The energy research and development administration was created in 1974 due to the country’s need for additional energy sources.The goal was to research new technology and conserve the existing energy resources. This program was to coordinate with numerous agencies in the federal government. President Nixon proposed this agency due to the natural gas shortage, the lack of an energy policy and increased fuel prices. It took him three years to finally create this administration with the help of congress. The Energy Reorganization Act of 1974 was signed by President Ford and created three new federal agencies, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Energy Resources Council and the Energy Research and Development Administration. The ERDA was originally …show more content…
Seamans Jr. as the first head of this program (Buck). Seamans had previously been the Secretary of the AIr Force and the deputy administrator of the NAtional Aeronautics and Space Administration's. In order to prove that the ERDA was not just a new version of the Atomic Energy Commision he choose to base his headquarters in Washington instead of Maryland. Along with his team, they headed programs for fossil, solar, geothermal, nuclear and advanced energy systems and received the bulk of the budget. They also worked on conservation, safety, national security and the environment. The conservation program was added in extra since it is not really about research or development. They included it since Congress saw that future generations would struggle with available energy resources if the United States did not start to conserve. Seamans created the first national energy plan known as “Creating Energy Choices for the Future.” The main purposes of that plan were to beat the technical problems that inhibited expansion of energy sources and the express the importance of conservation in cars, industrial and building settings. This eventually created the Solar Energy Research Institute in 1974 to assist the ERDA.His plan also mention generating solar power and speeding up the process to extract gases