8. Cooking with Renewables
How to replace fossil fuels with renewables is the source of much discussion and political strife, particularly when it comes to the NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) dynamic. How much landscape will need to be consumed to satisfy our appetite for energy with solar, wind, biomass, and hydro? How many forests ground up for biomass? How much cropland devoured for ethanol? How many eyes will have to feast on solar farms and how many mountain tops will we festoon with twirling turbine blades? Maybe this scary menu can be more easily digested with a bit of quantitative analysis. The space requirements for these options can be calculated accurately enough to give us an idea of the kinds of decisions involved in shifting from our fast food energy diet to the more healthful renewables. The USA consumes about 28 trillion kilowatt-hours (kWh) of energy per year. That includes all the uses (housing, electricity, transportation, commerce, manufacturing, imported energy, etc.). About 81% of curren