I ran across wecansolveit.org where they say,

“We can switch 100% of America’s electricity to clean energy sources within 10 years.”

Pure nonsense, IMO.

If there was an alternative to the present systems used to deliver electricity to individual consumers, it would have long ago been invented and made somebody very very rich. The keys to the problem are that the functionality, reliability, and cost for the present methods are extremely difficult to best. We flip a switch and we always get electricity. Cost is a factor, but for such a necessity, cost is not the most important factor.

Note that this example refers to replacement / retrofitting a system with another system that provides the exact same functionality, reliability, and cost of the systems being replaced. If any proposals fall short on any of the factors, it is highly unlikely to even begin to make a dent in the market.

A recent example is provided by the cell phone. This product and associated service provided additional functionality compared to the system it replaced. Some countries have been spared the costs of installation of a land-line based system and gone instead directly to the cell phone method. Individual customers apparently were just waiting to be able to carry their telephones around with them. Plus now we have cell phones that have multiple functions.

How long did it take for the cell phone to attain wide-spread saturation of the entire potential market? From Wiki:

The first commercial mobile phone service was launched in Japan by NTT in 1978. By November 2007, the total number of mobile phone subscriptions in the world had reached 3.3 billion, or half of the human population (although some users have multiple subscriptions, or inactive subscriptions), which also makes the mobile phone the most widely spread technology and the most common electronic device in the world.

That would be about three decades.

And again these are products and services that provided additional capabilities and cost savings over the existing legacy systems. New products and services that provide only equivalent desirable characteristics to those of existing legacy systems have significantly longer market acceptance and penetration time scales. Retro-fitting, for example, is notoriously slow.

[Wiki also says: According to internal memos, American Telephone & Telegraph discussed developing a wireless phone in 1915, but were afraid deployment of the technology could undermine its monopoly on wired service in the U.S.]

That would be your basic additional six decades.

The time required for deployment, that is after development to commercial-grade requirements, is measured in decades for anything you want to name. The telephone is roughly analogous to getting electricity to individual customers.

As another example, for how many years have we heard that individual solar is just around the corner; three decades at least. And the usual strawman that Big Coal, Big Gas, Big Nuclear, and Big You Name It, have received subsidies, huge obscene subsidies, and the alternatives have not, is simply not correct. All forms of production of electricity have always received subsidies. In the early days of wind power, the growth and decay of the number of operating machines at Altamont Pass could be accurately correlated with the status of the tax code relative to alternative energy sources.

No suggested alternative electricity production method can provide continuous electricity to individual customers. Additionally, as alternative sources are added into the mix on The Grid, the alternatives will begin to dominate the operational characteristics of The Grid. Not to mention that distributed power sources are going to require significant additional capital for development and deployment of the transmission systems to get the electricity to the customers. Boone Pickens plans to use his existing gas pipe-line right of ways for both construction space for wind turbines and for the transmission systems for the electricity. While at the same time advocating for increased consumption of natural gas. Natural gas that will flow through his pipelines like money into his pockets as the increased demand increases the price. Boone Pickens is a smart man.

So, what I’m trying to get to is that the time-rate-of-change of all aspects of both phase-out of carbon burners and phase-in of non-carbon burners will shortly become the dominate limiting factors in meeting any carbon-reduction goals. 2012, for example, is only four years from now; actually closer to three than four. 2020 is only 12 years out.

And I do mean all aspects; from mining natural resources and manufacturing capabilities rates for pieces parts, to labor to put the pieces parts together, to front-end design and analyses of proposed systems, to labor and time to carry out mandated various ‘impact’ studies, labor and time to gather numerous stakeholder ‘input’, … the list is very long.

Name any major construction projects, any at all, that can be completed in a time scale of the order of a single decade. Available historical data can be used to get good estimates for the time-rates of change associated with changes in basic infrastructure and these should be factored into all analyses for phasing out carbon and phasing in non-carbon alternatives.