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Suggested Citation:"PART 2." National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and National Research Council. 2009. America's Energy Future: Technology and Transformation. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12091.
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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:

Suggested Citation:"PART 2." National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and National Research Council. 2009. America's Energy Future: Technology and Transformation. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12091.
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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.

Suggested Citation:"PART 2." National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and National Research Council. 2009. America's Energy Future: Technology and Transformation. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12091.
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Page 133
Suggested Citation:"PART 2." National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and National Research Council. 2009. America's Energy Future: Technology and Transformation. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12091.
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Page 134
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Energy touches our lives in countless ways and its costs are felt when we fill up at the gas pump, pay our home heating bills, and keep businesses both large and small running. There are long-term costs as well: to the environment, as natural resources are depleted and pollution contributes to global climate change, and to national security and independence, as many of the world's current energy sources are increasingly concentrated in geopolitically unstable regions. The country's challenge is to develop an energy portfolio that addresses these concerns while still providing sufficient, affordable energy reserves for the nation.

The United States has enormous resources to put behind solutions to this energy challenge; the dilemma is to identify which solutions are the right ones. Before deciding which energy technologies to develop, and on what timeline, we need to understand them better.

America's Energy Future analyzes the potential of a wide range of technologies for generation, distribution, and conservation of energy. This book considers technologies to increase energy efficiency, coal-fired power generation, nuclear power, renewable energy, oil and natural gas, and alternative transportation fuels. It offers a detailed assessment of the associated impacts and projected costs of implementing each technology and categorizes them into three time frames for implementation.

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