How to Beat the Big Energy Chill

Gina and Ron Martin’s home in Mentor, Ohio, is just plain big. It has six bedrooms, five and a half bathrooms, a cavernous basement, a spacious patio and a pool in the backyard. But the last thing the self-employed housing contractors suspected when they bought their dream house in 2004 was just how big the heating bills were going to be. Last winter their utility bills averaged $400 a month. Although the price of heating oil has inched down in the past two weeks, the Martins are anticipating bills of $700 a month this winter. They expect the price of energy to keep rising
Four hundred miles away, in a joint hearing of the U.S. Senate Energy and Commerce committees, the CEOs of the five major oil companies appeared last week to defend their record $32.8 billion third-quarter profits in the face of such pocketbook pain. They could offer little solace to Shell-shocked consumers like the Martins. “Given the scale and long-term nature of the energy industry,” said Lee Raymond, CEO of the world’s biggest oil company, ExxonMobil, “there are no quick fixes and there are no short-term solutions.”

When all is said and done, 2005 may be remembered as the year America caught a serious case of energy agita. In the past year, oil has blown by $50 a barrel and peaked briefly at $70 altitudes, sending prices at the gas pump temporarily into the psychologically jarring territory north of $3 a gallon. At the same time, confronted with hurricanes, vanishing Arctic ice and other bizarre weather phenomena, many global-warming skeptics finally acknowledged that the greenhouse gases produced by burning fossil fuels are altering the Earth’s climate. Add to that the fierce ongoing debate about “peak oil” and the declining viability of the Earth’s oil supply, the plunge in sales of gas-guzzling SUVs and, finally, the double whammy of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, which ravaged the Gulf Coast energy infrastructure and closed a third of the country’s oil and gas production.

All this has produced an interesting side effect: the alternative-energy industry has taken off. In the past two years, more states and countries have passed mandates requiring that a percentage of future energy use be derived from alternative sources. Last week, for example, China announced it would boost the country’s use of alternative energy from 7 percent to 15 percent by 2020. Meanwhile, Silicon Valley engineers have started renewable-energy companies, the technology continues to improve and, most important, the prices of alternative sources of fuel have headed downward. Sixty-dollars-a-barrel oil has suddenly made what were fringe experiments look like mainstream solutions