“If implemented, this plan will eliminate air pollution mortality and global warming emissions from California, stabilize prices and create jobs – there is little downside.”
-Stanford Prof. Mark Z. Jacobson, the study’s lead author

http://news.stanford.edu/news/2014/july … 72414.html

Hi Mr. Hodin. When reading this article, I found out how little I knew about California’s energy sources. To me, this is especially embarrassing because I am a resident of California. I think Mark Jacobson’s plan to switch California’s energy sources from nonrenewable to renewable would be very beneficial to the California government and the people of California. However, as we are learning in my class all scientific models are flawed in some way. I do not doubt Mr. Jacobsen’s knowledge, but do you know if any of his plans have been implemented? If so, was the plan a success? He has created the NY Plan and the 50 States plan, but so far, it seems that they are just ideas, not possible changes that the government is considering on making. Why do you think this is so?
NY Plan: http://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jaco … Policy.pdf
50 States Plan: http://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jaco … tesWWS.pdf

i agree with Ms. Jolene. as good as Mr. Jacobson's advice is, i'm skeptical about something that doesn't SEEM to have a downside. not to mention, if this idea was as perfect as it sounds, why hasn't the government implemented it, yet?

Hello Jason. Whilst I do agree with the fact that utilizing the renewable resources available to as energy is a good idea, replacing the current methods of energy production at such a large scale would not be as beneficial to the environment. The sun's energy and the wind are readily available for use as energy sources however, the equipment needed to harvest this energy can be quite harmful to the environment due to its production. A lot of the time, something that I think gets overlooked when discussing the topic of the benefits of using renewable energy sources is how the equipment made to harvest these resources is made. Factories still need to use large amounts of energy to produce all this equipment such as wind turbines and solar panels, further increasing the threat to the environment, especially if we are talking about producing enough solar panels and wind turbines to power the state of California, which isn't the smallest piece of land. You must also consider the space these things need. Although solar panels can be placed in the desert and arranged into a sol ar farm, plants that harvest these energy must still be built; the same thing applies to wind farms, they require space.
However, in the long run this will be a highly beneficiary process and should be put into place but one must consider downside to replacing all the current non renewable energy power plants with ones that use renewable energy sources.

Hi Camilo, yes, production of wind turbines, etc, does use energy, but that is true of any device that produces energy.  By comparison, wind, solar and hydro power are far less demanding of enbergy resources overall. But I agree with you that the best thing would be for us to use less total energy.

Yes Jason, I completely agree with you on that point because it's true and there's no denying it. The best thing would be to use less total energy and the government should definitely find a way to replace the current means of energy production, which mostly use non-renewable resources, in a way that won't harm the environment and create too much waste. I wish the article you posted would've presented an idea of how this replacement could be done efficiently, on top of describing the changes and ways the power would be handled.