1.21 Gigawatts??? How about that much each day for the next 25 years?

In Back to the Future, the classic Michael J. Fox film, the inventive Doc exclaims, “1.21 Gigawatts!!!!!” in horror when he realizes how much energy he needs to send his DeLorean back to the future. It turns out that we need to bring that much new clean energy online every day for the next 25 years.

1.21 Gigawatts???? Impossible???

Let’s say you want to turn on a 100 Watt bulb in your house. (You’ve probably already changed your light bulbs to compact fluorescent or LEDs so it might be a lot less than 100 watts, but go with me.) To light that light bulb, you’re most likely getting energy from coal, gas, nuclear, hydro, or wind. In the US, a bit less than half of the electricity comes from coal-fired power plants. Coal produces wonderfully inexpensive power, but it also emits the highest amount of CO2 of any of the major energy sources used in the US.

Recent studies and calculations have figured out that we need to produce about 13,000 Gigawatts of new zero-carbon energy in the next 25 years in order to prevent a climate change catastrophe.

Wow.

That’s a gigawatt of new clean energy a day, every day, for the next 25 years and more. And that’s the minimum we’ll need. Scientists, led by NASA’s James Hansen have told us that we need to ensure that the level of carbon in the atmosphere stays below 450 PPM. Author Bill McKibben has spearheaded a campaign to bring our carbon level back to 350 PPM, conveniently named 350.0rg.

Back to our lightbulbs. The big question is how we produce the energy we need and still keep the level of carbon in the atmosphere below 450 PPM. Creating 13,000 gigawatts of new clean energy in the next 25 years is no small feat. A gigawatt is 1,000 megawatts of energy, or a billion watts. A large coal fired power plant or nuclear power plant produces about a GW of energy. A gigawatt is enough to power 1,000,000 100 watt bulbs.

So how do we get there? We could do it by building a new nuclear power plant every day for the next twenty-five years. That seems unlikely. According to Steve Kirsch, we could it with wind power, by “installing more than 1,500 large (2 MW, with enormous 100m diameter blades) wind turbines every day for 30 years.” And doing it with solar power alone is even more difficult.

The answer will lie in bringing all of these technologies together, along with a host of new technologies and transmission infrastructure to power our lives. Efficiency is always the first investment. In the 13,000 GW model, there’s a 50% energy efficiency calculation built in. We’re also going to have to find ways to increase our quality of life while using less electricity. I bike or walk to work whenever I can; it saves energy, but it’s also more fun.

The Breakthrough Institute, in Oakland, California, is calling for a $50 Billion a year US Federal investment in making clean energy cheap and available. The reality of the challenge we face in changing over our energy supply requires that we think that big. Getting to 13,000 new gigawatts of clean energy in the next generation will be no small task.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Here’s more from the formidible Adam Werbach, former President of the Sierra Club, currently Global CEO of Saatchi and Saatchi S and author of Strategy for Sustainability, as a frequent guest blogger here at Care2. He has a lot to say and we’re happy to have him. For more from Adam you can join him on Facebook and follow him on twitter.”

His twitter page is

Read more: animal welfare, global warming

Studio stock photo
by Adam Werbach

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Disclaimer: The views expressed above are solely those of the author and may not reflect those of
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Byron W.

10:11AM PDT on Sep 20, 2009

Don't worry about it Earth will still be hear long after mankind has gone

send a green star

megan m.

2:43PM PDT on Sep 4, 2009

I second Randy.
We need to first reduce before we produce. Consumption is the main problem here.

Randy P.

5:54PM PDT on Aug 31, 2009

Seems like reducing consumption has got to be an even bigger part of the equation. It is hard to envision adding all that clean energy production (especially without spending even more than that to produce the turbines, etc..!!)

Renee L.

9:01AM PDT on Aug 30, 2009

It is all a lie!! Wake up before it is too late. WE are heading into another ice age!! The CFU bulbs are toxic and will kill us eventually with mercury poisoning. The General Public is being very naive and quite frankly, you are SHEEPLE!! WISE UP! Al Gore is a fear monger who stands to make billions off of you the tax payer if this horrible cap and trade goes through. Stop it now!! You are loosing your freedoms! How could you not care? How could you defame the memory of those who have fought and died for you to keep your freedoms and rights? If you hate the United States, sell everything and MOVE!! There are plenty of other countries out there!! Remember one big thing, if it wasn't for the United States of America, there would be No England, No France, No Poland, No Spain!! Read your history and learn something before it is too late!! This all stinks of something horribly bad.

8:57AM PDT on Aug 30, 2009

GLOBAL WARMING IS A HOAX AND HUGE LIE!!

3. Polar Bears Refute Al Gore's Warnings

The polar bears that climate change alarmists claim are endangered by global warming are doing just fine, thank you.

Al Gore and other alarmists have warned that higher global temperatures due to greenhouse gases could lead to the melting of the polar ice caps. That would threaten the polar bears' efforts to find food and survive.

But due to colder than usual subarctic weather this year, healthier polar bears are being spotted along the Hudson Bay coast in Canada, according to a release from PR Newswire.

"The late break-up of ice this year on Hudson Bay means the polar bears, which rely on sea ice to live, have been given more time during spring and summer to hunt and eat seals, and this has allowed them to gain important weight to live off of until freeze-up," said Robert Buchanan, president of Polar Bears International.

Daryll Hedman, a regional wildlife manager for Manitoba Conservation in Canada, said polar bears remain on the Hudson Bay ice for as long as possible so they can feed, and this year the ice was so thick that they stayed there for an extra two weeks, resulting in fatter, healthier bears this summer.

On a related front: With many Democrats still clamoring for cap-and-trade legislation to curb carbon emissions in response to global warming fears, the outgoing leader of the environmental group Greenpeace has retracted an assertion about Arctic ice.

In a

Sheila S.

6:23AM PDT on Aug 27, 2009

Kevin, you are so right about the kids being great "cops"! My friend, who happens to be a substitute teacher, and I were just talking about that! How, if you do something different that what their regular teacher did, the class says "NOOOOO! We do this next!" We are creatures of habit and scheduling (which some adults tend to lose after school until they have kids, like I did! LOL!) But they will shamelessly tell you if you do something wrong, and make you feel the most guilty about being a litterbug or anything else of that sort! To be told what to do by a child is so demeaning, but what better way to teach an adult than to be reminded by a kid... Granted, a lot of those adults wouldn't listen, because "Really, what would a kid know anyway?" is their attitude. We lose a lot of that child wonder, the pureness, the love of being alive.

If enough people take to heart the damage we are doing, and if a change would come that could be available with a more than fair price tag, it IS possible! We could save our planet... it's so sad, though, that we could have had a better jump on things if we had actually paid attention when the first activists for the Earth said something... oh well, they say hindsight is 20/20, but that doesn't mean we should just give up.

Sheila
*Reduce and Re-use Before Recycle* :)

Dan R.

7:43PM PDT on Aug 26, 2009

Yes, constantly increasing population on a finite planet is the real problem. We're not likely to do anything serious about it without some 'help' from Gaia, and we're not going to like the help we get. Better to start by creating a meaningful global government. ( I once proposed it be called Global Aid and Information Agency - GAIA - as the main functions of good government.) It would replace tax deductions for kids with birth taxes, proportional to square of the number of kids per mother. It would lump all human welfare under one system. It wouldn't give money for doing nothing, but would give "necessities", furnish and encourage contraception by all methods, pay for getting an education and more, to anyone who would stoop to accept them, with a variable copay for some services and maybe some people. It would also include and encourage use of "Right to Die" laws and maybe find new excuses for executions. These might include intentionally doing any net harm to Gaia, such as maybe reducing social trust by stealing just for your own pleasures, or habitual wastefulness or littering.

Or maybe you'd rather start taking action on your own?

Scott M.

10:38AM PDT on Aug 26, 2009

Don't worry its not getting warmer, and CO2 helps plants grow. Better to spend time on things that help, EG cleaning litter especially plastics which dont break down. Filling swiss bank accounts through cap&trade only help the elite.

Julieta S.

9:40AM PDT on Aug 26, 2009

I don't think there should be any other answear but "we have to"

Brian G.

9:05AM PDT on Aug 26, 2009

No one is looking at the real problem, that except China. the solution is to reduce the population of the world.
If the population continues to increase so will the need for even more power, thereby creating yet more CO2 in the process.