10/25/06 Getting to 25x25

Getting to 25x25. I'm Greg Martin with today's Line On Agriculture. Yesterday we talked about the daunting task of making sure that by the year 2025, 25% of our energy comes from renewable sources. Read Smith is the 25x25 committee co-chair. He says it will take some time to make this happen. SMITH: Let's just look at the numbers through 2004, our country consumed about 100 quads of energy and a quad is a quadrillion BTU's. It's a measurement of energy consumed. We're talking about heat power and transportation so it's a large number. So in 2004 about 100 quads. About 5 quads of that in 2004, if you count old hydro, was delivered through renewables. About half of that is hydros, about half of that is biomass. I f you go out to 2025 they are looking in the neighborhood of 136 quads of energy consumption by our country at that time and if you take 25 percent of that number you can see we need to develop a considerable amount of renewable energy. This is not going to be easy. Business as usual will not get us to 25% by the year 2025. Smith has a positive outlook to the success of the project but there is some opposition. SMITH: I think what we have seen in the northwest and in Washington State in particular as there is a ballot initiative on renewable portfolio standard. It tends to make some of the power generators nervous when the public is telling them how to do their business. You know I'm sympathetic to them but I guess the point is we need to give the marketplace some certainty that some of these things are going to happen. While 25x25 is ambitious, it's not unrealistic and everyone can help. SMITH: I think each one of us has a role to play, some large, some not so large. But certainly holding the decision makers to their word and making them responsible to us is probably the key thing that the average soccer mom can do. We all need to be more knowledgeable about what our sources of energy are. For more information visit their website at www.25x25.org. That's today's Line On Agriculture. I'm Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.