Is U.S. Energy Policy Correct?

The respondents that think we can do more, (immediately), with renewable energy, have been focused on the, "Dreams From Our President".

Every change in society must take place due to some catastrophe..Oh we can see it coming sometimes, but unless the change is profitable, which is not likely,,,then new technologies must be developed to make the change economically viable, and that can only happen with speculative or donated monies, and those can only be had out of necessity...That's why change takes time, and is so painfully expensive...There is no return until new, profitable technologies have been realized...So yes we are heading in the same direction we have been for many years, we have set a new course, but like a cruise ship on steroids, the actual turn is like the hour hand on a clock, the movement is so slow that it appears to be standing still...Some changes we can see are evident, 10% of our gasoline is now produced from corn, in the form of ethanol...and cellulosic ethanol production will be a reality soon...Every major car maker has an electric vehicle either out or coming out soon...Will everybody go out and buy an electric car next year,,,,probably not, but the next 10 years, who can say...

Unfortunately it has more to do with who is collecting the profits than any real intelligent thought being put to use. Green energy has less profit in it than poluting the planet with fossil fuels.

I feel for our grandchildren, for the hate they'll feel for us for not doing enough.

Energy efficiency is all very noble, but doesn't such such stuff start at our own front door ?

Switching off lights when not needed (take a look at any city during nighttime - all them light's ain't on just because cleaning staff are in). Do you really need a gas guzzling car.etc. How many people (CR4 types are probably an exception) have done an energy survey of their house and addressed energy consumption.

How we produce energy is a secondary part of the issue. Using what we have more efficiently should be first.

I can't comment on American policy, but the UK has some utter nonsense that is 'sold' to the public. Wind farms make me laugh so bad I could almost power them myself. We've signed up to overly ambitious renewable goals. People need to stop freaking about Nuclear until renewable technology is better developed. The government here have skipped the 'let's run trials and determine the true cost/efficiency' stage.

Any sane person would want more renewable energy, but a lot of current stuff is clouded in a political fog.

The need for renewable can't be over-hyped, but it's implementation can be over-sold.

Yeah, it's a joke. Here in the US we even keep empty parking lots lit up all night long, along with big empty office buildings and other businesses..........................throughout the entire country!

And our idiot politicians claim they are on the case by banning incandescent bulbs. Yeah right.

banning incandescent bulbs

..another case of policy versus science/fact. Not a single 'low-energy' bulb I have ever tested meets it's stated claims about luminosity and lifespan. That's without going into the cost and materials of producing the damn things. In the UK they get dished out like a pimp getting kids hooked on crack. I'm all up for the idea in principle, but being lied to on the ticket....

Apart from that little rant, the occasional foray to 'low-energy' bulbs does just not cut it. We elect people, then they seem to get lobotomized and forget what ordinary folk want. Government here sponsered many TV adverts on safety (Brits will recall Jimmy and 'clunk-click' and such). Why the **** don't they run a series to reduce energy use.

How much energy I or my family uses is no one else's business. I pay for every watt consumed once a month.

The U.S. does not have an energy policy. Every President has had a so-called policy that never goes anywhere.

I'm guessing you are American ?

It's a fair point you make (that we should be able to make our own choices etc). However, pollution is a global game and nobody knows the exact cost. Cost per kwh is one thing, but what if that energy is from coal fired plants in another state ?

GA for a very interesting and thought provoking point. We wont get an absolute answer here, but posts that make one consider are worth reading.

"Renewable" is another buzzword, like "sustainable" and "affordable," which is meaningless in application. "Renewable" covers wind, solar, biofuels, geothermal, hydro, tidal, run of the river, piezoelectric, and the rest of the proffered power sources other than nuclear and fossil fuels. It is so broad and vague that it is meaningless, but this empty buzzword is used as a badge or shibboleth to identify the true believers in this crusade against coal and nuclear.

Who stands to benefit if coal and nuclear are shut down? Natural gas. Wouldn't it be awful if it turned out that the leaders of this crusade are invested in natural gas, which is now under fire for polluting the water supply? The deliberate sabotage of the nation's power and water supply by deluded zealots led by Judas goats in the environmental movement is definitely the wrong track.

We are told that "we have all the technologies we need" -- so what exactly are these technologies and are they scalable to meet increasing power demand?

Right away we can exclude post-combustion chemical CO2 capture and underground storage (CCS), for well-known reasons that are leading to the cancellation of CCS projects. "Clean coal" is not going to happen that way, and now finally people are realizing that they have been sold an expensive and futile research project whose only beneficiaries (beside the usual grant recipients) are the oil companies, who hope to get cheap CO2 to use in their EOR. CO2 storage at utility scale in deep saline formations (which are packed full of high pressure brine) is "a profoundly non-feasible option for the management of CO2 emissions."

Nuclear has political problems, unrelated to technology, because of the furious ignorance of its opponents. After Fukushima, nuclear doesn't look like the answer, although I am hopeful that the new small modular designs can eventually succeed. But the argument against nuclear is not on the technical merits, so the nuclear case gets decided by the reptilian part of the brain.

Hydro is maxed out, and geothermal sites are also scarce. Biofuels are a joke -- look at corn ethanol. It's not that biofuels have no use, but they are clearly not going to substitute for coal and nuclear for baseload generation at the scale required. No one seems to have accounted for the water and fertilizer required to grow them, the energy required to harvest, dry, transport, and process them, and the fact that when they are burned they also produce CO2, just like coal.

Wind and solar pretend they can do the job of baseload generation, so we can just close down our coal plants and rely on new wind farms distributed over a wide enough area that the wind is always blowing someplace. At night, which is when wind is available, there is already a lot of cheap power available from the spinning reserve and, seasonally, from hydro, so lots of wind gets curtailed: 25 TWh in 2010. Wind power is expensive and nobody wants it, so the only way to sell wind is to force utilities to buy it and install natural gas backup. Solar is available during the day but it is much smaller than wind. Also, you can't count on wind and solar to be there when you need them. Eventually, wind and solar might come to wider deployment such that their intermittency is no longer an obstacle, but for now it is hard to see how that will happen. I think wind needs to look for a different job, such as grinding things for pyrolysis upgrading, or cracking CO2 emissions, instead of trying to sell power into the grid, and seek deployment in harmony with -- not in opposition to -- conventional generation. "Renewable baseload" is like dry water.

In view of their disappointed expectations, small wonder that the American public disagrees with their leadership. All of the happy talk about green jobs and renewable energy replacing coal and nuclear looks ignorant at best, and manipulative at worst.