2. Renewable energy development
Energy resource use is one of the most important and contentious issues of our time. Investments in energy efficiency and increased conservation may be the best way to tackle energy use. But it seems unlikely that goals for reducing carbon emissions can be met through demand-side management alone. As many as 2 billion people worldwide lack electricity today [2], and as rapid population growth in developing countries continues, demand for electricity will almost certainly rise. At the same time, rising standards of living and reliance on technology in developed countries may cause energy demand to rise faster than population, even with advances in efficiency. In the United States, for example, per-capita energy use declined throughout the 1970s and early 1980s due to improvements in efficiency, but has increased since then, and is predicted to increase in the next 20 years, with higher demand for energy services [3]. In order to meet demand that is anticipated despite efforts to improve efficiency, while limiting production of greenhouse gases, renewable energy sources must be developed.
In the United States, research on renewable energy has lagged in part because it is difficult for any new technology to compete economically with cheap and established fossil fuel plants. Renewables often pay off in the long term, because the “fuel”—sunlight, wind, ocean waves, etc.—tends to be free and limitless. In the short term, renewable energy plants are sometimes prohibitively capital intensive. However, proper accounting for externalized costs of energy production puts renewable energy in a more favorable light, while advances in technology and economies of scale can cause the costs of such technologies to drop considerably over time. For example, wind power cost 30 cents/kW h in the 1980s, much too high to be economically feasible; by 1999 that cost had dropped to 5 cents/kW h, making wind power cost competitive with fossil fuels [4], even without accounting for the costs of pollution and other adverse impacts associated with fossil fuels.