[jaltekruse]

Getting people to use more efficient appliances and insulating their homes should help reach these targets. We don't need to generate today levels of energy if we can drop usage by some percentage and just generate all of that with renewables.

That being said, the bill is also pushing for heat pumps to replace natural gas burning furnaces, so I'm guessing the net impact will be we need today levels of electricity generation, or maybe even a little more once we look at electrifying things that currently don't interact with the grid and consume fossil fuels directly.

And actually as I even type this, I'm remembering that electrifying cars is a big part of this that will definitely drive up electricity need way more than efficiency gains suppress demands for some use. Hopefully we can get to some of the more transformative ideas suggested about improving city planning and density together with investments in public transit so we don't end up producing way too many batteries simply to preserve a car centric transportation system.

I do think even just incentivizing consumers to buy electric everything will have a strong movement to drive more electricity generation, and renewables are the cheapest or very cost competitive options for new power generation installations. I think there are some funds in the new bill for encouraging sunsetting fossil fuel based plants early, but we likely need more of that down the line.

[throwaway894345]

> Getting people to use more efficient appliances and insulating their homes should help reach these targets. We don't need to generate today levels of energy if we can drop usage by some percentage and just generate all of that with renewables.

Sure, but if the bulk of the problem isn’t residential inefficiency (or if these incentives are only going to recoup a small portion of that inefficiency), then perhaps this money and political will might be better spent elsewhere.

In particular, I suspect industry is a big emitter and the big gains are probably to be had in disincentivizing carbon emissions in industry. The low hanging fruit would be a border adjustment tariff on countries that don’t meet our current emission standards (bring more jobs to the US, which improves our supply chain security). From there we could set a low price on carbon and ratchet it up as necessary. I would much rather us squabble over the price of carbon than trying to play whack-a-mole with specific incentives and disincentives. Moreover, carbon pricing isn’t a cost, it’s a revenue source.

Besides carbon pricing, it would also be neat to see the money spent on increasing our renewable energy capacity. It’s not enough to convert our grid to renewables because we have all of these new EVs and electric heaters and electric industrial applications coming online and replacing fossil fuel applications. The grid is going to be much more strained than before, so we need to increase that capacity as quickly as possible.