Preface

On December 17, 2004, Senator Jeff Bingaman, ranking Minority Member of the U.S. Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, requested that the Energy Information Administration (EIA) assess the impacts of the recommendations made by the National Commission on Energy Policy (NCEP), a nongovernmental privately funded entity, in its December 2004 report entitled Ending the Energy Stalemate: A Bipartisan Strategy to Meet America’s Energy Challenges. This report provides EIA’s analysis of those NCEP recommendations on energy supply, demand, and imports that could be simulated using the National Energy Modeling System (NEMS). The impacts of the NCEP recommendations analyzed are compared with results published by EIA in the Annual Energy Outlook 2005 (AEO2005).

The legislation that established EIA in 1977 vested the organization with an element of statutory independence. EIA does not take positions on policy questions. It is the responsibility of EIA to provide timely, high-quality information and to perform objective, credible analyses in support of the deliberations of both public and private decisionmakers. This report does not represent the official position of the U.S. Department of Energy or the Administration.

The model projections in this report are not statements of what will happen but of what might happen, given the assumptions and methodologies used. The reference case projections are business-as-usual trend forecasts, given known technology, technological and demographic trends, and current laws and regulations. Thus, they provide a policy-neutral starting point that can be used to analyze policy initiatives. EIA does not propose, advocate, or speculate on future legislative and regulatory changes. All laws are assumed to remain as currently enacted; however, the impacts of scheduled regulatory changes, when defined, are reflected.