U.S. Energy Policy the Need for Radical Departures: Dreams of a Near-Term Transformation Are Illusory. The Needed Massive Overhaul Will Take Time and Commitment (Energy Realities) (Viewpoint Essay‪)‬

Five years may be an entire era in politics, and as the recent global economic upheavals have shown, it is also a span long enough to hurl nations from complacent prosperity to panicky fears. Five years might also suffice to usher in, however belatedly, a sober recognition of the many realities that were previously dismissed or completely ignored. But five years is too short a period to expect any radical large-scale changes in the way in which affluent economies secure their energy supplies and use their fuels and electricity. Indeed, the same conclusion must apply to a span twice as long. This may be unwelcome news to all those who believe, as does a former U.S. vice president, that the United States can be repowered in a decade. Such a completely unrealistic claim is rooted in a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of technical innovation. Most notably, the process of accelerating innovation, habitually illustrated with Moore's famous graph of an ever-denser packing of transistors on a microchip, is an entirely invalid model for innovations in producing large amounts of commercial energies, bringing them reliably to diverse markets, and converting them in convenient and efficient ways. The principal reason for this difference is the highly inertial nature of energy infrastructure, a reality that is especially germane for the world's largest and exceptionally diversified energy market, which is also very dependent on imports. U.S. energy production, processing, transportation, and distribution--coal and uranium mines; oil and gas fields; pipelines; refineries; fossil fuel-fired, nuclear, and hydroelectric power plants; tanker terminals; uranium enrichment facilities; and transmission and distribution lines--constitute the country's (and the world's) most massive, most indispensable, most expensive, and most inertial infrastructure, with principal features that change on a time scale measured in decades, not years.