What's Plan B?

In the last couple decades, federal, state, and local governments have begun the push for cleaner, renewable energy. Sadly enough though, it seems that just about 99% of proposed plans have either failed or never even made it past the vote. In this blog post, I want to discuss a few such initiatives that I have come across that would do a considerable amount of good for this country and world but are now nothing but ideas.

1. The One Watt Initiative. Proposed in 1997 by the International Energy Agency, this initiative wanted to have all appliances with standby power of less than a Watt by the year 2010. Not only would this decrease the amount people are spending on electricity bills, but it would also decrease the amount of carbon dioxide emissions released into the air every year that would be the equivalent of taking 18 million cars off the road. 2010 is less than a year away so how are we doing? Very poorly. Televisions and computers still use any where from 1 Watt to 100 Watts in standby power. Fail.

2. The Renewable Energy Production Tax Credit (PTC). This initiative was created in 1999 to give tax breaks to companies using renewable energy in their first ten years of operation. And how is this one doing. Three times now, Congress has allowed the PTC to expire and it is projected that funds for the PTC will become completely exhausted in 6 years. With such unreliability with the Tax Credit, companies don't really have an incentive to use renewables instead of cheap petroleum. Fail

3. The Renewable Fuel Standard. Passed in 2005 in the Energy Policy Act, the RFS mandates that a certain percentage of our fuels have to come from renewables. The standard for 2006 was suppose to be 4 billion gallons of renewable fuel and in 2012, it is suppose to be 7.5 billion gallons. For 2009, according to the initiative, fuels that companies use have to be 10%. After checking the official RFS page, it is easy to see that this standard has been revised numerous times. However, the standard does seem to be increasing which means less dependence on oil and cleaner fuels. Though recently the date was just pushed back to 2022. With proper funding, this initiative might actually succeed in promoting clean fuels. But for right now I am extremely skeptical. I'm on the fence about this one.

If you were to type in failed energy initiatives in the Google search bar, you will see a continuing trend and many key similarities. They include, lack of funds, lack of interest, and lack of regulation.