"The Google engineers have studied it a lot harder than you have."
Yup. That's why Google is buying power from the technology of others with the money they were using to try and develop something new.
Those calculations cast our work at Google’s RE<C program in a sobering new light. Suppose for a moment that it had achieved the most extraordinary success possible, and that we had found cheap renewable energy technologies that could gradually replace all the world’s coal plants—a situation roughly equivalent to the energy innovation study’s best-case scenario. Even if that dream had come to pass, it still wouldn’t have solved climate change.
spectrum.ieee.org
I don't disagree with that. If we could wave a wand and create their dream tomorrow, we'll continue heating for about 40 years. We won't "solve" or "reverse" climate change until we either figure out how to pull carbon out of the air, or come up with a viable geoengineering method.
rtcc.org
What they really think, in their own words, is that they didn't go far enuf.
"We’re glad that Google tried something ambitious with the RE<C initiative, and we’re proud to have been part of the project. But with 20/20 hindsight, we see that it didn’t go far enough, and that truly disruptive technologies are what our planet needs. To reverse climate change, our society requires something beyond today’s renewable energy technologies. Fortunately, new discoveries are changing the way we think about physics, nanotechnology, and biology all the time. While humanity is currently on a trajectory to severe climate change, this disaster can be averted if researchers aim for goals that seem nearly impossible."
=
The company announced that Google would help promising technologies mature by investing in start-ups and conducting its own internal R&D. Its aspirational goal: to produce a gigawatt of renewable power more cheaply than a coal-fired plant could, and to achieve this in years, not decades."
spectrum.ieee.org
Solar power cheaper than natural gas, killer coal, (your old boss and current existential threat), and nuclear power in Texas!
treehugger.com
Wind Power is Actually Cheaper Than Coal, Nuclear and GasOnce you consider the downstream consequences, coal becomes a lot more expensive
Read more: smithsonianmag.com |
