The Renewable Energy Challenge

Thursday, September 10, 2015, 10am to 11:30 in the Meeting Room (behind the fireplace)

To meet the EPA carbon targets of 32% by 2030, we are going to need a lot more than energy efficiency. The few new nuclear plants will just compensate for the closing of older nuclear plants. We will need to rely on renewable energy, mostly wind and solar, to replace the energy from closing coal plant. Obama is betting that renewable energy is up to the task. But optimists and pessimists paint very different pictures, especially for the further carbon reductions that we need after 2030. Some say renewables can take us to 100%, other say that we will need advance nuclear plants to provide the baseload electricity missing from renewables. We will take a closer look at the challenges to renewable energy to get a fair assessment. We will use material from the following videos:

• Al Gore on the reason of hope from renewables
• Thorium Energy to fight Climate Change by Gordon McDowell
• Obama at the Clean Energy Summit in Las Vegas
• CASEnergy & IEER Debate Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 & 7
• Amory Lovins - A 40-year plan for energy (link corrected 9/10/15) 
• Jonathan Lesser on Intermittent Power
• Bill Gates Talks About the Future of Energy (link corrected 9/10/15)

Note that many of these videos have information about nuclear energy, but we will will only look at the parts that pertain to renewable energy.

---------------------------------- Updated 9/10/15 ------------------------------------

Here are the links to the video that were shown at the meeting, but were not listed above:

• Chuck Grassley The Wind Energy Production Tax Credit
• Lamar Alexander Let Wind Power Stand on Its Own in the Marketplace
• Arizona PBS Expediting Electrical Transmission Lines