Disclaimer
I’m not an economist and I do not have extended knowledge renewable energy. Research I did for this short article is very much on-the-surface (front page results only) but figures I’m stating are not optimistic. If two options were presented, I chose the more pessimistic one.
What to do with lots of money
Cost of the war in Iraq (for the US) is roughly $500 billion so far. That’s an insane amount of money. But not really surprising. Taking how long it’s taken to fail in achieving peace, this number will continue to go up.
Hypotheses: The main aim of the war is to secure status-quo (from the US point of view) in the Middle East so that oil production is not jeopardized in the region.
Oil is basically energy in a very portable and efficient form. It can be used to power cars, airplanes, ships and to create electricity. This brings in an interesting question. How else could the US have spent that money to secure large amounts of energy?
In the research I did I found that in the end of 2006, the UK government gave green light to building two large off-shore wind farms, enough to generate energy for 1 million households. Estimated cost of this is £2 billion. That amounts to about £2000 ($4000) per household. As I said before, my figures are pessimistic, I would imagine that building wind farms on land is a lot cheaper. But I’ll use this figure to make sure I’m not being too optimistic.
There are 110 million households (actually a bit less) in the US. 110 million times $4000 is $440 billion. Interesting. So, the price of this war could have been used to provide enough energy to power every single home in the US.
Taking that every single (or almost) home is already powered by other sources of energy, this would most likely leave enough surplus energy to power every single car, train, street light, metro, ship and Google data center. Airplanes are a bit more difficult as you can’t fly while being plugged in and batteries are quite heavy. (Perhaps use the remaining $60 billion to fund research on developing more efficient laptop batteries that can be used as energy source for airplanes?)
Of course, as with every string theory, there is a hole in the middle. Big one in this case. Constructing that many wind mills would be an impossible task. I mean, where would you find enough work force to build them? You’d need at least an army of men to do it.
–kristian
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