United States

The competitive cost of wind has made it now the second source of electric power for the new generation of United States during the past three years, behind natural gas and plants ahead of coal.The photovoltaic solar energy both as termosolar of concentration is, at the moment, relatively face, but will be competitive by 2020. Careful analysis by Vasilis Fthenakis of the Brookhaven National Laboratory indicates that within a period of 10 years, the cost of photovoltaic energy could placed about 10 / kWh, including long-distance transmission and the cost of storage of the compressed air to be able to use it at night. Similarly, the analysis of estimates of systems of solarthermal with enough thermal storage to generate electricity 24 hours a day in the spring, summer and autumn, indicates that it could provide electricity to 10 / kWh or less on that date.Transport in a WWS world will be driven by batteries or fuel cells, so we must compare the economy of these electric vehicles with the of internal combustion engine vehicles. Detailed analysis made by one of us (Delucchi) and Tim Lipman of the University of California, Berkeley, pointed out that the mass production of electric vehicles with batteries advanced lithium-ion or nickel hydride batteries, could have a cost per mile or km throughout his life (including battery replacements), comparable to that of the gasoline vehicleWhen the gasoline is sold at more than $2 per gallon.When taking into account the so-called external costs (the monetary value of damage to human health, the environment and climate) of fossil fuels in transportation, the WWS technologies are even more competitive.The cost of general construction of a WWS system might be on the order of 100 billion dollars worldwide, in about 20 years, while not including the costs of transmission. But this is not money distributed among all Governments or consumers.