{"id":17248,"date":"2016-02-01T13:30:30","date_gmt":"2016-02-01T18:30:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=17248"},"modified":"2016-02-01T13:30:30","modified_gmt":"2016-02-01T18:30:30","slug":"renewables-offer-quick-fix-for-us-emissions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=17248","title":{"rendered":"Renewables offer quick fix for US emissions"},"content":{"rendered":"

Renewables offer quick fix for US emissions<\/a><\/h3>\n

\"Interstate<\/a><\/h3>\n
\n
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A wind farm sprouts alongside the Interstate 10 road near Whitewater, California
\nImage:\u00a0Chuck Coker<\/a>\u00a0via Flicker<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Scientists say interstate energy \u201chighways\u201d would allow current wind and solar technologies to deliver electricity where and when it\u2019s needed throughout the US<\/strong>.<\/strong><\/div>\n

LONDON, 31 January, 2016<\/em>\u00a0\u2013 The US could reduce greenhouse gas emissions from electricity generation by\u00a080% below 1990 levels within 15 years<\/a>\u00a0just by using renewable sources such as wind and solar energy, according to a former government research chief.<\/p>\n

The nation could do this using only technologies available right now, and by introducing a national grid system connected by\u00a0high voltage direct current<\/a>\u00a0(HVDC) that could get the power without loss to those places that needed it most, when they needed it.<\/p>\n

This utopian vision \u2013 and it has been dreamed at least twice before by\u00a0researchers in Delaware<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0in Stanford<\/a>, California \u2013 comes directly from a former chief of research in a US government agency, the\u00a0National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration<\/a>\u00a0(NOAA).<\/p>\n

Dr Alexander MacDonald<\/a>, a distinguished meteorologist, was\u00a0until recently, the head of NOAA\u2019s\u00a0Earth System Research Laboratory<\/a>\u00a0in Boulder, Colorado.<\/p>\n

Supply and demand<\/strong><\/p>\n

He and colleagues at the University of Colorado\u00a0report in Nature Climate Change<\/a>\u00a0that instead of factoring in fossil fuel backup, or yet-to-be-invented methods of storing electricity from wind and solar sources, they took a new look at the simple problems of supply and demand in a nation that tends to be sunny and warm in the south and windy in the north, but not always reliably so in either place.<\/p>\n

Their reasoning was that storage technologies could only increase the cost of renewable energy, and increase the problem of reducing carbon emissions.<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Renewables offer quick fix for US emissions A wind farm sprouts alongside the Interstate 10 road near Whitewater, California Image:\u00a0Chuck Coker\u00a0via Flicker Scientists say interstate energy \u201chighways\u201d would allow current wind and solar technologies to deliver electricity where and when it\u2019s needed throughout the US. LONDON, 31 January, 2016\u00a0\u2013 The US could reduce greenhouse gas […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,4],"tags":[3930,141,9245,674,11565,12135],"class_list":["post-17248","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-energy-2","category-environment","tag-alternative-energy","tag-climate-change","tag-climate-news-network","tag-renewable-energy","tag-tim-radford","tag-us-carbon-emissions"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17248","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=17248"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17248\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17249,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17248\/revisions\/17249"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17248"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17248"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17248"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}