This past weekend President-elect Obama stated in his weekly address that he wants to see the U.S. renewable energy output to double as a result of an economic stimulus program. That's a laudable goal but let's put it into perspective. Bear with me but we have to wade through some numbers.

The U.S. Department of Energy's Energy Information Agency publishes the Monthly Energy Review. The December 2008 edition documents the U.S. energy consumption through the first 9 months of 2008. It is interesting to note that over the past several years the totals have stayed quite consistent. After extrapolating the 2008 numbers out to 12 months it looks like the 2008 totals will be within 2% of the 2007 numbers. For sake of illustration I'll use the 2007 totals.

 

First a definition. The unit of energy measure used in the report is a Quad (short for 1 quadrillion BTUs). That is a one followed by 15 zeros. One barrel of oil (42 gallons) will provide approximately 5.8 million BTU. 1 Quad is roughly equivalent to 172 million barrels of oil.

The annual energy consumption in the U.S. is 102 Quads. Of this total 8.4 Quads are from domestic nuclear energy, 6.8 Quads from renewable energy sources (solar, wind, geo, bio, and hydro), and 34.7 Quads are imported. That leaves 52.1 Quads produced from non-renewable U.S. sources (coal, natural gas, and oil). The domestic production is actually higher because we export about 5 Quads annually.

Back to Obama's goal. Increasing the renewable output by 6.8 Quads could reduce the imported requirements by the equivalent of almost 1.2 billion barrels of oil. A laudable goal! But what if through conservation we were able to cut our demands over the next couple of years by 20%. We could get a good start on this without spending any money by driving less and adjusting thermostats. When we do chose to invest on conservation the percentages add up even faster.

What would 20% mean? 20.4 Quads is nearly 60% of the imported total or more than 3.5 billion barrels of oil. Even a 10% reduction is a better result by 50% than doubling the renewable output. I'm not suggesting we stifle renewable production. We must do both. I just don't want conservation efforts to get lost in the hype and frenzy of our government's handout (economic stimulus) program.