Nearly 70 years after her grandfather led the Allies to victory in Europe, Susan Eisenhower called on the electric co-op community to lead the charge in securing America’s energy future.
“We have to take control over the conversation and be sure to ask the right questions. And quite frankly, and maybe most of all, we have to have the courage to tell the truth,” she said.
Eisenhower, a strategist and an expert on energy, delivered her address to some 8,300 co-op leaders gathered at the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association annual meeting in Orlando last month.
“We have to understand that our regional interests are inextricably interwoven with our national interests, and if America fails to rise to the challenge, each of us will suffer together,” she said. “We are in an unprecedented challenge globally.… Our leadership position is ours to lose.”
Eisenhower cautioned co-op leaders to “guard against bumper sticker solutions and bumper sticker politics.” Both political parties have made “great overstatements” about what is achievable in the energy sector, she said. She warned that the polarizing debate over national energy policy has presented “ideas and opinions not subject to the facts,” while ignoring what is achievable and sustainable.
“We seem incapable of aligning the facts with reality and opportunity,” she said. “We have to stop trying to make ourselves feel good with promises we cannot keep.”
President Obama’s line that 80 percent of Americans’ electricity will come from clean energy sources by 2035, she said, must have been influenced by Al Gore’s 2008 speech in which the former vice president said 100 percent of our electricity from clean, carbon-free sources, is attainable in 10 years. “Well, you know, this kind of over-optimism … has led to unrealistic renewable portfolio standards in many states and has put the system under strain at a time when we do not have a national energy strategy,” she said.
“We live in an era of populism where the validation of our own opinions and ideas are utterly unburdened from the facts,” she said.
California, for instance, has committed itself to 33 percent from renewables by 2020. Other states have targeted the 20 percent range in the next 10 years. She asked how can we do this when currently wind supplies just two percent of our electricity and solar is less than one percent.
At the same time, she noted groups oppose building any new coal or nuclear plants, yet those sources supply 70 percent of our power. “So it’s hard for me to imagine how they think we’re going to fuel our economies without a transition period – a transition period that is going to have to be sequenced and planned for.”
She noted renewables will be extraordinarily important in a clean energy future, but there is much to do in terms of developing technology and infrasturcture.
She pointed out that the United States Energy Information’s Annual Energy Outlook predicted renewables will only climb to 14 percent by 2035. Even China, she said, which is investing huge amounts into improving its infrastructure, has set a goal of only 30 percent renewables by 2050.
Eisenhower believes the recession has lulled people into forgetting about the long-range growth in energy demand. She said eventually there could be “an impossible strain on our infrastructure without a solid plan for modernization,” both in power production and transmission. She bemoaned the lack of planning, permitting and construction of long-term generation projects to meet power needs at the end of the next decade and beyond.
“Americans can’t contemplate the possibility of power shortages,” she said, but without long-term generation projects, it is “hard to imagine how we are going to continue to fuel our economy.”
Eisenhower said co-op consumers need to understand the issues involved. “Public education is absolutely critical for explaining the risks and the benefits of this transition we are about to undertake.”
She said it’s important to develop a national energy plan that doesn’t pick winners and losers because we’re going to need everything to meet the demands of our growing economy. “But we will have to sequence them according to the scientific and technological availability, and we have to be able to take advantage of the low-hanging fruit that exists to continue to meet our obligations,” she said.
“We need to have a realistic plan that’s based on real targets and real financial requirements… We need regulatory reform. We need regulatory certainty, and we need citing authority. We have to raise these issues above partisan politics,” Eisenhower said.
“We live in an era of scarce resources. To prevail, we’ll have to think faster and be better. And finally, and most important of all,” she concluded, “we’ll have to pull together as a nation and start acting like Americans again.”
Go to the April 2011 Table of Contents