A Plan for Powering the World for all Purposes With Wind, Water, and Sunlight

This talk discusses a plan to power 100% of the world’s energy for all purposes with wind, water, and sunlight (WWS) within the next 20-40 years. The talk starts by reviewing and ranking major proposed energy-related solutions to global warming, air pollution mortality, and energy security while considering other impacts of the proposed solutions, such as on water supply, land use, resource availability, reliability, wildlife, and catastrophic risk. It then evaluates a scenario for powering the world on the energy options determined to be the best while also considering materials, transmission infrastructure, costs, and politics. The study concludes that powering the world with wind, water, and solar technologies, which are found to be the best when all factors are considered, is technically feasible but politically challenging.

Relevant papers can be found here.

Mark Z. Jacobson Dept. of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Stanford University. Jacobson is Director of the Atmosphere/Energy Program and Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Stanford University. He is also a Courtesy Professor of Energy Resources Engineering, Senior Fellow of the Woods Institute for the Environment, and Senior Fellow of the Precourt Institute.

He currently sits on the United States Department of Energy Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE) Federal Advisory Committee (ERAC) to the U.S. Secretary of Energy. He received a B.S. in Civil Engineering with distinction, an A.B. in Economics with distinction, and an M.S. in Environmental Engineering from Stanford University, in 1988. He also received an M.S. in Atmospheric Sciences in 1991 and a PhD in Atmospheric Sciences in 1994 from UCLA and has been on the faculty at Stanford since 1994.

His work relates to the development and application of numerical models to understand better the effects of energy systems and vehicles on climate and air pollution and the analysis of renewable energy resources. He has published two textbooks and 110 peer-reviewed scientific journal articles. His 2000 finding that black carbon, the main component of soot particles, may be the second-leading cause of global warming after carbon dioxide provided the original scientific basis for five recent U.S. proposed laws on black carbon. He received the 2005 American Meteorological Society Henry G. Houghton Award for "significant contributions to modeling aerosol chemistry and to understanding the role of soot and other carbon particles on climate.” In 2005, his group developed the first wind map of the world from data alone at the height of modern turbines. He recently co-authored a cover article in Scientific American with Dr. Mark DeLucchi of U.C. Davis and two more detailed analyses in Energy Policy on how to power the world with renewable energy.