My general is top three priorities: Deploy, Deploy, Deploy. Maybe fourth is ‘develop’ things in the lab for deploying tomorrow and fifth would the research for the day after tomorrow.

Out of the $1T, therefore, might spend some $10Bs on R&D — with perhaps 80-90% going to deployment.

A key point: economies of scale and the virtuous cycle. Putting resources into deployment will contribute greatly to lowering the costs/easing of tomorrow’s deployments. Much innovation actually occurs only through the real world lessons/experience.

And, many of the key innovations (such as rooftop leasing for solar …) are business innovations that only bubble up as deployment faces challenges.

http://www.renewwisconsin.org/wind/Toolbox-Homeowners/An%20Open%20Letter%20to%20Inventors.pdf

http://www.wind-works.org/cms/index.php? id=398&tx_ttnews[tt_news]=137&cHash=bce4d8017b9a204d47f82fec725f72d7

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/27/nyregion/turbines-pop-up-on-new-york-roofs-along-with-questions-of-efficiency.html?ref=todayspaper&_r=0

Thanks for the reply. While deferring to your knowledge of the specifics of American power industry policy, I would still claim that small and large-scale comparisons can be meaningful, perhaps to a greater extent for a technology like wind, where size is essential, than for solar, but there are solar technologies that need to be large scale. And I think it’s too often overlooked in exchanges like this that even the best technologies will fail to perform if they’re not properly sited. I would also claim –and I don’t think we would disagree here – that chosen energy solutions generally should be cost-effective and shouldn’t make social inequality worse. The production price of Danish power is among the cheapest in Europe, but our electricity bill is high because 59% of it is taxes that help finance our social welfare system. The more privatized our system becomes, the fewer there are to pay for a system that benefits all. In the U.S. I would fear that the combination of rooftop solar and storage would benefit those who can afford it while transferring grid and other costs to those who can’t. (At the same time I accept that this would weaken the power of the utilities, but I don’t think that would be the only effect.)

A Multi-Pronged Approach to Building Efficiency
(Sorry there’s not much here about residential.)

A key problem in the US is that much of this is done at the state level. Energy interests have fifty independent targets in their efforts to develop anti-regulation or anti-clean energy legislation or policy. Imagine the European Union with fifty countries divided into two very different political camps and with the legal basis for NOT cooperating stronger than the legal requirement to cooperate.

I question the large vs. small scale differences. This is in a way an implied point of what I’m saying in this post. PV panels on buildings, as they work now, pay for themselves in short order. This can’t be argued against. they produce clean energy. Using this approach changes the efficiency of other approaches.

That rooftop solar makes sense does not obviate other strategies that make sense, and visa versa.

The problem with comparing strategies is that all of the comparisons are provisional, not proven, and the effect a given analysis will have is not based on the qualities of the analysis, but on the sociopolitical positioning of the analysis. And, of course, many analyses are biased. On to of this, there is a cultural phenomenon that emerges where individuals or organizations fall into the trap of thinking their favorite solution is the best and therefore all others are not merely “not as good” but rather “bad, dont’ do them.”

For these reasons I reject nearly all such comparative analyses, no matter how scientific they may seem, during the low hanging fruit phase. After we have picked a lot of the low hanging fruit we will need to start comparing solutions to see which way to go. But by definition, low hanging fruit solutions do not require comparison because they are all good, all pay for themselves, all easy to do. So just do them.

On the biggest bang for the buck comment, exactly. Also, the truth is, that our ultimate goal is not to make cheap or efficient energy. It is to make energy that does not use fossil fuel. Sometimes that is going to be expensive.

(For det første er der bedre samfunds- økonomi i en energiproduktion i større skala end i fx individuelle solcelleanlæg og lokale lagringsløsninger.
Giv Energien Videre
Nye energipolitiske visioner og udfordringer 2020-2030 p.20)

It also ignores that low hanging fruits also are a matter of available resources. Rooftop solar has certain obvious advantages. One of them is that it doesn’t necessitate the use of additional land. But in some locations, other kinds of solar generation make more sense. And in some locations, wind is preferable. It should also be taken into account that wind and solar aren’t just different technologies, they’re complementary. And a grid that can tie different technologies and geographical areas together reduces the need for storage and baseload capacity.

Finally, while I agree that we need to reduce emissions as quickly as possible, we also need to avoid an as cheap as possible or biggest bang for the buck strategy. Any strategy should also include the implementation of expensive, immature technologies that could show promise if they were scaled up.

So allocating funds for retrofits seems like a good idea as you get the effects you want right now.

I’d add that even replacing some roofs with not just solar panels but anything other than that tin stuff they use all over the South would be better, and putting in double-pane windows everywhere. Whenever I travel to Florida I look at the houses and think there can’t be a more inefficient way to cool buildings — everywhere I went it was hot inside unless the A/C was going, and I kept thinking that the stone architecture I see in Spain and Morocco would be a much better solution.

Also: office buildings. Those glass towers are basically greenhouses. (See: Hancock Tower in Boston). I could think of a lot of ways to cut the energy use of those structures with a trillion dollars — even planting grass on the roofs of a lot of Manhattan buildings would probably go a long way.

As to longer term projects, I might allocate a few billion here and there for good public transit. Many cities once had such transit systems — Rochester, NY for instance had a subway. I see no reason why you couldn’t map out some expansions in say, Chicago, LA (replacing the old rail system they had) and in cities like Dallas, outer New Orleans, Memphis, Indianapolis, Salt Lake City — I’m sure we could all think of others that could use that kind of thing. The key bit would be to treat these things as systems. For instance, you’d want passenger rail links between Chicago, Indianapolis, and then connecting Indianapolis to St. Louis directly. And completing (or rather restoring) the line from Bakersfield to LA. Stuff like that. Every other developed country I have been to — and even some developing nations like Morocco — has rail links from airports that are direct to where you want to go.

Even in the Northeast, building real inter-suburban rail in New Jersey would take the load off of several highways and cut maintenance costs; on top of that you’d lose the carbon emissions (I am thinking of a line connecting stations along the I-287/ 280 corridor).

All these would be decade-scale projects, but I mention them because they are just that — the kinds of things you could do in 10 years or less.

R&D is great, but the problem is it’s a bit too much of a gamble (though it should certainly be done). That is, you have a gap between invention and adoption that can last a long time. So even if someone successfully builds a fusion reactor tomorrow, it will be decades at least before they are everywhere. Remember that we still use coal and that technology is several centuries old, 100 years if you count just coal fired electricity.