Barack Obama has officially been inaugurated as the 44th President of the United States of America. He now has the opportunity to take action on renewable energy that all previous administrations have yet to take. However, he has a difficult time ahead of him before he achieves his ambitious goals.
In case you haven’t had a chance to read his Energy Plan, here are the key points:
- Provide short term relief to American families facing pain at the pump
- Help create five million new jobs by strategically investing $150 billion over the next ten years to catalyze private efforts to build a clean energy future.
- Within 10 years save more oil than we currently import from the Middle East and Venezuela combined
- Put 1 million Plug In Hybrid cars – cars that can get up to 150 miles per gallon – on the road by 2015, cars that we will work to make sure are built here in America
- Ensure 10 percent of our electricity comes from renewable sources by 2012, and 25 percent by 2025
- Implement an economy wide cap and trade program to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 80 percent by 2050
I would like to focus on his renewable energy implementation targets. Currently, non-hydro renewables make up 6% of this country’s energy production (From the Renewable Energy Data Book). Including hydro power, this number becomes 9%. While it is not clear what he defines as “renewable sources”, his goal of 10% by 2012 is well within reach. It will be increasingly difficult, however, to reach his 25% by 2025 goal.
There are still many unanswered questions on how he plans to acheive these goals. My hope is, that as he begins the process of setting up programs and reforming legislation, that he follows a more sustainable path of supporting smaller, community based projects. It would be all too easy to put up a few giant wind farms in the midwest to boost the installed capacity and ignore the smaller behind the meter projects. While the big centralized projects are an important way of avoiding large fossil fuel powerplants, they will become less and less important in our energy infrastructure as renewable energy becomes more accessible to the masses.
It is clear that President Obama has a strong vision of what direction this country should move in. I hope that he sees the opportunity for developing and promoting distributed energy generation in his Energy Plan.
