Obama’s liquid fuels plan: do nothing, technology will fix everything
March 20th, 2009Dave Cohen at The Energy Bulletin asks, what’s the Obama administration’s plan regarding liquid fuels? He looks at the administration’s proposals and policies and finds that the only possible answer comes down to:
Do nothing while we wait for efficiency to take care of the problem. In other words, the check is in the mail.
Cohen breaks down energy spending in the stimulus package.
- $43 billion will be spent on all energy projects.
- $2 billion will be spent on battery research.
- $400 million will be spent “to encourage electric vehicle technologies”.
- $700 million will be spent on federal & state purchases of fuel efficient vehicles.
- All together, only 7.2% of the energy spending goes toward reducing liquid fuel consumption.
$2.4 billion will be spent on R&D for electric vehicles, and another $700 million on fuel efficient vehicles, for a total of only $3.1 billion out of $43 billion.
Over 90% of the new energy spending goes toward an “efficient and reliable” electricity grid, adding renewable sources to the grid, Energy Star appliances, house weatherization, etc. Cohen points out that a smart grid won’t do anything to reduce our oil consumption over the next 20 years.
Cohen thinks the problem is that Energy Secretary Steven Chu and President Obama assume we have anywhere from 20 to 80 years to solve the liquid fuels problem, so there’s plenty of time to gradually put efficiency measures in place over that time span.
Cohen calls Chu’s (and by extension Obama’s) approach “techo-optimism.” Their approach to the grid is illustrative.
As I’ve pointed out here before, the U.S. “smart grid” looks nothing like and is not nearly as ambitious or radical as the proposed European “supergrid” which would enable Europe to repowered with electricity from renewable sources. In that post I described the U.S. “smart grid” as business more-or-less as usual. Actually, it embodies a vision of a new distributed power utopia, with cars and buildings contributing power to the grid. This would be enabled by leaps in photovoltaic and battery technology. It envisions a supercharged business as usual, requiring only a swapping out of old “brown” parts with new “green” parts, with “smart meters” the key to unleashing the magic of the market to allow the American dream nightmare of suburbs and highways to go marching on, victorious over the land.
Right. We can just build and manufacture our way out of a “limits to growth” crisis.