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Two words: Efficiency and Renewables Energy Efficiency doesn’t get much press so is not well understood or appreciated. Electricity was relatively cheap and plentiful in the last half of the 20th century, so American’s have become accustomed to wasting it. If rates went up significantly, you would quickly figure out exactly how much power every appliance in the home used. Most Americans are unaware of where the energy that comes into their homes is wasted. A major component of efficiency is finding the places in homes and buildings where spending some extra money now will reduce the electric bill each month thereafter. Many of these measures are cheap and simple and will earn the consumer a profit over a few years. With efficiency, every kilowatt of consumption saved has the same effect as building a new kilowatt of generation capacity – there is one more kilowatt of electricity floating around in the grid that you are no longer using. This increases the electric supply and costs about half as much as increasing the supply by building a new coal plant. The U.S. could fulfill most, if not all, of the increase in electric demand for the next decade through implementing a broad range of efficiency measures, at a lower cost than building new plants, and without the air pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, or more decapitating of mountains in Appalachia that come with building new plants. Renewable energy encompasses all sources of energy that do not deplete a finite reserve such as coal, oil or natural gas. This includes solar power, wind power, tidal power, geothermal power, biomass (where fuel is “grown’) and other innovative solutions. Many of these are cost competitive today, and given their appropriate share of subsidies for research and deployment, they can collectively become the dominant source of energy not only for America, but for the world. There are links to information about renewable resources and other “better than coal” solutions below.
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