The Bush Administration National Energy Policy offers no immediate relief to California's deepening electrical shortage and warns that summer heat could bring even more and longer-lasting blackouts than originally feared.

As with gasoline prices, the plan looks to increased supplies and reduced demand to offer long term relief.

The Bush plan calls for the EPA to conduct a 90-day study into the feasibility of rolling back a federal rule requiring existing power generation plants to install new, state-of-the-art pollution control and monitoring systems whenever they upgrade facilities or expand output capacity.

Along with increasing gasoline supplies, the plan looks to increase power supplies by allowing petroleum companies to drill for oil and natural gas on parts of the 23-million acre Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) in Alaska. The plan asks the EPA to conduct a study of federal environmental regulations currently preventing this.

To increase nuclear power production, the Bush energy policy calls for: 

• A $1.5 billion tax incentive package to promote the sale of nuclear power plants
  
  
• The expenditure of up to $2 billion over 10 years to develop environmentally sound methods for burning coal to generate electrical power
  
  
• Streamlining the bureaucratic process of licensing new nuclear power plants to speed their development
  
  
• A new study into the feasibility of reprocessing spent nuclear fuel, an idea abandoned in the 1980s due to projected high costs
  
  
• Continued study of deep underground storage of spent nuclear fuel

In summarizing the current U.S. energy situation, the 163-page report states, "A fundamental imbalance between supply and demand defines our nation's energy crisis.''

Responding to that imbalance, Vice President Cheney suggests the Bush administration's energy plan represents a long-term strategy of applying advanced technology to achieve adequate supplies of energy while maintaining sound environmental and economic policy.

• Complete National Energy Policy Report
View or download all or separate sections of the report direct from the White House Web site. (You will need the free Adobe .pdf file viewer. Get it here.)