Are these timelines attainable to be Fossil Free

[ThomasD]

Some states like Marland plan to be Fossil Fuel free by 2035 to 2040. Are these timelines achievable?

Climate plan's out. Now comes the hard part: Paying for it. - Maryland Matters

Moore administration officials tout $90 million being set aside for climate investments. But that isn't "new" money.

www.marylandmatters.org

Michigan recently passed legislation that requires that the state generate 80 percent of its electricity from wind, solar and other carbon-free sources by 2035 and 100 percent by 2040, which is a faster forced energy transition than the one in California—a state that has often been the leader in climate programs with associated energy price increases

California Releases World’s First Plan to Achieve Net Zero Carbon Pollution | California Governor

Following Governor Newsom’s call for more ambitious climate action, state’s climate plan would create 4 million new jobs, slash greenhouse gas emissions by 85%, and cut oil usage by 94%

www.gov.ca.gov

 

[ItsNotAboutTheMoney]

How you done any research on what MIchigan has available to it?

 

[fhteagle]

I mean anything that doesn't violate laws of physics is possible when you throw enough money at something. We have all the technology we need to be fossil fuel free. Some tech certainly could be improved, made more efficient, etc, but all the basics are there. But they need to be scaled by many orders of magnitude, which is going to cost a lot of money. But the fossil fuel system is going to get increasingly expensive to keep running, too, so that's not a COP out, just a fact of life.

The problem with wind, water, and solar is each of them suffers from some degree of intermittency. Which means you have to build not only the generation, but enough storage to match. Storage in the form of batteries is not going to get it done for many many many decades, even with every ground transport vehicle participating in V2G. Plus there's a nasty material mining issue bottlenecking battery and electronics production. It's going to take the real workhorse, pumped hydro storage and/or running hydro reservoirs like self-charging batteries to really tackle the storage problem in a meaningful way.

Add the LCOE + LCOS to make renewables firm and dispatchable, and modern GW scale nuclear starts to look like a lot better of a deal. Not cheap like fossil gas is, but really that's artificially cheap right now for 100 reasons that aren't going to last anyway.

We'll still need liquid fuels for most of aviation and probably long distance shipping for some time to come, but a combo of bio fuels and e-fuels should be able to cover that, once we quit sending good material into the ethanol boondoggle.

So, long story short, can it be done? Yes. Will we push enough resources into getting it done and in a way that doesn't make for a energy crisis that makes the 1970s look like candy land? To be determined....

 

[David_Cary]

Electricity rates in CA have a lot more to it than trying to be fossil free.
You can certainly list corruption there.
But there is also fire risk, high labor costs, difficult terrain and probably a few other things.
Getting to 80% renewable is not hard at all. Just build out a ton of wind and solar. Use NG for dark non windy times. Getting to 100% is a good deal harder. Storage to make it to 100% is quite difficult.

Getting nuclear in by 2035 would seem to be an impossibility at the state level - they can't control the NRC.

They can get there and just ignore aviation - and I think that is fair. A state has no power to fix aviation. It does have the power for electricity supply.