The Governor’s appointed Energy Council and the Georgia Environmental Facilities Authority (GEFA) released the State Energy Strategy in December 2006. This fifth and final draft comes after 10 months of work from GEFA staff, 1 round of public comments and several meetings of the appointed Energy Council.

The final strategy is a mixed bag—it correctly emphasizes the importance of renewables and efficiency to Georgia’s energy future but it also falls short of recommending strong and enforceable standards to drive these goals. The final draft also includes recommendations that support IGCC coal power, nuclear energy and coastal drilling for oil and gas, these three strategies will hurt the environment and public health and do little to diversify our energy supply and were not included in the original Energy Strategy.

Happily, the strategy does contain several important suggestions such as the creation of a Public Benefits Fund (changed to a Clean Energy Fund in the final draft), the adoption of a State Energy Efficiency Goal, Recommendations around Global Warming, and green state spending guidelines. It will now be up to Governor Perdue and the Georgia General Assembly to turn these recommendations into law and change Georgia’s status quo of dirty, dangerous, and unreliable energy production.