2015 energy use

2050 energy use





The last two posts at this blog ( here and here ) showed that Vermont Yankee electricity on the grid has been replaced, kWh for kWh, by power electricity produced by gas-fired plants. Two comments (that I published) asked about the growing use of renewables. Two other comments (that I did not publish) asked the same thing, but in a truculent and accusatory tone.So. What about renewables? Vermont has a plan.Here's the answer about renewables. Vermont has a new improved energy plan for the future! We are going to cut our energy use by 1/3 by 2050, and use renewables for 90% of our remaining energy needs. Here are two graphs (for the years 2015 and 2050) which I have abstracted from the executive summary of the plan Look how much less energy we will use! Look at how much less waste there will be! And fossil fuels will be almost completely eliminated!You can double-click to see larger versions of the charts, and you can read the ten page summary . For this blog post, I simply took screen shots of the charts, but you can find numbers in the summary document, or in the complete plan document , which is over 400 pages long.My Russian grandmother had a rather cynical saying: "Sure, comes the revolution..." I guess she heard that phrase once too often, growing up in Czarist Russia.Comes the Revolution, indeed.Still, the new part of the plan is clear: we are not only switching to renewables, we will use significantly less energy in the future. The earlier plan was about switching to 90% renewables: this plan is also about lowering energy use to use only 2/3 of the energy that we use now. On page 2 of the Executive Summary (which is the first real page of the plan) we read:(Bold type is in the original.)The other new thing is a certain level of lip service to the environment, including some realization that there are conflicting goals on land use, and that our ridge lines are part of our ecosystem and landscape. The article about the plan in Vermont Business Magazine quotes extensively from these pages among the 400 pages of the plan document. The quotes are from Chapter 5 on land use planning, a chapter that is about six pages long (page 58 to 63). The chapter includes references to Vermont's land use laws (for most of the chapter). It acknowledges competing land uses in paragraphs such as this:However, the report certainly stops short of promising to protect these ridges. Instead, chapter five ends with a ringing endorsement of planning. Some quotes:In other words, we can hope that the bureaucrats will successfully plan our future land use in Vermont. They will apply themselves to this job, despite the welter of competing interests and confusing laws. The bureaucrats will certainly be busy.As everybody who studied Russian history may note: Came the Revolution, that is exactly what happened.--------: My tax money paid for writing this elaborate state plan, but nobody is paying me to read it. So I won't. I read the earlier version, a few years ago. Also, the state set up a way to comment on the plan which was basically impossible to use. (Here's my blog post on the near-impossibility of commenting .) I have put in my time on this plan, in all honesty.And as George said to me: "Comes the Revolution, Meredith, you will be surely be one of the first to be executed." (Not that it will come to that. He was just kidding.)