Lately it’s been trendy to talk about going 100 percent renewable energy in 20 or 30 years and going 50 or 70 percent in a decade or so. In some parts of country, especially rural communities with lots of hydroelectric that might be possible but for the rest of us that’s probably an unattainable goal.

I’ve thought a lot about this in my own life when I eventually own land and an off-grid home. I think I can probably get more than 90 percent of my electricity via solar panels and battery storage but there are going to be times in November and December I’ll probably have to occasionally fire up a gasoline generator to produce the rest of my electricity needs and keep my batteries healthy.

But that’s just electricity. I doubt I’ll ever have or want to invest in enough solar panels and batteries to generate all my energy needs on-site. It takes a lot of renewable energy to make up for the energy dense fossil fuels we use every day. Propane will be used for the stove and oven, and as an accessory source of heat to the wood stove, all of which emit carbon. I also imagine my truck and farm tractor would burn diesel and my ATV or side by side would burn gasoline.

Electricity is great if you have many massive generating plants and many electrical consumers to distribute the load to an instantaneous fashion but is impossible to store in mass. Small amounts of electricity can be stored chemically in batteries or mechanically in pump storage but those facilities are costly and difficult to build in an environmentally responsible manner.

Electric cars are technology superior to internal combustion engines and they use energy much more efficiently than their combustion counterparts. But the intense amount of energy required to move a car forward for any distance will stress most on site renewable systems, as cars consume hundreds of kilowatt hours of power to get from place to place. Storage of that quantity of energy is possible on board with modern technology but refueling takes time as batteries have to store the energy mechanically and by no means is that an instant process. No instant refills like gasing up.

I’m not hopeful for an all renewable grid or even fully addressing climate change before its too late. I think people have their heart in the right place but sometimes their heart doesn’t align with math or science.