Climate Plan Will Transform How You Get Your Electricity

More efficient cars, trucks and airplanes.  Less-polluting electric power plants.  So many solar and wind farms that no transcontinental road trip in an electric car could take place beyond the sight of one.

Those may be the most obvious changes everyone sees if and when America’s proposed climate policies fully bloom in the next decade or so.  The biggest of those policies, the Clean Power Plan, was announced a year ago and is slated to take effect in 2016.  It could help low-carbon energy such as wind and solar spread quickly across the country and significantly change where Americans get their electricity and the effect it has on the climate.

In a nutshell, the Clean Power Plan aims to cut the United States’ biggest source of climate change-driving greenhouse gas emissions — carbon dioxide from existing power plants that run on fossil fuels, especially coal.  The goal, as the EPA proposed it, is to slash those emissions 30 percent below 2005 pollution levels through 2030 by allowing states to find their own ways cut pollution.  They’ll do that mainly by boosting overall energy efficiency, switching a lot of electric power generation from coal to natural gas and using more wind, solar and other renewables.

Here are four things to know about what the Clean Power Plan means for electricity in the U.S., based on a recent analysis by the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA):

• Energy Diversity Will Rule the Future
• Coal Goes Down,  But Not Out
• Solar and Wind Power Are About to Grow . . . A Lot
• Nuclear Power?  Not So Much

Read more at Climate Plan Will Transform How You Get Your Electricity