CONCLUSION BEYOND HYDROFRACKING - Hydrofracking: What Everyone Needs to Know - page 91

from hydro and wind power; Portugal got 47 percent from renewables; and Spain
got 30 percent from renewables. 3
To be sure, many of these countries don't have the carbon-based energy re-
sources that the United States does, so their citizens are accustomed to high energy
costs. Some nations, like Portugal and Denmark, created financial incentives to
drive the development of solar and wind power; others, like Germany, have strong
green movements that made it politically palatable to keep energy prices high in
order to reduce greenhouse gases.
But reducing carbon is as much about politics as it is about economics and en-
gineering. Germany, which got 20.7 percent of its power from renewables in 2011,
has a new set of incentives to push that share up to 35 percent by 2020. 4 But for
the plan to work, Germany will have to bolster its electrical grid in order to trans-
fer power generated in the windy north to the industrialized south more efficiently.
That is expensive, and it comes in the midst of a global recession. So German lead-
ers are carefully assessing public support for clean energy before committing to the
new incentives.
In the United States, by contrast, reliance on fossil fuels seems an article of
faith. Thanks to hydrofracking, cheap natural gas has made it easy to cling to that
view. But as renewables become more commonplace and prices decline, this is an
opportune moment to ask the kinds of questions raised in Europe.
“It's absolutely not true that we need natural gas, coal or oil—it's a myth,” said
Mark Z. Jacobson, an engineering professor at Stanford. 5 He and his colleagues
have designed a renewable energy blueprint, which envisions New York—which is
hardly as sun-baked as Nevada or as wind-swept as South Dakota—powered en-
tirely by solar, wind, and hydro power by 2030. The blueprint calls for an energy
mix: 10 percent from land-based wind; 40 percent from offshore wind; 20 percent
from solar plants; and 18 percent from solar panels; plus a smattering of hydroelec-
tric and geothermal power.
“You could power America with renewables from a technical and economic
standpoint,” Jacobson said. “The biggest obstacles are social and political—what
you need is the will to do it.”
A recent study by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory suggests that with
targeted investments, emissions of CO 2 from US power plants could be reduced by
as much as 80 percent by 2050. 6 In this scheme, most electricity would come from
a combination of wind and solar, with gas-fired plants providing backup when the
renewables are unable to meet peak demand (on a hot summer night, for example).