Once again, the public underestimates the cost
Unfortunately, the public has no idea of the actual costs of achieving 80% clean energy.
The survey said Americans might be willing to spend $260 per year more for the next 23 years to achieve 80% clean energy. Terrific. Unfortunately, that's only $6000 each. That's not nearly enough to, for example, put solar cells on your house with some kind of energy storage. So even if you paid that to your local utility to put in solar and wind with enough energy storage to deal with the erratic nature of these sources to achieve the 80% clean energy standard, it's highly unlikely that will be enough.
The other side of the precautionary principle is that no large country has ever before trusted something so critical as energy generation to something that today only provides a few percent of our power. Making the transition will require new transmission monitoring and management technologies. It will require massive investment in storage technologies that are expensive, ill-defined, and have never been tried on such a large scale. And nobody is in any position to tell us what the final cost of the transition will be.
It took decades, indeed most of the 20th century, to get us to our present energy infrastructure. You may not like how it produces power, but the fact is that it provides our needs with an extremely high reliability. Trying to force such a radical transition in under 25 years has never happened in any major industry I can think of. Why we should risk this in an industry as critical as energy production is beyond me, especially when there exist much safer and proven stepping stones to that goal such as natural gas.
