The Peak Oil Crisis: America’s Electricity

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 U.S. 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, 12 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 20 or 30 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.

From there on, however, the situation goes downhill. The overriding factor is carbon emissions, and there seems to be a consensus that the U.S. will pass some sort of Cap and Trade law soon that will force a reduction of carbon emissions into American air. For centuries, humans have been pumping increasing amounts of carbon into our global atmosphere, which can only hold a finite amount of such carbon. The use of the atmosphere as a place to dump our combustion waste has always been considered free and that, in turn, has kept the cost of energy from combusting fossil fuels much cheaper than it should be. The atmosphere, of course, is about to have its say, either by creating so much hell on earth that we are going to change our ways or, in the extreme case, simply shutting down many of us and much of our civilization.

Falls Church News-Press