In an effort to provide greater awareness of the necessary policy decisions facing our elected and appointed officials, Energy Policy in the U.S.: Politics, Challenges, and Prospects for Change presents an overview of important energy policies and the policy process in the United States, including their history, goals, methods of action, and consequences. In the first half of the book, the authors frame the energy policy issue by reviewing U.S. energy policy history, identifying the policy-making players, and illuminating the costs, benefits, and economic and political realities of currently competing policy alternatives. The book examines the stakeholders and their attempts to influence energy policy and addresses the role of supply and demand on the national commitment to energy conservation and the development of alternative energy sources. The latter half of the book delves into specific energy policy strategies, including economic and regulatory options, and factors that influence energy policies, such as the importance of international cooperation. Renewed interest in various renewable and nontraditional energy resources—for example, hydrogen, nuclear fusion, biomass, and tide motion—is examined, and policy agendas are explored in view of scientific, economic, regulatory, production, and environmental constraints. This book provides excellent insight into the complex task of creating a comprehensive energy policy and its importance in the continued availability of energy to power our way of life and economy while protecting our environment and national security.

The United States and China are the world's top two energy consumers and, as of 2010, the two largest economies. Consequently, they have a decisive role to play in the world's clean energy future. Both countries are also motivated by related goals, namely diversified energy portfolios, job creation, energy security, and pollution reduction, making renewable energy development an important strategy with wide-ranging implications. Given the size of their energy markets, any substantial progress the two countries make in advancing use of renewable energy will provide global benefits, in terms of enhanced technological understanding, reduced costs through expanded deployment, and reduced greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions relative to conventional generation from fossil fuels. Within this context, the U.S. National Academies, in collaboration with the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and Chinese Academy of Engineering (CAE), reviewed renewable energy development and deployment in the two countries, to highlight prospects for collaboration across the research to deployment chain and to suggest strategies which would promote more rapid and economical attainment of renewable energy goals. Main findings and concerning renewable resource assessments, technology development, environmental impacts, market infrastructure, among others, are presented. Specific recommendations have been limited to those judged to be most likely to accelerate the pace of deployment, increase cost-competitiveness, or shape the future market for renewable energy. The recommendations presented here are also pragmatic and achievable.

A component in the America's Energy Future study, Electricity from Renewable Resources examines the technical potential for electric power generation with alternative sources such as wind, solar-photovoltaic, geothermal, solar-thermal, hydroelectric, and other renewable sources. The book focuses on those renewable sources that show the most promise for initial commercial deployment within 10 years and will lead to a substantial impact on the U.S. energy system. A quantitative characterization of technologies, this book lays out expectations of costs, performance, and impacts, as well as barriers and research and development needs. In addition to a principal focus on renewable energy technologies for power generation, the book addresses the challenges of incorporating such technologies into the power grid, as well as potential improvements in the national electricity grid that could enable better and more extensive utilization of wind, solar-thermal, solar photovoltaics, and other renewable technologies.

Energy, and access to energy, are essential to human life, civilisation and development. A number of energy issues - including energy security, energy prices and the polluting emissions for energy use - now have high prominence on global agendas of policy and diplomacy. In addressing these and other global energy issues, the purpose of this book is to lay out the broad global energy landscape, exploring how these issues might develop in coming decades, and the implications of such developments for energy policy. There are great uncertainties, which will be identified, in respect of some of these issues, but many of the defining characteristics of the landscape are clear, and the energy policies of all countries will need to be broadly consistent with these if they are to be feasible and achieve their objectives. The book therefore provides information about and analysis of energy and related resources, and the technologies that have been and are being developed to exploit them that is essential to understanding how the global energy system is developing, and how it might develop in the future. But its main focus is the critical economic, social, political and cultural issues that will determine how energy systems will develop and which technologies are deployed, why, by whom, and who will benefit from them. The book has three Parts. Part I sets out the current global context for energy system developments, outlining the essential trends of global energy supply and demand, and atmospheric emissions, from the past and going forward, and their driving forces. Part II explores the options and choices, covering both energy demand and energy supply, facing national and international policymakers as they confront the challenges of the global context outlined in Part I. Part III of the book brings together the discussion in Parts I and II with consideration of possible global energy and environmental futures, and of the energy policy choices which will determine which future actually comes to pass.