Secretary of Energy Moniz did an exit interview with DOE’s podcast team
By Doug Houseman
Ernest Moniz is an award winning Nuclear Physicist who was a professor at MIT before being confirmed as the Secretary of Energy in March of 2013. He had previously served as the Under Secretary of Energy in the 1990s. In 2008 Obama for America issued an Energy Fact Sheet[1]. The article below is a combination of the promises for the electric industry in the fact sheet, the exit interview from Secretary Moniz and other sources listed in the footnotes.
In the fact sheet there were two opening issues that to be President Obama stated – the first was the US dependence on foreign oil, the second was climate change. Oil consumption in the US hit bottom during the recession in 2011, and imports hit bottom during the recession in 2014, since those dates, both have been rising. Overall dependence on foreign oil has dropped by 21 percent since the Energy Fact Sheet was released based on Energy Information Agency data. Significant investment was made in renewable energy during Secretary Moniz term raising renewable’s share of electricity produced to 13% in 2015. Many factors go into these results, from falling global oil prices, to photovoltaic prices falling dramatically.