The EIA's Annual Conference

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The Energy Information Administration (EIA) kicked off its annual two-day energy conference April 7 in Washington, DC.

The conference schedule took a two-part format, with a morning plenary session followed by a series of 90 minute concurrent sessions. Unfortunately, some of the most interesting concurrent sessions overlapped, so I was forced to make some tough choices as to which session to attend.

Here’s a rundown of some of my notes and thoughts from two the sessions.

Plenary Session

This year’s plenary session was well attended and featured three speakers: US Secretary of Energy Dr. Stephen Chu, Yale University Professor of Economics William Nordhaus, and Exelon Corp (NYSE: EXC) CEO John Rowe.

The keynote address by Dr. Chu was clearly the most widely anticipated of the three addresses. A full analysis of the comments and points he made is enough to fill up several TEL issues, as he outlined the Obama administration’s basic energy policy. I'll focus on my general impressions in this issue and revisit the topic on At These Levels or in a future Energy Letter.

The most striking thing about Dr. Chu’s comments was just how little he mentioned oil, coal, natural gas and nuclear power. The secretary highlighted the fact that Americans are heavily dependant on oil imports, and how expensive those imports are. He also showed an interesting chart that highlighted the correlation between US recessions and spikes in the price of oil.

Finally, Dr. Chu, as expected, spent considerable time discussing climate change and the need to develop new low-carbon or carbon-free sources of generation.

However, after the first few slides he said very little about conventional energy sources and the future of nuclear power. In fact, he mentioned nuclear power on just one occasion, in response to one of the two questions he took at the end of his session. This is striking to me because these four sources of power account for nearly 93 percent of US primary energy consumption. And according to the EIA’s own estimates, these three sources of energy will still make up more than 90 percent of the total in 2030.

Generally speaking, Dr. Chu’s comments were aimed at highlighting some of the research and work being done by the Department of Energy (DoE) on renewable sources such as solar and wind. He also defended the stimulus package passed in February as a key aspect of US energy policy; the package included funding for key DoE projects.