[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] The Peak Oil Crisis: America's Electricity

[Bill Totten]

by Tom Whipple

Falls Church Press-News (July 24 2008)


Earlier this week, the National Conference of State Legislators held an
energy policy forum entitled "The Future of State Electricity Policy"
for the benefit of legislators from all over the US who were attending
the annual conference. At the outset, the organizers announced they had
been considering a transportation fuels forum, but had finally deemed
the subject too confusing and too politicized to grapple with at this time.

The first speaker, a senior Energy Information Administration (EIA)
official, felt impelled, however, to tell the gathering that before
talking about electricity, he should warn them that his agency is very
concerned about the cost of home heating which is set to at least double
this coming winter.

For the next eight hours, twelve speakers and hundreds of PowerPoints
covered nearly every conceivable aspect of America's electric power
situation - past, present and future. The good news is that, for the
present, there is enough power to go around, so that unlike much of
world, we should not have pervasive, continuing power shortages. It
seems that twenty or thirty years ago, America's power industry
overbuilt its generating capacity on the theory that America's homes,
commercial spaces and industry would continue to grow robustly. They got
the part about the residential and commercial space right, but failed to
foresee that much of America's manufacturing capacity would depart for
foreign lands. The result was that despite building larger houses,
air-conditioning them to the hilt and stocking them with a myriad of
power-guzzling electronic gizmos, we are still above water. If nothing
else, our sagging economy and home sales should help out with somewhat
lower demand for electricity in the immediate future.