Wow. I’m swooning over the prospects put forth in an article I just read. Jane’s Addiction’s song “Jane Says” came immediately to mind while reading it because oil is after all the new heroin.

The article, appearing in the January ‘08 Scientific American, is titled A Solar Grand Plan, by Ken Zweibel, James Mason and Vasilis Fthenakis. It’s a very sober, and hope-evincing, look at what it will take to get the Fossil Fuel Monkey off our national back and get us on the road to sensible, sustainable energy self-sufficiency by 2050. No methadone-esque ethanol plan this, these guys propose a warm-turkey weaning by implementing a solar grid. Sounds pretty damn good to me.

Here are the article’s highlights, as presented by the authors:

KEY CONCEPTS:

â– A massive switch from
coal, oil, natural gas and
nuclear power plants to solar
power plants could supply
69 percent of the U.S.’s
electricity and 35 percent
of its total energy by 2050.

â– A vast area of photovoltaic
cells would have to be
erected in the Southwest.
Excess daytime energy
would be stored as compressed
air in underground
caverns to be tapped during
nighttime hours.

â– Large solar concentrator
power plants would be
built as well.

â– A new direct-current power
transmission backbone
would deliver solar electricity
across the country.

â– But $420 billion in subsidies
from 2011 to 2050
would be required to fund
the infrastructure and
make it cost-competitive.
—The Editors

I’m good with all of that. $420 Billion over the next 40 years?? Even if they’re wrong by half, $800 Billion is peanuts in the larger scheme of things. We could fund that in 10 years if we chose to. The payoff would be immediate and the benefits almost inconceivably luscious economically, politically and environmentally.

Consider what we spend on the damn Irag/Afghanistan boondoggle…nearly $193 Billion is going to be spent in 2008 alone. Since the war began in 2001, we’ve disgorged in excess of $570 Billion. And for what? Despite being rabid neo-cons, I don’t think the Bush babies did a proper RoI analysis on this little muscle-flexing jaunt. Hmmm, $570 Billion + Total loss of all international credibility + increased global terrorism VS. a possibly steady supply of oil at $100+ a barrel until extremists blow up the infrastructure. For that kind of dough we could be well on the way to funding and implementing a new solar energy industry and national infrastructure and actually making the Middle East and OPEC fairly beside the point.

I’m sure there are flaws and miscalculations in the proposed Solar Grand Plan, though I don’t see them. It’s still a well-thought feasibility study of what it would take to become energy independent using the free, abundant energy of the sun.

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