America’s Best Places For Alter­na­tive Energy — Forbes​.com

The “cubic mile of oil” – a met­ric roughly equiv­a­lent to the amount of oil con­sumed world­wide each year – is fre­quently used to explain the chal­lenge fac­ing solar, wind, geot­her­mal and bio­mass power.

So what would it take to replace the amount of energy in a cubic mile of oil? Roughly 4.2 bil­lion solar rooftops, 300 mil­lion wind tur­bines, 2,500 nuclear power plants or 200 Three Gorges Dams, accord­ing to Menlo Park, Calif., non­profit research insti­tute SRI International.

In other words, no sin­gle cat­e­gory of renew­able energy is grow­ing any­where near the speed it needs to bear the full brunt of dis­plac­ing carbon-emitting fos­sil fuels any­time soon.

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While there is no doubt that wind, solar and geot­her­mal [power] have ample energy to power the planet – the sun­light that hits Earth in a sin­gle hour con­tains enough energy to fuel the human pop­u­la­tion for a year – they will need years to mature before they reach any­thing approach­ing their poten­tial. Oil has had more than a cen­tury to mature, and its short­com­ings remain painfully obvi­ous even now.

Hope­fully this isn’t a sur­prise to most, but it looks like we’ll need a lot of hard work — cer­tainly not just a bunch of peo­ple and com­pa­nies “going green” in name — to really effect envi­ron­men­tal change. That’s a glass of cold water.