The U.S.
“Buckeye Power has invested more than $1 billion in environmental controls over the past 20 years,” says Pat O’Loughlin, Buckeye’s president and CEO. “To put it in perspective, that’s over half of everything we’ve invested in the entire history of our company, and those investments have produced dramatic results in cleaner air, cleaner water, and significantly reduced solid waste such as ash.”
Often in life, we need to balance the practical with the possible. This is especially so as we navigate the social and political demands to rapidly reduce the amount of carbon emitted from the energy we use.
EPRI has been at the forefront of research to determine pathways that may someday lead to achieving dramatically lower carbon emissions that could meet the stated goals of many nations, organizations, and businesses around the world.
In my time on the board at EPRI, I’ve gotten a behind-the-scenes look at how our industry has been grappling with the many issues and concerns of rapid carbon emission reductions and identifying pathways that would allow us to meet those social and political demands. Among those concerns:
The U.S. electricity system is poised to change more in the next 30 years than it did over the past century. The main reason for such a rapid transformation: goals set by industry and government to lower carbon dioxide (CO2) by mid-century.
Leaders within and beyond the sector are focused on developing the right mix of resources to enable a low-carbon future. While specific CO2 targets and the resources available to achieve them can vary by region, the early steps of the carbon reduction journey have shown that:
