The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) recently dusted off its 30-year-old crystal ball and gazed into the future of American energy use. Its findings were released last week in report titled America's Energy Future: Technology and Transformation. The experts on the panel are slightly stoic and guardedly optimistic. In 10 to 25 years—"with a sustained national commitment"—they say, the U.S. will be able to achieve "energy-efficiency improvements, new sources of energy, and reductions in greenhouse gas emissions through the accelerated deployment of existing and emerging energy-supply and end-use technologies."
This particular mode of divination harks back to a similar effort back in 1980, when the NAS issued a similarly ballyhooed report, Energy in Transition, 1985 to 2010. That report took four years to assemble and involved 350 of America's smartest energy researchers, engineers, and economists. Before we take the new findings too seriously, let's see how 1980's experts have fared three decades on.
( Read more... )As we now know 30 years later, energy prices remained essentially flat and the economy grew at 3 percent. The 1980 report noted that "more rapid economic growth...implies higher energy consumption." Had the assumptions behind the 1980 NAS scenarios been accurate, Americans should be using far more than 130 quads of primary energy by now.
What actually happened? According to the EIA, the U.S. uses just 98 quads of energy today up from around 80 quads in 1980.
The rest at http://www.reason.com/news/show/135213.html
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