Mike Jesanis former president and CEO of National Grid USA
Disruptive change in the energy industry is primarily driven by economics…
Put simply, large quantities of cheap, available natural gas from shale is a game-changer for the U.S. energy industry…
The first loser in this new marketplace is nuclear power…
New energy technologies — whether nuclear, wind, biomass or solar — are also losers…
Cutler Cleveland Editor-in-chief of the Encyclopedia of Energy
…there’s over 1,200 years worth of oil, natural gas and coal that is “technically recoverable”…
If we put anywhere near that amount of carbon into the atmosphere, we’ll fundamentally alter the planet’s climate system in ways that make the 1 or 2 degree rise of the last century seem almost laughably trivial….
First, there are the enormous — and growing — sunk costs in fossil fuel infrastructure. Second, major energy transitions — from wood to coal, from coal to oil — historically take 30 or more years….
Another major problem is the market sends perverse signals about energy. The environmental and human health externalities — costs not reflected in the price — associated with fossil fuels are staggeringly large….
Finally, there’s the third rail of American energy politics — the demand side. No president since Jimmy Carter has dared talk with the American people about our use of energy. How, and how efficiently, we use energy has to be part of the discussion…
N. Jonathan Peress vice president of the Conservation Law Foundation
This highlights the paradoxical role of natural gas: It’s helping to reduce current carbon emissions in our electric system, while simultaneously delaying our ability to deploy renewable energy sources to reduce future carbon emissions. Natural gas may be on the right side of the “carbon curve” today, but it will be on the wrong side very quickly…
However, recent life-cycle analysis suggests that reductions in greenhouse gas emissions from natural gas
are minimal. A recent
study by the National Center for Atmospheric Research concluded “
substitution of gas for coal as an energy source results in increased rather than decreased global warming for many decades…”
In our view, it doesn’t make sense — economically or environmentally — to invest in building new natural gas pipelines and power plants that will be shut down in 10-20 years as we complete the transition to a low-carbon energy future…