PART 2
Part 2 of America’s Energy Future: Technology and Transformation contains six chapters and supporting annexes that provide detailed assessments of the following energy supply and end-use technologies:
-
Energy efficiency in the buildings, transportation, and industrial sectors (Chapter 4)
-
Production and use of alternative transportation fuels, in particular biofuels as well as fuels derived from converting coal, or mixtures of coal and biomass, into liquids (Chapter 5)
-
Production of electricity from renewable energy sources such as wind, solar, and geothermal, as well as hydropower and biopower (Chapter 6)
-
Domestic fossil-fuel energy, particularly as coupled with technologies that would capture and safely store CO2 (Chapter 7)
-
Production of electricity from nuclear energy (Chapter 8)
-
Electrical transmission and distribution systems that reliably accommodate intermittent energy supplies such as solar and wind and sophisticated demand-side energy efficiency technologies (Chapter 9).
The chapters on energy efficiency (Chapter 4), alternative transportation fuels (Chapter 5), and renewable energy (Chapter 6) were derived from three National Academies reports that were published as part of the America’s Energy Future (AEF) Phase I project:
-
Real Prospects for Energy Efficiency in the United States (available at www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=12621)
-
Liquid Transportation Fuels from Coal and Biomass: Technological Status, Costs, and Environmental Impacts (available at www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=12620)
-
Electricity from Renewable Resources: Status, Prospects, and Impediments (available at www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=12619)
The chapters and supporting annexes in Part 2 of this report provide the AEF Committee’s detailed technical assessments of the energy-supply and end-use technologies that it judged were most likely to have meaningful impacts on the U.S. energy system during the three time intervals considered in this study: 2009–2020, 2020–2035, and 2035–2050. The assessments were used to inform the committee’s judgments about what could happen as a result of accelerated deployments of existing and new technologies. They are not forecasts of what will happen, however. As is noted in Chapter 1, the potential energy supply (or savings) and cost estimates presented in this report were developed independently for each class of technologies. The AEF Committee did not conduct an integrated assessment of these technologies to understand, for example, how policies, regulations, and market competition would affect energy savings, supplies, and costs. Predicting the nature and impacts of such policies and regulations on investments in particular energy-supply and end-use technologies and their deployment is well beyond the scope of this study. Consequently, the estimates provided in these chapters should not be viewed as predictions.