It's all about priorities...

Yesterday, Al Gore said that we should get 100% of our electricity from carbon-free sources in 10 years.

There are a number of problems with this. My initial reaction was that it was just stupid. We’re not talking about changing a bunch of frickin’ light bulbs here, Al. In the grand scheme of things we can accomplish if we put our minds to it, transitioning to zero carbon electricity ranks just above transitioning to breathing nitrogen. My second reaction was that it was just unhelpful. Al Gore has built a tremendous amount of credibility on this issue (see Prize, Nobel Peace), and if we manage to improbably escape utter ruin, we will owe him big time. What we don’t need is him marginalizing himself by saying we should do something that everyone knows we won’t do.

But then something interesting happened.

There are a lot of people who have put a lot of money into some pretty expensive doo-dads that generate electricity from fossil fuels, and blowing them up in 10 years is most certainly a cost of the Gore plan, and a good starting place for thinking about its overall costs. I thought I’d use an envelope for about all the use it has left in the internet age and explore this question for the Pickle: How much would it cost to shut down all US coal and natural gas power plants on January 1, 2019? Another way to think about it: If, right now, we paid anyone who owns a coal or natural gas power plant a fair price to shut it down forever on January 1, 2019, what kind of price tag would we be looking at?

Using every square inch of our business-size envelope, we throw down estimates on a few questions:
• How much electric generating capacity is there in the US? About 1000 gigawatts (both G’s are soft, please)
• How much of that is coal or natural gas? Maybe 70%...
• How much does it cost to build a 1 GW coal plant? About a cool billion.
• How long does it last, and how old are our plants on average? 50 years and 20 years seems about right.

Well, if you take all that, and you do a little finance hoo-ha, and you figure that it’s fair for the American taxpayers slash electricity-users to buy out whatever value there is left in those suckers as of 1/1/2019, you get a number in the neighborhood of about $80 billion. That is, it would take about $80B in today’s dollars to buy out all existing fossil generation effective 1/1/2019.

Now that’s a whole lot of money, to be sure. But now seems like a fair moment to point out that we’ve spent almost a TRILLION dollars on a war that has no purpose, started at the urging of the Vice President, who was paid a severance package of something like $50 million by Halliburton on his way to the White House, and a good part of that TRILLION seems to have been paid to former Halliburton subsidiary KRB so they could build temporary housing that apparently takes carbon-based electricity and electrocutes American servicemen and women with it. Perfect.

Update: Halliburton gifted the future VP $20M on his way out the door, not $50M. I owe the man an apology for impugning his character.