By Cynthia Bombach
A group of residents at a California retirement community has developed a proposal to halt climate change on a global scale by the year 2040. The group’s scientific research shows that it’s possible to reach the goal 10 years earlier than the 2050 deadline proposed at the recent UN climate summit in Glasgow.
The four residents of BridgePoint at Los Altos have deep backgrounds in science, mathematics, and environmental causes. Co-founder Richard Hansen is a former astronomer who studied the sun’s corona from a mountaintop in Hawaii for the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). Hansen used NCAR atmospheric CO2 data to convince fellow resident Larry Partain that global warming is caused by human activity. Partain, who has a PhD in electrical engineering and is the author of two editions of the book Solar Cells and Their Applications, embraced the idea that something needed to be done to halt global warming.
The two joined forces with Hansen’s wife Shirley, a mathematician who has published numerous scientific journal articles about the sun’s corona, and Allan Newlands, a former mayor of Woodside, Calif., who was instrumental in creating the Green Foothills Open Space District for the city. Shirley Hansen spent a year working with a committee to investigate San Francisco’s efforts to address climate change.
“Make or break” issue
At Richard Hansen’s suggestion, the group calls itself the BridgePoint Consortium. The Consortium works to advance the worldwide adoption of solar and wind power in order to stop global warming. “Climate change is going to make or break the world. It must be brought under control,” Hansen says.
To reach their goals, the group makes presentations at scientific conferences, writes reports, and speaks to citizen groups to demonstrate that halting climate change is feasible. The Consortium has written four reports for the annual Photovoltaic Specialists Conferences in Washington D.C. They’ve also created three presentations for American Geophysical Union conferences in San Francisco.
Their latest report, “Halting Global Warming and Climate Change Before 2040,” uses decades of statistics to show that solar and wind power could supply the world’s energy needs by 2040 if widely adopted. This is 10 years sooner than the proposal developed for the recent United Nations COP26 Climate Change Summit in Glasgow. The Consortium’s report was presented at the Photovoltaic Specialists Conference in June 2021.
“The solar cell and wind turbine technology is here, and it’s growing at an unbelievable rate of doubling every 2.6 years,” Partain says. Meanwhile, worldwide energy use only doubles every 30 years. At those rates, the group believes that solar and wind energy can catch up to worldwide energy needs by the year 2040.
Publication and communication
The Consortium is now working on getting the paper published in a peer-reviewed journal, which will give it the credibility needed to move forward. The next step would be to encourage the Biden administration and the rest of the world to push more strongly for widespread use of solar and wind energy in order to replace fossil fuels.
Worldwide energy super grids and new methods of energy storage would also need to be developed.
“It really requires international response,” Partain says. “If the U.S. does it and not the rest of the world, we’re still kind of condemned. We’ve got to get everybody on board.”
Governments will have to lead the efforts, he says, supported by private industry, researchers, engineers, inventors, and others.
In addition to reducing greenhouse gases, using renewable energy has financial benefits as well. For the past three years, solar energy has been the lowest-cost form of new electricity, according to the International Energy Agency.
Solar power possibilities
Providing renewable energy on a worldwide scale requires more than just putting solar panels on roofs. For perspective, Partain says that a 10-by-10-mile solar farm in an area such as Oklahoma would be large enough to power the United States.
“What is not known yet and still needs to be developed is how to cover times when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow,” Partain says. Promising technologies exist, but so far they have limited capacity to fill worldwide needs.
Starting in the community
The Consortium recommends the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) report “E.O. Shaughnessy et al ‘Community Choice Aggregation (CCA)’, 2019” as a source of information for senior living communities that want to switch all their electricity use to sustainable energy.
BridgePoint at Los Altos gets all its electricity from a nonprofit CCA renewable energy provider called Silicon Valley Clean Energy. In areas where clean-energy providers aren’t available, communities can consider installing solar panels on their own buildings. Doing so would help slow global warming and reduce their cost of electricity once the original investment was recouped.
Ultimately, the motivation for switching to renewable energy is often a combination of personal, financial, and altruistic goals.
“As a parent and a grandparent, I think it’s something we have to do,” Hansen says. If we continue to contaminate the water and burn up the fuel to the very, very last gallon, there’s nothing left for them.”
