Thank you. The Mark Z. Jacobson articles are pretty convincing, and only maybe a hair optimistic on the technological development side. That really had what I was looking for, and not expecting, which was the quantitative discussion that was missing in all of those previous articles. I hadn’t really thought as far as radically decentralizing the power infrastructure, either. It’s pretty inspiring that it actually seems, from that analysis, like it might be physically possible to pull off. That, of course would require us to pull our collective heads out of our asses almost immediately, which, unfortunately, strikes me as a far more unreasonably optimistic assumption than the assumptions about technological development. At least, we might have time to make the jump after things get bad enough to drive us to it, but before they get too bad for us to maintain the industrial infrastructure necessary to pull it off.
The 30TW in 20 years figure is around, and I can’t find the original source I read it in, but this: http://www.eia.gov/forecasts/ieo/world.cfm
with a couple unit conversions, gives 27TW. Based on wikipedia, I should have used 40% instead of 50 for the base load, leaving us with a figure of 10TW instead of 15, but when we’re making predictions about social and technological changes that far in the future 1/3 off is well within the margin of error. That said, I had not thought far enough outside the box to deal with that by decentralizing the infrastructure.
