100 percent renewable energy. What year will the U.S get there? Your prediction.?

Question

my guess 2025

Answer 1

Never.

Answer 2

Energy is ALWAYS degraded.  Best we hope for is a renewable resource to create energy more and more efficiently.

Answer 3

When all else runs out.  Nuclear isn't renewable- we only have a few hundred years supply of Uranium, at best.    After that we might begin splitting matter into energy.   One pencil contains more energy than a trainload of coal, IF we can figure how to get it out.   E=MC2 works the other way too.     If we can't figure that out, a few hundred years.

Answer 4

We will use only renewable energy when we have exhausted all non-renewable energy. But when will we get to 99.5%?

I doubt this will come within the current century.  We do not know where our next large finds of nuclear fuel will come from, but in general heavier elements are likely to be found deep in the earth. We have not seriously looked for all world nuclear fuel. We have looked for fuel close to the surface, not knowing how to search deeper.

If we conserve fossil fuels we will still be using the last dregs 100 years from now.

Answer 5

we will never reach 100 percent renewable energy, but we also don't need to,right now our electric power comes from.

nuclear, 19.8 percent.

hydro generation, 6.5 percent

wind and solar,  3.3percent.

and 50.4 percent comes from coal with the rest coming from petroleum and natural gas. 4.4 percent.

even with the technology that we have now, ethanol requires a 15 percent petroleum additive.

But I believe that there will always be those diehards that insist on burning gasoline,

but the more that we reduce our dependencies the lower the price of fossil will go.

Answer 6

The rest of the world is already there, it is the US that keeps dragging its feet kicking a screaming that it want to be stuck in the 70's!

Answer 7

I hope the era of 100 percent renewlable energy will coming soon, renewlable energy emit 0 CO2 and zero air pollution.  so the cleaner world come.

I would guess it is 2030 would reach 90%.

  

Answer 8

Not 2025, if the US began a crash program to build as many nuclear power plants as possible the electricity grid could be pretty far along towards being carbon neutral by then and that's using something that actually can handle supplying a country with electricity (look at France and where they get their electricity from).

That's just referring to electricity not all energy (although some things could be converted to electric, especially public transport).

The problem that ultimately prevents renewables, no matter how good we manage to make them from running a country is that they either rely on geology that doesn't exist everywhere (e.g. hydro and geothermal) and so are only solutions for a few places or they rely on natural forces that aren't reliable (e.g. wind and solar) which means that they need some other form of power to back them up on still nights (usually natural gas) and it doesn't matter how efficient or cheap your solar cells are or how close a wind turbine gets to extracting all of the energy of the wind because you are ultimately dependant upon that backup power.

Some have suggested building a massive overcapacity of 'renewables' and then using the excess power produced to charge an energy storage system for when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing.  The biggest problem with that suggestion is that right now we don't have a decent way of storing that energy on the scale that we need (and we can't count on developing it either).

The reliability problem of solar energy can be solved by moving the power plant into space, far enough from the Earth as to not be eclipsed, geostationary orbit would do just fine, and then being the power down to earth with Microwaves.  That would be able to supply all electricity needs for all but those really far from the equator but it requires space infrastructure we don't have.

The term 'renewable' though really needs to exit the language, it doesn't provide a useful distinction and is mainly arbitrary (given that we've got enough nuclear materials to last billions of years with breeder reactors the argument could be made that nuclear should be considered as renewable (and it is renewed, by supernova)), especially considering that all the renewables are nuclear power anyway, just not as direct (the sun (which also powers the wind and keeps water liquid enough for hydro power to work) is a nuclear reactor and geothermal comes from radioactive decay).