Where would America's renewable energy come from?

Biomass energy is usually considered carbon-neutral. Carbon from the atmosphere is absorbed by biomass via photosynthesis, and the same amount is released back into the atmosphere when it is burned.

The following map, downloaded from here, shows America's biomass resources.

Further down the road, hydrogen shows great potential. Now, despite frequent news reports to the contrary, hydrogen is not a source of renewable energy (except for some heavy isotopes used in nuclear power), but it is a carrier that can be used to store energy. It's the most abundant element in the universe, but it is almost always found as a compound, such as water. Separating hydrogen atoms from these compounds requires energy – at least as much energy as you're going to get from the resulting hydrogen.

So why bother doing it? Because if you can use renewable energy, such as wind or solar, to split hydrogen from compounds, then you've got a great storage medium whose delivery of carbon-free electricity is not dependent on the weather.

Take a look at this map of renewable-to-hydrogen potential, downloaded from here.

It's no coincidence that this looks a lot like the wind-power map. NREL is currently working on a wind-to-hydrogen project, exploring the potential of using wind turbines to power electrolysis, that is, separating hydrogen and oxygen in water molecules, and then using the resulting hydrogen to power internal combustion engines that produce electricity.

As Mr. Gore pointed out, one of the biggest impediments to getting renewable electricity from solar and wind farms to our wall sockets is our aging transmission lines. In his speech, Gore cited a report – probably this one from the Electric Power Research Institute [PDF] – that says that our current grid system costs US businesses more than $120 billion a year. "It has to be upgraded anyway," Gore said.

Upgrading our electric grid does not require any new technology. Nor does installing photovoltaic panels, or building solar thermal concentrators, wind farms, geothermal plants, and biomass converters. All it requires is money – about $1.5 trillion to $3 trillion, by Gore's estimate – and political will.

And, as these maps suggest, the United States has enough potential within its borders to fulfill its energy needs – without any efficiency measures beyond improving the grid.

We could go even further than that. Imagine, just for a moment, what the world would look like if America were to become an exporter of energy. Many commentators, including T. Boone Pickens and Hillary Hillary Clinton, have said that the United States has the potential to become the Saudi Arabia of wind.

Saudi Arabia, it should be noted, has no personal income tax.

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