Buying Time…

I love technological innovation (I am from MIT, after all), but if we are going to match growing energy demand with renewable energy sources, behavioral changes — in the short term — are more important than technological breakthroughs.

My reasoning: the US demand for residential and commercial energy over the next 23 years is predicted to increase by 18% (see http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/aeo/excel/figure36_data.xls) — excluding industrial and transportation sectors.

If we want the additional power generated by renewable sources (and who doesn’t?) this demand must be met by increasing wind and solar power generation capacity.

But http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/aeo/execsummary.html says

…the [predicted] share of electricity sales coming from nonhydroelectric renewables grows from 3 percent in 2007 to 9 percent in 2030…

That’s a 6% increase, which is far short of the 18% predicted increase in demand.

The basic problem is that renewable energy sources — specifically wind and solar — can’t currently be deployed at a rate that keeps up with increased demand.  And unless we start do something differently, we will need to build yet more non-renewable sources of energy.

But I believe wholeheartedly that we can do something differently: we can give better feedback to energy consumers to help eliminate the most egregious sources of waste.  Properly done on a national scale, this will let us hold energy demand constant for a few years, buy time for solar and wind technologies to mature, and obviate the need to build more non-renewable generation plants.