THE BATTLE FOR THE FUTURE OF AMERICAN ENERGY - The Power Surge: Energy, Opportunity, and the Battle for America's Future - page 6

Clean energy was too new, too expensive, and too unreliable to
power the United States, let alone the planet. Someday, perhaps—it
was tough to i nd anyone opposed to that—but the day was a long
way of .
h e following years did lit le to shake skeptics' beliefs that new energy
technologies weren't ready for prime time; indeed, in many quarters,
that view had strengthened. Clean-energy enthusiasts celebrated falling
prices, which seemed to be a powerful response to claims that the tech-
nologies were too expensive. But the same low prices had helped bank-
rupt a string of high-proi le renewable energy i rms, some backed by
the federal government, sending a clear message to would-be skeptics
that something in the entire business was unsound. h e AltraBiofuels
facility in Coshocton, Ohio, declared bankruptcy the same day I vis-
ited it; the solar manufacturing plant outside Pit sburgh remained only
half used. David Kreutzer, an analyst at the Heritage Foundation in
Washington, D.C., compared claims that clean energy could create jobs
to assertions that bank robbers might stimulate economic growth. 6
In any case, said the skeptics, clean energy remained too expensive.
Chevron CEO John Watson, speaking to a Washington audience in late
2011, laid down his bot om line bluntly: “On a per-unit basis, stripped
of subsidies, wind, solar and biofuels are simply not cost-competitive
with fossil fuels. ” 7 “Our energy policy is rife with contradictions,” he
warned. 8 Government ef orts to aggressively push clean energy were
bound to make lit le sense—especially when America was blessed with
abundant fossil fuels.

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Everything we once knew about American energy seems to be chang-
ing. Oil imports have fallen for the i rst time in decades. Natural gas
supplies, long in continuous decline, are on the rise. Cars and trucks are
delivering extraordinary and ot en unanticipated gains in fuel ei ciency.
Wind, solar, and other alternative technologies have seen costs plum-
met and deployment accelerate like never before. Every one of these
trends has the potential to play out not just in the coming years but
over the next decade and beyond, and all are being propelled by a mix