America needs affordable and reliable energy sources to power our economy, provide prosperous personal living standards, and compete with global competitors. We also want to produce and use energy sources in a way that safeguards a clean and ecologically healthy environment.
Affordable, reliable, and clean. This is the foundational tripod of sound energy policy. Affordability is necessary to ensure consumers can afford the electricity we need for our day-to-day lives. Reliability is necessary to ensure electricity is available whenever we need it. Environmental impact is important because we all want to be good stewards of our environment.
In this paper, we analyze and assign an objective numerical score for competing energy sources regarding each of the three factors. Adding the three scores for each energy source, we arrive at an overall full-spectrum score for affordable, reliable, and clean energy.
For the purposes of this paper, we will confine our inquiry to energy for electrical power generation. The potential exists for a future paper, applying the same factors regarding transportation fuels.
In this paper, we will score seven electrical generation sources. They are, in alphabetical order, biomass, coal, hydropower, natural gas, nuclear power, solar power, and wind power.
