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Our nation desperately needs to change its course on energy. We’re staking out a bold plan that uses American innovation to
bring about a New Energy Future.”
—Rob Sargent
Senior Energy Policy Analyst
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After announcing our New Energy Future agenda last September, we’ve been encouraged by the reception it has earned. The plan, which
would save a third of the oil we use today and cut our energy use 10 percent by 2025, has attracted the support of members of Congress,
leading environmentalists, energy experts, hundreds of state and national environmental groups and thousands of ordinary citizens.
But practically speaking, how do you go about fixing a broken energy system in our country? The nation’s leading energy experts, scientists and engineers share a lot of the credit for giving our plan the legs it needs to stand on.
New advances in technology, combined with good old-fashioned common-sense conservation, have the potential to fix our broken system. Here are the four ways we’re encouraging decision-makers to go about doing that. The support we built for these policies at the state level shows that it’s time for the federal government to get moving.
Reduce dependence on oil
Our ambitious plan gets us to where we use a third less oil than we use today by 2025. Given that our demand for oil has been sky-rocketing—the Department of Energy predicts that America will use approximately 25 percent more oil in 2025 than we do today—the goal of using 33 percent less might sound fantastic. But there are already some very concrete ways to use less oil. You’ve probably heard about plug-in hybrid cars that get 100 miles to a gallon of gas. So why can’t we take the relatively modest step of increasing fuel economy to 40 miles per gallon?
Just that one change gets us a quarter of the way to our goal of using a third less oil in 2025. And a bill to raise fuel efficiency standards to 40 miles per gallon introduced last year had the support of some formerly vocal opponents. We’ll get the rest of the way to our goal through efficiency in homes and buildings (more about that later in the article), bio-fuels and alternative transportation.
For instance, changing our transportation priorities so that the average American drives no more in 2025 than he or she does today could save 3.6 million barrels of oil per day. Replacing a share of transportation fuels with plant-based fuels like ethanol and biodiesel would save about 1.5 million barrels of oil per day.
It probably goes without saying, but saving more than a third of the oil we use today by 2025 is good for national security. We could cut America’s petroleum consumption by 7 million barrels per day—more than twice as much as we currently import from the Middle East. That is a lot of oil, but it’s actually a conservative vision of what we can save if we apply our technological know-how and embrace balanced transportation policies that offer Americans more choices for how to get where they need to go.
Clean, renewable, homegrown energy
Our plan lays out the ways to get 25 percent of our energy from clean, renewable, homegrown sources by 2025. It sounds difficult until you start thinking about the virtually limitless potential our country has to generate electricity from renewable energy sources such as wind power and solar power.
For instance, the wind that blows over America’s Great Plains could provide enough power for the entire country. Using plant-based fuels to substitute for oil in transportation and industry could supply about 4.5 percent of our total energy use in 2025. Wind power could provide as much as 30 percent of America’s electricity by 2025 and possibly more as new technologies and practices allow us to integrate more wind power into America’s electricity mix.
Additional renewable energy from wave and tidal power, solar hot water heaters and geothermal heat pumps are in development right now and show strong potential. Technological improvements in these areas would enable us to expand the amount of energy we get from clean, renewable sources.
Saving energy
Our plan gets America using 10 percent less energy than we do today by 2025. Just like with oil use, the DOE predicts that our energy demand in our homes, businesses and industry will continue to go up—23 percent by 2025.
But when America has needed to conserve energy, we’ve figured out a way to do it. Faced with rolling blackouts during California’s infamous energy crisis, the state embarked on an ambitious energy-saving strategy that cut the state’s electricity consumption by 6 percent within a single year. Key to California’s success were large, timely investments in energy efficiency improvements and a strong public education effort, which included financial rewards for customers who sharply reduced their electricity consumption.
If we followed suit and used 10 percent less energy by 2025, we’d save more than 28 million tons of coal, enough to fill rail cars stretching from New York to Los Angeles.
Looking forward, we can expect savings in energy use to come from exactly where you would expect: energy efficiency. We’ll reach our goal by setting stronger energy-efficiency standards for household and commercial appliances, requiring utility companies to meet energy needs through energy-efficiency improvements instead of new power plants, and by expanding efficiency programs.
Investing in technology
Without the appropriate investments in technology and the markets that sustain energy-saving and renewable energy products and services, our plan will exist on paper, but not in real life. For example, new homes meeting Energy Star home standards use 15 percent less energy than homes meeting even the most rigorous current building codes. With tax credits to build such dwellings, office-buildings and public spaces, we could help meet a lot of our goals.
And here’s an added perk to the New Energy Future plan: by developing and implementing energy efficiency and renewable energy technologies, the United States can become the global leader in new energy technologies, a field that will become increasingly popular and in-demand given the threats posed by global warming.
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