Advanced Energy Perspectives

ExxonMobil issued its Outlook for Energy this week, predicting that global energy demand would rise 35 percent from 2010 to 2040 due to steady growth in countries now lacking electricity, appliances, and transport. “People want a warm home, a refrigerator, a TV, someday a car, and a cellphone,” William Colton, ExxonMobil’s vice president for corporate strategic planning, told the Associated Press. That means dramatic growth, but there’s more, buried in the fine print of the ExxonMobil press release: “Without gains in efficiency, global energy demand could have risen by more than 100 percent.” In other words, it will take huge growth in advanced energy technologies to keep the increase in energy consumption down to 35 percent by 2040. That makes the advanced energy opportunity even greater.

This post was originally published at WBUR.org's Cognoscenti. Read it in its entirety here. 

With a price tag that starts at nearly $70,000, I’m not going to buy a Tesla Model S any time soon, and chances are, neither are you. But if all-electric cars, and variants such as plug-in hybrids, become as common on the road as traffic lights, it will be because of Tesla. The Model S is an electric car that’s turning heads, and changing minds.

Discussion of the challenge to the utility business model posed by distributed generation and energy efficiency continues, with a mix of handwringing and saber rattling.

Though it’s been quiet thus far, it is hurricane season, which gave the new report from the White House on power outages from severe weather even more currency than it would have otherwise. The report, a product of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers and DOE, is titled “Economic Benefits of Increasing Electric Grid Resilience to Weather Outages,” but it’s really about the economic cost of widespread power outages from severe weather events, which have been on the rise over the past decade.

Earlier this month, four former EPA administrators for Republican presidents wrote an op-ed for the New York Times that made what they called the “Republican case for climate action.” Serving under Presidents Nixon, Reagan, and both Presidents Bush, they wrote, “we held fast to common-sense conservative principles — protecting the health of the American people, working with the best technology available and trusting in the innovation of American business and in the market to find the best solutions for the least cost.” Investment in advanced energy, they wrote, is “inarguably the path we must follow to ensure a strong economy along with a livable climate.”