Only Science Can Save Us Now
RENEWABLE ENERGY
Over the past 40 years, the price of delivering one watt of solar power has dropped from about $100 to $1. This makes solar one of the most promising success stories of carbon-free power, and a technology that needs relatively little government research help to keep improving. But although the cost is now close to that of the most efficient natural gas power plants, close isn’t always good enough for investors. The price of large-scale solar needs to keep dropping if it’s going to have a serious global impact, and money for both R&D and the massive infrastructure build-outs that the Green New Deal framework imagines can make that happen.
The same is true of wind turbine technology, which has benefited from steady improvements in blade design, tower height, and computer control. Wind farms today supply electricity for about half the price they did a decade ago, and offshore wind is another promising area for expansion. Denmark, for example, has lots of shallow offshore regions that are ideal for wind turbines and produces nearly half of its electricity via wind. But not every country has Denmark’s advantages. It’s difficult to anchor wind towers in water more than 200 feet deep, and creative new ways to build turbines in deeper waters are good targets for R&D spending.
Solar and wind get most of the attention among renewable energy sources, but there are other promising technologies. For example, ground source heat pumps take advantage of the fact that temperatures just a few feet below ground tend to stay the same throughout the year. In
