Empower Network

Green Technology

The United States faces three urgent challenges: economic recovery, global warming and reducing our dependence on foreign oil. We believe that new energy technologies will play a strong role in helping address all three.

Adopting new energy technologies will energize the economy by creating jobs, stimulating demand for new goods and services, and building the basis to compete in a more efficient 21st century global marketplace. Clean energy technologies will limit global warming by rapidly "decarbonizing" our economy. Finally, new energy technologies can help wean us from our dependence on imported oil, most directly through the adoption of electric vehicles.

Policy support will be needed to develop and finance most new energy technologies in the short-term, but the cost of those policies can be minimized by coupling them with competitive private sector investments. We believe a clean energy standard promoting all forms of low- and no-carbon technologies as well as sensible policies to support the adoption of electric vehicles are the right tools to drive this competitive private sector investment. More important than policy is the consumer. The American consumer is making an irreversible move to sustainability, and the choices to act sustainably are finally developing in the energy industry. Companies like NRG must commit to showing consumers that green products are affordable, fun and cool, getting rid of the old notion that green means expensive or out of the mainstream.

NRG's clean energy projects are already creating substantial engineering and construction jobs and will continue to do so over the next several years, all while jump-starting critical reductions in our country's carbon dioxide and other air emissions. And our work expanding electric vehicle charging infrastructure is directly reducing our nation's dependence on foreign oil while reducing pollution by switching cars to run on lower emission electricity.