Environmental and conservation groups have had years of friendly receptions in Washington. Perhaps it's time we listened to people who actually know something about energy. Yes, conservation is important. That's why Bush's energy policy (or, if you prefer, here's the summary had many provisions to promote conservation. Alternative energy is also important and was addressed in the policy. However, for the next 10-20 years, conservation and alternative energy aren't likely to meet our growing energy demand by themselves. That means we need more production, too.

Cutting the rate of growth in energy demand is important. That's where conservation comes in. The US energy consumption was roughly 100 quads (quadrillion BTU) in 2000 and is projected to grow to about 130 quads in 2020. If we can cut that growth to 110 or 120 quads, we're talking about a real savings. However, we'll still need quite a bit more energy than we have today. What are the alternatives?

Nuclear power plants?

Fission plants are opposed by the environmentalists and fusion is many years away from being able to produce commerical power.

Solar?

Silicon solar arrays are at most 20% efficient. Since the solar intensity is roughly 1000 watts per square meter, that means that each square meter can produce about 200 watts of electricity. To produce a single pitiful megawatt, you'd need 5000 square meters of solar panels not counting distribution losses. To get the full power of the sun, those panels would need some expensive tracking mechanisms. Solar towers may be more efficient than panels but they also have a substancial up front cost. Then there's this little thing called "night".

Wind?

Wind power can be useful in some areas but it just isn't effective in most places. The cost of wind power is dropping and that's good news. I've driven past some pretty big wind farms in California. Quite often, few of the turbines were turning so little power was being produced. The energy you can harvest from the wind squares as the wind speed doubles. If a wind turbine was designed to produce full power at a certain speed, say 30 MPH, then it only produces 1/4th the power at 15 MPH. Some people also complain that wind turbines tend to kill a lot of birds.

Hydrogen?

Where do you get the hydrogen? Electrolysis of water takes a lot of electricity, more than we get from burning the hydrogen or from putting it in fuel cells. We can split the hydrogen from natural gas but that requires natural gas and it releases CO2. Then there's the non-trivial issue of establishing a national infrastructure capable of producing and distributing hydrogen. That alone would could tens of billions of dollars. Who will pay for that?

What's left? Shale oil? That requires a lot of water and produces a lot of pollution. Coal? Oops - Greenhouse gases! More drilling? Noooooooooo!

Talking about conservation and alternative energy is fine but it doesn't get the job done. We have to look at these challenges with an engineer's pragmatism instead of idealism if we hope to actually solve the problems.