A 100 Percent Renewable Energy-Based Electric Grid?

A recent estimate for the cost of a 100 percent renewable elecric grid by 2030 is $4.5 trillion according to a Wood Mackenzie analysis recently cited in Greentech Media.

Some will react with sticker shock.

But I suspect that is because they do not put the figure into its proper context. Large a sum as $4.5 trillion is, it is equal to about 2 percent of GDP or so over a decade, even assuming the stagnation seen this past decade continues--hardly a devastating price tag for such an essential piece of infrastructure. (Given the strong probability of technological improvement amid such an effort, and the economic stimulus it may generate, it might come to rather less.) And in any event, much or all of this money would have been spent anyway. (Infrastructure costs, and America's grid, rebuilding which is going to be a multi-trillion dollar job regardless of the specific technologies used, has been long neglected.)

In fact, it may be just half what we will spend on fossil fuel subsidies over the same time frame, if current practice continues (this being as much as $1 trillion a year). It is considerably less than the estimates of what the current round of wars (readable as at least to some extent an oil subsidy) has cost us (some $6 trillion to date).

The project (a modest thing next to all the World War II talk to which some tend when discussing the issue) is unavoidable--and as these other uses to which even greater sums have been and still are being put show (along with a good deal of other analysis), the money is there--making the course the obvious one of getting seriously to work on it, the sooner the better.