either to run on electricity or on Natural Gas, because of the sharply increasing fuel prices - right now it costs the equivalent of about 60 cents a gallon to run a car on electricity - and MIT has built a solar car that never needs any fuel - and can go from Boston to NYC even without any sun, using the energy stored in the on-board batteries. However, prices are set by supply and demand, and if we can convert away from gasoline, that will also bring gasoline prices to below $1/gallon - as long as no one uses it!

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