President Obama Visits DOE, Talks Energy Independence
Posted by Matt Ortega on February 5, 2009 at 03:56 PM
Earlier today, President Barack Obama visited staff at the Department of Energy and spoke about energy independence and his plan to stimulate the economy.
After decades of dragging our feet, this plan will finally spark the creation of a clean energy industry that will create hundreds of thousands of jobs over the next few years, manufacturing wind turbines and solar cells for example, and millions more after that. These jobs and these investments will double our capacity to generate renewable energy over the next few years.
We’ll fund a better, smarter electricity grid and train workers to build it – a grid that will help us ship wind and solar power from one end of this country to another. Think about it. The grid that powers the tools of modern life – computers, appliances, even blackberries - looks largely the same as it did half a century ago. Just these first steps toward modernizing the way we distribute electricity could reduce consumption by 2 to 4 percent.
We’ll also lead a revolution in energy efficiency, modernizing more than 75 percent of federal buildings and improving the efficiency of more than 2 million American homes. This will not only create jobs, it will cut the federal energy bill by a third and save taxpayers $2 billion each year and save Americans billions of dollars more on their utility bills. [...]
For the last few years, I’ve talked about these issues with Americans from one end of this country to another. Washington may not be ready to get serious about energy independence, but I am. And so are you. And so are the American people.
Read the President's full remarks.
Comments (4) «
I'm glad President Obama took my advise to upgrade the federal buildings.
;)
Schools should be next! (isn't that where most of taxpayers $$$ go on property taxes???)
We are hearing little or nothing about the conversion from the internal combustion engine to hydrogen/electric fuel alternatives. Does this mean that oil is still controlling our transportation? Does this mean the best we can hope for is an internal combustion engine car that gets 35 miles to a gallon? If so - is is tragic - and we will still have an infrastructure that is tied to the interests of fossil fuels in the middle east. As the war in Gaza is tied to natural gas supplies. As all the hype about Iran is tied to the oil corridor. The change we need is change from the internal combustion engine for the bulk of our transportation. If we cannot carry this change out, very little will change.
We need to do everything in our power to reduce our dependence on foreign oil.We have so much available to use such as wind and solar as well as technologies to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels. There could be no better investment in than to invest in energy independence. Create clean cheap energy,create millions of BADLY needed new green jobs, and reduce our dependence on foreign oil.The high cost of fuel this past year did serious damage to our society and economy. Record numbers of jobs and homes have been lost due to the direct impact on our economy.Oil is finite.We are using it globally at the rate of 2 X faster than new oil is being discovered. Added to the strain on our supplies foreign countries are bursting in populations and becoming modern.China and India alone are expected to add another 3 million vehicles to their highways in the next 2 decades. I just read a fantastic book called The Manhattan Project of 2009 Energy Independence Now by Jeff Wilson.Great Book!
I was very disappointed to hear that President Obama does not support further work at the Yucca Mountain site to enable storage of spent fuel/wastes from our nuclear energy program.
It is all good and well to support wind power, solar power and other renewable energy sources but we will need far more energy than these will provide if we are going to replace our coal, natural gas and oil fired energy sources.
As an example, 1 gigawatt coal fired plant could be replaced by 500 2 megawatt wind turbines if the utilization factor was 100% for both types of energy producers. In fact, a coal fired plant operates at a utilization factor in excess of 90% (and over the past decade nuclear plants of similar size have operated at similar utilization factors) while wind turbines have been estimated to operate at their nominal power levels about 28% of the time. As a consequence the number of turbines required would be more like 600 units of 2 megawatts rating to replace 1 coal plant. This is a very large number. In addition we will have to find some way to capture and store this energy so that it could be used when needed rather than when available.
Similar arguments apply to solar power which, due to insolation issues, weather related intermittency in solar input and current panel efficiencies result in solar power sites of several square miles area to produce typical coal plant power levels on the order of 1 gigawatt. Again, as with the wind farms we do not as yet have practical ways of storing the energies needed for night-time use, etc.
I supported Obama in part because he seemed to understand how very critical our energy issues were. I am disappointed that he is seemingly backing away from his earlier support of nuclear power in order to placate Harry Reid.
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