NJ Energy Master Plan

Energy plays a vital role in the health of NJ’s economy and environment. Over the past several decades, energy challenges have repeatedly awakened us to our growing demand for energy and regional and global competition for supply, and to our resulting vulnerability to high prices, supply shortages, and environmental impacts. Families who are barely getting by paycheck to paycheck can’t bear ever-increasing energy bills. Businesses need reliable supplies of energy at affordable and predictable prices to remain competitive. The production, distribution and use of energy, unless wisely managed, can threaten the economy of this state, the quality of our air and water, and the health of our residents.

Planning for this more responsible future must begin with understanding our current energy environment and challenges, and understanding what the future will look like if we continue on our current path. The consequences of our current path will result in an energy environment that will be less reliable, environmentally irresponsible, and will threaten to undermine economic growth in the state.

NJ’s goal is to establish reliable energy supplies that are both environmentally responsible and competitively priced. Building that future will require not only long-term actions, but also immediate investments that will help to ease our energy costs in the short term, create jobs, grow clean energy businesses, and establish the clean energy industry as a cornerstone of the state’s economy.

Growth in the supply of electricity has not been keeping up with the growth in demand. Our ability to maintain reliable, competitively priced supply is threatened by the fact that we have, over the past decade, consistently and dramatically increased our electricity demands at a time when the resources needed to supply this demand have consistently been reduced. Larger homes, more computers, plasma televisions, and other devices have increased our demand significantly and are likely to continue to fuel a higher demand that is not matched by growth in the capacity to satisfy this demand. Between 2002 and 2007, electric generation capacity in NJ increased annually at an average annual rate of .71%. Peak demand is expected to keep growing faster than supply has grown. It has been calculated that peak demand in NJ from 2008 – 2018 will grow at an average annual rate of about 1.75%. This projected growth in peak demand is about 2.5 times as fast as supply has grown in recent years. We need to continue progress in fixing this system by using renewable energy.

The price of energy, along with becoming increasingly volatile, has increased substantially over the past few years, and this trend is expected to continue. Without action, our contribution to global warming and other pollutants will continue to increase. The state has much less authority over the supply and price of electricity than it used to. If nothing is done to address these challenges, total energy consumption will cost customers close to 96% more than 2005 prices by 2020, and greenhouse gas emissions would increase more than 7% during the same time period.

We must maximize energy conservation and efficiency. Reducing energy consumption through conservation and increasing energy efficiency is the most cost-effective way to help close the gap between supply and demand, lower energy costs, increase reliability, and lower the state’s contributions to global warming and other air pollutants. Reducing energy consumption by at least 20% by 2020, as Governor Corzine has directed, would yield annual electricity savings of nearly 20,000 GWh (1 gigawatt hour = one billion watt hours) per year and annual heat savings of nearly 110 trillion BTUs (british thermal unit or unit of measuring energy). This reduction in energy consumption will result in significant cost savings, and thereby fuel economic growth in the state.

Reducing peak electricity demand is something else we can do. Supplying electricity during the hours of peak demand is much more expensive, due to the need to call upon more expensive sources of generation, than electricity supplied during times of non-peak demand. During these times, wholesale electricity prices may increase by anywhere from 100% to 1,000%. Solar panels will drastically reduce the peak demand because of the solar electricity generation, which occurs mainly during these times.

by Campbell’s Construction

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