3 ms·

The Pacific Northwest is near-desert just east of the Cascades, and transmission lines could carry power to Seattle, Portland, and Vancouver BC from the dry sun

• jldugger 4y ago
  The cascade rain shadow is helpful but the PNW is far enough north that you're not getting direct sunlight. And unfortunately the Pacific Northwest is also relatively low population. 4 million for the Seattle metro, 2.5 in Portland. Even if you built out enough solar for Washington and Oregon, we're only 3 percent of the US population. Plus these states have pretty good hydro already. While there are arguments about the ecological impacts of hydro, I think reasonable people will agree that those are now sunk costs and there's not much reason to retire them early. There seems to be a better argument in the southwest, where we have less agriculture and the hydro power Lake Mead provides is now questionable. which is why there are already massive farms there. Though, without that water I'm not sure who would want to live in Vegas at all. The best place for solar seems to be California rooftops. Lots of population, far enough south to have closer to optimal solar incidence, and arid climate that wont interfere too much. But all of this means that you shouldn't expect a unified, cohesive federal energy plan. I don't, at least. Instead we should expect different geographies to find different niches, and a much more diversified plan spread across many more forms: wind, solar, hydro, fission, fusion, geothermal, etc. Plus anyone complaining the US underinvests in R&D has to contend with the fact that this publication came from MIT, and was funded in part by the NSF.