Re: “With the price of renewables falling, is 100 percent green energy affordable?” Jan. 26 Mark Jaffe column.
The good news about Mark Jaffe’s column about moving electric generation to 100 percent renewables is that we can get to 80 percent right now. Wind and solar are now so much cheaper that getting to 80 percent renewables would help everybody’s bottom line. What sticks is the cost of storage to help fill in the last 20 percent.
Jaffe doesn’t account for the costs of climate change. 2017 gave us a taste. Yes, hurricanes and forest fires happen. But what is the additional cost when the hurricane is bumped up from a category 3 to a 4 or 5? Or the additional cost of a jet stream slowing Harvey over Houston for days? Or doubling our rate of forest fires? Climate change costs are easily in the hundreds of billions for 2017. And it will get worse.
Getting to 100 percent renewables is chump change compared to ignoring the greater costs of climate change.
Jeff Neuman-Lee, Denver
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