Al Gore’s 5 Steps To Deliver 100% Clean Power in a Decade
While Al Gore was rallying the Web 2.0 troops to fight climate change on Friday, this weekend the former V-P and Nobel Peace laureate now turned green VC set his sights on the New York Times op-ed page, where he laid out five steps needed to achieve his ambitious (if not unrealistic) U.S. clean energy plan.
Gore is calling for 100 percent of U.S. electricity to be from renewable power within 10 years. How on earth is that achievable? Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt has a similar plan, but closer to a 20-year time frame. Gore says the answer is federal incentives and Obama needs to help ASAP, though he gives very few details on what each step would actually entail. What do you think?:
1). Large-scale federal incentives for constructing solar thermal, wind and advanced geothermal power plants. No word from Gore on how big those incentives should be.
2). Spend $400 billion over 10 years to build out a national smart grid that can connect renewable energy in remote locations to the cities where people will use it.
3). Help out not only Detroit but the struggling electric vehicle startups, and build a national fleet of plug-in hybrids that can help with storing energy for the grid.
4). Implement a national green retrofit plan for buildings, which can be combined with the congressional mortgage proposal.
5). Put a price on carbon and lead the way beyond Kyoto in the international community.
Yeah, let’s start with a giant bailout for the automakers that screwed us for years with giant SUVs, effectively putting us square in the pockets of unfriendly nations. I mean didn’t these companies get a bailout already when we allowed them to slip out of CAFE standards by classifying SUVs as “light trucks?”
Dear Alex,
In spirit you rage is well directed. But
If you had read AL GORE’s OPED — He specifically called attention to non-big 3 automakers that are designing automobiles of the future — The Tesla’s o f the world. you can learn more at
http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/funding-roundup-tesla-gets-40m–5105.html
we can’t escape the fact that automobiles are our largest manufacturing sector, nor can we escape the fact that we need Wall Street to finance new innovation — but we can begin to look at biz models and hard assets in a harsher light.
Dear Evan,
I’ll read Al Gore when he writes half as well as Earth2Tech.
Tesla isn’t the alternative to the “Big Three.” Face facts: Tesla is nothing more than Elon Musk’s science project, financed as a vanity project.
The alternative to the “Big Three” is a redesigned, streamlined “Big Three” building cars without the benefit of unionized labor. Let the market make these companies better and more competitive.
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I agree with Alex that the Big Three Motor company would do well to include their workforce in the decision making process because their jobs depend on getting it right. They are consumers as well so should instinctively know what the market expects.
What does the plan think about nuclear? He doesn’t seem to say. You can’t simply replace steady energy production from coal plants with intermittent renewables. This is fantasy talk. What are you going to use to store power and feed it back to the grid? (And don’t say PHEVs, cuz that would be way too expensive.)
[...] has outlined a five-step plan to achieve his goal of generating 100 percent of the U.S.’s electricity from renewable [...]
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[...] in fact the right investments coming out of the stimulus can ostensibly help both goals. Everyone from Al Gore to Thomas Friedman to Van Jones have been calling for investment in clean energy sectors to produce [...]