Just a quick envelope calculation on possible costs to energy infrastructure from SRM. I don't recall seeing anything like this published. Please attack.
Total world energy consumption is a bit under 20TW and growing fast. https://www.theworldcounts.com/stories/current_world_energy_consumption We can crudely assume approximately that amount will come from solar, mid century - due to expected energy consumption growth and other technology providing the balance (wind, nuclear, etc). Let's assume that SRM makes solar PV about 1pc less efficient. That's 200GW lost to SRM. Mid point solar PV LCOE is about $35/MWh at the moment. We can assume that might fall to around $2-20, although that's a broad range. Even at the bottom of this range, the cost to replace the "lost" energy is therefore $400,000/hr. Per annum that's roughly $4bn - and could easily be $40bn that, if solar costs don't fall precipitously. Even at the low end, that's approx the cost of an SRM program. My thinking is that this might be a tipping point that makes other forms of SRM preferable - eg MCB or polar SAI. Comments welcome Andrew -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "geoengineering" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to geoengineering+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/geoengineering/CAJ3C-07ERTJUAa%3DbFbJskAOSpicQL9yXwWaUekBB60FJ6GgreA%40mail.gmail.com.
