100% renewable in U.S. is feasible and affordable

A Stanford scientist has proposed that the United States can be 100% free of fossil fuels by 2050.
Here is an excerpt from the Singularity Hub website:
Stanford University researchers led by civil engineer Mark Jacobson have developed detailed plans for each state in the union that to move to 100 percent wind, water and solar power by 2050 using only technology that’s already available. The plan, presented recently at the AAAS conference in Chicago, also forms the basis for The Solutions Project nonprofit.
Link is at:
http://singularityhub.com/2014/03/08/100-renewable-energy-is-feasible-and-affordable-stanford-proposal-says/
This article about the 50-state plan is from the Stanford News website:
The motivation for the 50-state plan, he said, is to address the negative impacts on climate and human health from widespread use of coal, oil and natural gas. Replacing these fossil fuels with clean technologies would significantly reduce carbon dioxide emissions that contribute to global warming and spare the lives of an estimated 59,000 Americans who die from exposure to air pollution annually, he said.
http://news.stanford.edu/news/2014/february/fifty-states-renewables-022414.html
Jacobson does tackle the difficult problems of storing and dispatching renewables on a grand scale in a 2011 journal article.  For the reference and abstract, please see my earlier post (same date as today).

Article: 100% renewable energy is feasible and similar to today's costs

This 2011 article in the Energy Policy journal by Mark. A. Delucchi and Mark Z. Jacobson proposes that that a 100% renewable-energy world (wind, water and solar power) is feasible and that the cost of energy would be similar to the cost today.   
      Jacobson has followed up on this work with a 50-state strategy to convert the U.S. to 100% wind, water and solar power by 2050.  I will put information on that in the next post.
       Meanwhile, this 21-page PDF document is part 2 of 2 parts, and focuses on "reliability, system and transmission costs, and policies."   It is in a dense, scholarly style, but a useful reference.  I haven't worried much about finding Part1, because this part is the one that deals with the most important barriers to renewables-- the issues of reliability, storage, dispatchability and such.   Here is the title and the abstract, followed by the link:

Providing all global energy with wind, water, and solar power, Part II:

Reliability, system and transmission costs, and policies

 Mark A. Delucchi,

       Institute of Transportation Studies, University of California at Davis, Davis, CA 95616, USA

Mark Z. Jacobson

       Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305-4020, USA

 Article history:

Received 3 September 2010

Accepted 22 November 2010 

 abstract

This is Part II of two papers evaluating the feasibility of providing all energy for all purposes (electric power, transportation, and heating/cooling), everywhere in the world, from wind, water, and the sun (WWS). In Part I, we described the prominent renewable energy plans that have been proposed and discussed the characteristics of WWS energy systems, the global demand for and availability of WWS energy, quantities and areas required for WWS infrastructure, and supplies of critical materials. Here, we discuss methods of addressing the variability of WWS energy to ensure that power supply reliably matches demand (including interconnecting geographically dispersed resources, using hydroelectricity, using demand-response management, storing electric power on site, over-sizing peak generation capacity and producing hydrogen with the excess, storing electric power in vehicle batteries, and forecasting weather to project energy supplies), the economics of WWS generation and transmission, the economics of WWS use in transportation, and policy measures needed to enhance the viability of a WWS system. We find that the cost of energy in a 100% WWS will be similar to the cost today. We conclude that barriers to a 100% conversion to WWS power worldwide are primarily social and political, not technological or even economic.

Here is the link: 

 http://www.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/DJEnPolicyPt2.pdf