Wind and solar have a place in the energy portfolio of the United States and the world and I support their development where it makes environmental and eco­nomic sense. They are renewable and they have low emissions of CO2 from their production and installation, and none from their operation. But they do not solve the energy problem. They can contribute the most power in areas where relatively few people live, requiring a huge and expensive new network of transmission lines to be built to get the electricity to markets. They are expensive and require large subsidies for them to be competitive. They have environmental consequences because of their very large footprints, which restrict them in many places. They are not very long lived as power sources, with effective lifetimes of around 20 years. And they do not reduce the need for fossil fuels to provide the baseload electricity that electrical grids depend on because of their intermittent nature. At best, they can provide about one-fifth of the electricity needs of the country, varying some­what by location, even with a massive investment and hundreds of thousands of wind turbines all over the country.

So if wind and solar are not able to wean us from our addiction to coal and nat­ural gas for electricity production, is there any environmentally friendly resource that can? That is the subject of the next chapter and the main topic of this book.