What's the deal with using 2005 as the reference date for the 30% cuts? Do we not have more accurate carbon measurements since then? Is it to make the cuts seem smaller since 2014's emissions are probably bigger than 05. There must be some specific reason to pick a reference date of almost a decade ago. Any thoughts?
2. The recession messed with a lot of energy and consumption so that the years from 2008-2012 or so are something of anomalies.
3. There have been significant rollbacks and cuts to getting datasets complete. It used to be we were only a year or two behind in lots of the published federal data. I've found it to be far more scattershot today, and sometimes just cross my fingers and hope they have managed to stay up to date. That said, the EIA has mostly managed to stay on top of their annual publications.
4. Natural gas prices bottomed out a couple years ago, and we'll have a glut of it for a while, keeping prices much lower than they were in the early 2000s.
5. Coal plants are getting replaced with natural gas combined cycle because of the fuel costs, and also because of new regulations on the new MATS stuff (also in the link above).
6. "Clean" coal has mostly been a bust. Duke Indiana's been trying to get their gasification plant to full capacity for a while, and cost ovverruns has resulted in them asking for rate increases. Also, carbon capture still isn't up to snuff, and underground gasification never took off.
