I wonder where we would be right now if Clinton and Bush had not just sat on their hands expecting the car companies to voluntarily raise efficiency? I wonder too if Clinton and Bush were that stupid or if they just thought we were?

My prediction is that by 2025 oil will be more expensive (probably offsetting higher mileage) and electricity will be cheaper, as will electric vehicles. Just my guess.

I wouldn't bet that electricity will be cheaper by 2025. During the next decade we're probably going to see a lot of paid off coal and nuclear plants close. We have a lot of plants nearing the ends of their useful lives.

Those ~2-5 cent sources will be replaced with 4-5 cent wind, solar and NG. Replacing them with new coal and nuclear would be really expensive.

But 5-10 years later we should see the cost of electricity fall as we pay off the first generation of panels and turbines and then enjoy their almost free electricity. Or at least stay somewhat level as the cost of other items inflate.

I don't think our household/commercial budgets will suffer to any real extent. We've got an aggressive efficiency program underway. As prices rise we'll be cutting our overall use so there will be some balancing out.

And switching to EVs/PHEVs will bring some very significant energy bill savings. Especially if we stick a few solar panels on our roofs and make our own.

I suspect that ten years from now if we stumble on a copy of this report we'll think it most quaint. We're likely to be well underway in our transition off fuel altogether.

We will be using liquid hydrocarbon fuels much longer than 10 years. The oil companies have a slide set that shows wide spread use for more than 50 years.

The complete switch from liquid fuel vehicles to electrified units will take 3 to 4 decades. It will be progressive, starting very slowly, early in the current decade, but it will gain speed by 2020 or so when improved lower cost batteries and FCs are available.

EVs and FCEVs will probably coexist, specially during ICEVs phase out period.

There will be no such thing as new $0.05/kWh nuclear energy. Canadian Candu overhaul cost drove production to over $0.11/kWh in NB Canada and would have been the same in Quebec Canada. That is the reason why the last Candu was shut down (01-01-2013) instead of overhauling it. Ontario is facing the same problem with most of their installed sites. That is why $100B to $150B Fed $$$ are requested. Meanwhile, Ontario is building more NG power plants and running the old Candu till they fail.

Total production cost for/from new Nuke sites are closer to $0.15/kWh than $0.05/kWh in North America.

It may still be an interesting solution in China where construction cost is up to 3 times lower and 3 times faster and NG is up to 3 times more costly than in USA/Canada.

Now and for the near future, NG power plants are the quickest and cheapest to install and operate in North America due to very low NG/SG price and mature/safe technologies.

Fast breeder reactors and thorium will power humanity for the next thousand years, the rest is a distraction and delusion.

What ever

What will most likely fund PHEV's cost premium over ICEV can be financing for car purchase, perhaps payment over 10 years. Owners of PHEV's will pay more for monthly car payment, but will pay less for energy cost and for car repairs and maintenance like oil changes and filter changes and brakes maintenance and repair. I believe that PHEV's owners will pay less for total ownership cost of PHEV's vs. owners of ICEV, immediately, via monthly total car expenses.

Another surprising bonus is that PHEV's owners will find that their PHEV's will last twice as long as the equivalent ICEV, 300k miles for PHEV's vs 150k miles for ICEV. So, after their PHEV's are fully paid off, the PHEV's owners will be laughing all the way to the bank, and every times passing by a gas station! So, cost per mile for ICEV's vs. cost per mile for PHEV when factored in the double durability of PHEV, we will find that the cost per mile in a PHEV will be a lot lower. A $20k ICEV when driven to 150k miles will incurr a cost of 13 cents/mile. A $32k PHEV when driven to 300k miles will incur a cost of only 10.6 cents/mile, already costing less than an ICEV per mile driven.

Now, considering all the savings in energy cost over the 300k miles and the savings in maintenance cost over that duration and one will see that PHEV will save a lot of money. An ICEV having 25mpg will consume 6,000 gal of gasoline, and at $3.5/gal, will cost $21,000 in fuel cost. A PHEV with 50mpg and driven 50% gas/50% electric will cost $5200 for gasoline cost, and will cost $3000 in electricity cost at 3mi/kWh and electricity cost of 12 cents/kWh, for a total cost of $8,200 total energy cost.

$21,000 vs $8,100, after 150,000 miles... hmmm!!! The best-kept secret in PHEV's money saving potential!

If you look at sales for EV/PHEV we will have less than 1% of the cars on the road EV/PHEV in 10 years.

I wouldn't be so sure.  PHEV market penetration is going a lot faster than hybrids did, back in the days of the original Honda Insight and Prius.  6500 or so vehicles in October, if continued, would be well over ½% of annual sales—and some of the models like the Fusion Energi are not yet a year old.  I would not be surprised if hybrids are 10% of the market and plug-ins are 2% by 4Q2014, with both on steep upward trajectories.  In 10 years, 65% and 25%, with 10% BEVs.

One way to promote BEVs/PHEVs sales in USA would be with interest FREE 10-year LOANS (**) for 100% of the purchase price, for the vehicles and home charging units.

A second way to boast EVs sales would be reduced sale taxes and reduced yearly registration fees for the first 5 or 10 years? States could be fully compensated with an equivalent higher sale tax on fossil fuels.

(**) This could be done by using some of the new $85B printed every month?

There may be another way to produce clean electricity at an acceptable cost.

A local firm, in Becancour Q.C., in partnership with Boeing, will build and install Water turbines (Hydroliennes) in major rapids (and where water flow is at a fair pace) in the St-Lawrence River adjacent Montreal City. Those small turbines will produce 1000 to 2000 KW each 24/7. Small diameter, longer units will be used for shallow rivers. Up to 40,000 units could be installed in the St-Lawrence and other local rivers.

The energy produced will cost more than with large Wind turbines (Éoliennes) but energy production will be 24/7 and ideal for base load and for small villages near a source of fast moving water.

There are a couple CAES systems which capture and store the heat created during the compression cycle and use it to reheat the air on its way to the turbine.

If batteries are only recycling once every three days then we're enjoying an abundance of cheap wind and solar. Not to worry. The price of wind/solar/storage electricity will still be far less than 16c/kWh.

Don't forget. Any appreciable penetration of nuclear would also require storage. We built quite a bit back when we were building reactors a few decades ago.

Onshore wind and solar tend to produce in opposition. Wind tends to blow more at night and in the winter. The times during which solar is off its game.

local windfarms are somewhat correlated, but it only takes a 50 mile distance to reduce the correlation dramatically, and over 100 miles it's pretty close to zero.

I'm sorry, but this is so laughably wrong I'm shocked that you could write it.  I've seen weather maps where winds from Texas to the Dakotas were in the calm-to-15-MPH range (typical of summer heat waves, BTW).  I've personally experienced fronts blowing through which would hit an entire set of coastal wind farms spanning 250 miles within an hour.  One minute, light winds; the next, blowing 25 MPH or more... and this change would cross a major wind farm about as fast as the wind itself.

pumped storage systems like Ludington were needed by nuclear - they're now becoming less necessary because of solar.

On the contrary, the rapid variations in output from wind+solar REQUIRE something like pumped storage (or conventional hydro), because thermal plants react poorly to such variations in net generation.  That's probably why Ludington's pumps are being upgraded, to the tune of about 300 megawatts.  This wasn't needed when it was just Palisades and Cook, but add heaps of wind farms and suddenly it's upgrade time.

There's trouble brewing.  If you don't remember the August 2003 blackout in the USA, don't worry, you'll have a really good chance of a repeat in the next few years anywhere they've tried to "go green".