The following appeared in a memorandum from the planning department of an electric power company.

"Several recent surveys indicate that home owners are increasingly eager to conserve energy. At the same time, manufacturers are now marketing many home appliances, such as refrigerators and air conditioners, that are almost twice as energy efficient as those sold a decade ago. Also, new technologies for better home insulation and passive solar heating are readily available to reduce the energy needed for home heating. Therefore, the total demand for electricity in our area will not increase — and may decline slightly. Since our three electric generating plants in operation for the past twenty years have always met our needs, construction of new generating plants will not be necessary."

Write a response in which you examine the stated and/or unstated assumptions of the argument. Be sure to explain how the argument depends on these assumptions and what the implications are for the argument if the assumptions prove unwarranted.




MY RESPONSE:


The author of the memorandum of the planning department of the electric company concludes that there won’t be any need of new power generating plants as the existing three plants are functioning properly for the previous 2 decades and is sufficient to provide electricity to the for the town.This conclusion made by the author are based on few assumptions which if not substantiated will weaken the argument.

First of all,the memorandum states th at survey results show that there are eager home owners who are willing to conserve electricity. The memorandum does not state under which circumstances the survey was conducted. The survey maybe, was done only in few select areas where enthusiastic owners who are willing to conserve energy/electricity are present. Moreover the survey perhaps was conducted when the electricity prices were on a rise which lead the home owners to show interest in conserving electricity. If either of there scenarios are true the conclusion by the author will not hold water.

Secondly, the author states that the home appliances like refrigerators and air conditioners are twice as energy efficient as they were a decade ago.The author assumes that the conditions today and a decade ago are similar.Maybe a decade ago the efficiency rating standards were different and aggressive compared to todays approach. There is a possibility that the prices of the home appliances has increased as their efficiency increased.This increase in prices may lead the home owners and consumers of these products to choose less efficient and cheaper alternatives. If these cases are to be proven true, the presumption that author based the claims are weakened.

Finally even if the new technologies that the author states such as home insulation and passive solar heating leads to less energy needs the author assumes that these new technologies will be in use forever. Perhaps the town is situated in place which has mostly hot days for the large part of the year.if its such a case the new technologies will become obsolete and not useful. This will again make owners buy other products which are heavy on energy consuming and decrease the efficiency and increase energy demands.

In conclusion, there is a possibility that these arguments provided by the memorandum are true. But as it stands now the argument is based on few unwarranted assumptions which weaken the conclusion that there is no necessity for new power generation plants. Thus the author needs to provide evidence for his arguments to prove his conclusion true.