America’s Energy Future

Responding to the new sense of urgency about the nation’s energy future is difficult due to competing national priorities and interests, such as reducing oil import dependence, ensuring that affordable energy is available, and reducing carbon dioxide emissions. Sensible decisions about alternatives to current technologies for using energy more efficiently and for ensuring an affordable supply of energy from a diversity of sources require a credible and widely accepted analysis of technology options and their costs and impacts. Many recent studies have explored technology options for shaping future energy use. However, key results of those studies are conflicting and seem to reflect real disagreements about technology potential, particularly in areas such as biomass, energy efficiency, renewable electric power, nuclear power, and advanced coal technologies. The National Research Council is drawing on the principal strengths and reputation of the National Academies to inform the national debate about the nation’s energy future by providing authoritative estimates of the current contributions and future potential of existing and new energy supply and demand technologies, their associated impacts, and projected costs so that policy options can be productively considered, debated, and decided by the nation.

The America’s Energy Future (AEF) effort at the National Academies is designed to provide an authoritative analysis of technology options and their costs and impacts to help make sensible decisions about the nation’s energy future. The AEF effort’s principal task is to critically review the portfolio of recently completed major studies on energy use and technology’s potential for improvement, compare their assumptions, analyze the currency and quality of information used, and assess the relative state of maturity of technologies for potential deployment in the next decade to reduce U.S. dependence on oil imports and CO2 emissions while ensuring that affordable energy is available to sustain economic growth.

Phase I: Foundational analysis to provide a technical base that narrows uncertainty in the cost, performance, and possible impacts of existing and prospective energy technology alternatives. The principal goal of Phase I is not to produce a new U.S. energy policy or deliver major recommendations about policy but, rather, to supply an authoritative technical basis for articulating energy policy options that can be productively considered, debated, and decided by the nation.
Phase II: Strategies for America’s energy future. Phase I is also intended to be the foundation for a Phase II portfolio of studies to be conducted at the Academies and in other organizations to address reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, transportation policy, the prospects for major increases in the use of biofuels and other alternative fuels in the U.S., energy research and development priorities, strategic energy technology development, policy analysis, and many related subjects.

The AEF study, in Phase I, is currently analyzing the potential of advanced coal technologies, nuclear power, renewable energy technologies, hydrogen and energy storage technologies, advanced transportation power train technologies, and technologies to improve energy efficiency in residential and commercial buildings, industry, and transportation. The study committee is critically reviewing the existing literature and ongoing work, much of it compiled in an electronic library assembled for this project, to produce a series of four reports.