Why start now on a national smart grid....
Today’s post: Wednesday, 3-25-2009
It’s imperative that we begin work on a well run and extensive national electrical transmission grid now.
Doing a good job of this is as important to our future prosperity as the Interstate highway system was in its day.
A national electricity transmission grid is now being considered in part to help us best develop & use large and multiple locations and sources for renewable energy.
There are actually five reasons for this.:
1. Some of the best locations with the most renewable energy potential are NOT now served with electrical transmission lines.
2. Many of the best locations with the most renewable energy potential are located far from the residences and businesses that will most need their output and the transmission lines between them are not yet built.
3. With the very large numbers of small sources of renewably generated electricity we expect to develop, we need to have some way of distributing the electricity to the locations that most need them at any particular point in time. This is related to the previous point; but will also be important for smaller sources in areas that already have transmission to help balance the supply and demand between parts of the existing transmission grid that are not now connected.
4. Particularly for solar generated electricity it will be important to be able to send electricity from areas still getting plenty of sunshine to areas far away where the sun has already set and lighting is needed. Large scale solar thermal sources in the Southwestern United States and in Mexico CAN efficiently save the heat for many hours after the sun goes down to aid in this process; but we will need to add the transmission lines to those areas and be able to send electricity East across all the time zones of the United States to enhance this capacity and extend the hours of the day we can use this renewable energy in our East coast cities.
5. Some areas of the United States have more people and businesses than good locations for renewable energy.
In short, to be able to have renewable energy come as close as possible to providing all our electricity it’s imperative we have this national transmission grid.
I’ve read that some people are saying that instead of building this grid system, we should develop multiple sources of renewable energy that are already near the populations they will serve and quite close to existing transmission lines to get usable renewable energy in place soon.
What they are in favor of doing is totally and absolutely correct and desirable. To provide energy independence and cut the use of fossil fuels that emit CO2 the air can’t safely handle any more, we need exactly that very fast start and we need it immediately.
Further, if all 50 states had good feed-in tariffs in place (see last week’s post) we would already be doing just that all over the US.
But that leaves as much as 60 % of the available renewable energy undeveloped and unused if that’s ALL we do.
If we start now on the national transmission grid, in 10 to 20 years we will have this other renewable energy available. And, we cannot afford to wait longer for it if we are to stop the worsening of global warming and continue to wind down the use of fossil fuels without starving our economy for energy or running up its cost enough to cause economic slowdowns.
Last but far from least, since this is an investment that will produce positive returns, the jobs that building the national transmission grid will produce have an extra justification; but in addition to that, what makes doing this now so valuable now is that having those jobs begin to come online in the next one to three years will help reverse our current recession.
So, in my view, on practically every point, the national transmission grid is something we should begin to build immediately.
Wednesday, March 25, 2009
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
How renewable energy can reverse the recession....
Today’s post: Wednesday, 3-18-2009
We have a proven method to create local and national jobs that is financeable NOW that will also put so much renewable energy in use, we can stop the worsening of global warming. And, this will create enough jobs and new energy to reverse the current recession by itself if we use it everywhere we can.
Why on earth aren’t we using it??!
It’s pretty simple. The people who should be putting it in place don’t know it exists or they know too little about it to see its value.
1. Right now we have a vicious circle effect in place. Banks and investors either won’t lend or invest or they will only look at extremely safe things that produce a near guaranteed positive return even if it’s not very high.
This is because they just lost money on almost everything else and have less money to lend or invest.
And, since, so far, such things are rare and do little to expand companies or trigger hiring of more people, we have virtually no growing areas of our economy hiring more people.
So many people have stopped buying and others have stopped buying because they lost their jobs and can’t buy. This has forced layoffs due to reduced demand.
And each step of this feeds back into the previous ones and keeps this circle of economic decrease in operation.
The emergency increase in production and willingness to work hard caused by World War II reversed this to end the depression.
So, to reverse this severe recession we need something that will have that effect now.
And, as we’ve seen, it has to fit the parameters that will get it financed in today’s economic conditions.
2. Other than the people in it, our economy only runs as well as the amount of productive energy use allows it to run. And, that means the energy sources have to be there to provide that energy.
But the fossil fuels our economy mostly runs on now, we need to stop using ASAP.
We are running out of them at just the time our population is increasing and many parts of the world have been growing economically. Recently that caused a severe run up in prices. And, if we continue relying on these fossil fuels, we’ll have economic collapse when they begin to run out. In addition to that, we have already put more CO2 in the air than we can allow and have our climate support our food supply & good health as well as it has been. So to preserve our food supply and way of life and health, we must very quickly stop using fossil fuels at all if we possibly can. Plus, we already will have large costs due to coastal flooding that will be even worse if we do not wean ourselves from fossil fuels very soon.
Here’s the story you likely missed that lays out in detail how this new but proven solution produces new jobs in abundance including jobs local to the places where it’s used and how effective it is in increasing renewable energy.
Even better, it needs NO tax dollars, is financeable even under current conditions, and it adds value so fast and efficiently, in practice. energy costs where it has been used have gone up very little.
“The Rooftop Revolution
A little-known policy is turning sleepy central Florida into a green energy hub.
Could it do the same for America at large?” (Clearly it can and will.)
“By Mariah Blake
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2009/0903.blake.html
This winter, as Congress was scrambling to pass the stimulus package, the bottom fell out of the renewable energy sector the very industry that lawmakers have held out as our best hope of salvaging the economy. Trade groups like the American Wind Energy Association, which as recently as December was forecasting "another record-shattering year of growth," began predicting that new installations would plunge by 30 to 50 percent. Solar panel manufacturers that had been blazing a trail of growth announced a wave of layoffs. Some have since cut their workforces in half, as stock prices tumble and plans for new green energy projects stall.
But there is one place where capital is still flowing:
Gainesville, Florida.
Even as solar panels are stacking up in warehouses around the country, this city of 120,000 is gearing up for a solar power boom, fueled by homegrown businesses and scrappy investors who have descended on the community and are hiring local contractors to install photovoltaic panels on rooftops around town.
One of those investors is Tim Morgan, a tall fifty something man with slicked-back hair and ostrich-skin boots who owns a chain of electrical contracting companies. His industry has been hit hard by the downturn, but he has a plan to salvage his business, which he explained over a drink at the Ballyhoo Grill, a gritty Gainesville bar with rusty license plates nailed to the wall and Jimmy Buffett blaring on the jukebox. Morgan intends to rent roof space from eighty Gainesville businesses and install twenty-five-kilowatt
solar generating systems on each of them, for a total of two megawatts a project that would nearly double Florida’s solar-generating capacity. He estimates the venture will cost between $16 million and $20 million and bring in $1.4 million a year. Already, he has lined up financing, found local contractors to do the installation, and staked claims to the rooftops of at least fifty businesses. "And we’re just one tiny player," he told me. "Look around. You can see how fast this thing is going to move.."
Indeed, around Gainesville similar projects abound. Paradigm Properties, a residential real estate company, plans to install photovoltaic arrays on fifty local apartment buildings and its downtown headquarters. Achira Wood, a custom carpentry outlet, is plastering the roof of its workshop roughly 50,000 square feet of galvanized steel with solar panels. Interstate Mini Storage is doing the same with its sprawling flat-roofed compound. Tom Lane, who owns ECS Solar Energy Systems, a local solar contractor, told me he’s planning to expand his staff from eleven to at least fifty. "The activity we’ve seen is just explosive," he said. "I’ve been in the business thirty years and I’ve never seen anything like it."
Why is the renewable energy market in Gainesville booming while it’s collapsing elsewhere in the country? The answer boils down to policy. In early February, the city became the first in the nation to adopt a "feed-in tariff" a clunky and un-descriptive name for a bold incentive to foster renewable energy. Under this system, the local power company is required to buy renewable energy from independent producers, no matter how small, at rates slightly higher than the average cost of production. This means anyone with a cluster of solar cells on their roof can sell the power they produce at a profit. The costs of the program are passed on to ratepayers, who see a small rise in their electric bills (in Gainesville the annual increase is capped at 1 percent). While rate hikes are seldom popular, the community has rallied behind this policy, because unlike big power plant construction the costs of which are also passed on to the public everyone has the opportunity to profit, either by investing themselves or by tapping into the groundswell of economic activity the incentive creates.
Though Gainesville is the first to take the leap, other U.S. cities are also moving toward adopting feed-in tariffs. Hawaii plans to enact one this summer, and at least ten other states are considering following suit. Among them is hard-hit Michigan, where Governor Jennifer Granholm has promised that the policy will help salvage the state’s economy and create thousands of jobs by allowing "every homeowner, every business" to become "a renewable energy entrepreneur." There is also a bill for a federal feed-in tariff before Congress.
Could this approach help revive our renewable energy market, and give a needed jolt to the U.S. economy?
There is reason to believe it could.
In Germany, which pioneered the modern feed-in tariff, it has given rise to the world’s most vibrant green energy sector. More than forty countries, from Nicaragua to Israel, have followed Germany’s lead, often with dramatic results. Study after study has shown that not only do feed-in tariffs deliver more renewable energy than other market incentives, they do so at a lower cost. "People hesitate to call anything a panacea," says Toby Couture, an energy and financial markets analyst at the Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory. "But if you’re interested in creating jobs, getting capital flowing, and expanding renewable energy, feed-in tariffs get the job done often more cost effectively than other policies."
To understand why feed-in tariffs are potentially revolutionary, you first have to understand how they differ from the system we’ve been using to drive investment in renewable energy so far. For the last fifteen years, the United States has relied on a patchwork of state subsidies and federal tax breaks mostly production tax credits for wind power, which let investors take write-offs for the energy produced. When Wall Street was riding high on mortgage-backed securities, this made green energy an appealing option for big banks, which funneled billions of dollars into sprawling wind farms as a way of lowering their taxes. But when the market collapsed and corporate profits dried up, so did the incentive to invest. Since last year, the number of tax equity investors mainly big investment banks sinking money into wind farms has dwindled from as many as eighteen to four, and the remaining players have scaled back.
This tax-based system has other drawbacks as well. Because Congress has to renew the tax credits and has often failed to do so renewable energy is a risky market. Frenzied bursts of investment are followed by near-total collapse, a pattern that has hampered the growth of our domestic green manufacturing sector. Also, tax incentives (and the quota systems in place in about half of U.S. states) end up favoring large-scale projects, mostly monster wind farms concentrated in remote places like the Texas panhandle. This has been lucrative for the companies, like GE and Siemens, that build them, but of limited economic benefit to local communities. What’s more, a lot of energy is wasted transporting power from the sparsely populated areas where it’s produced to the cities and coasts assuming it can be transported at all. Transmission lines are in such short supply that turbines (and occasionally entire wind farms) sometimes have to be shut down because of bottlenecks in the grid.
Feed-in tariffs promise to solve many of these problems by encouraging small, local production, driven not by Wall Street banks but by ordinary entrepreneurs a system that boosts efficiency and fortifies local economies..
Feed-in tariffs are not a new idea. In fact the United States tried them once before, in the 1970s. At the time the global economy was in shambles, the result of OPEC choking off the world’s oil supply. In a bid to ward off future oil shocks, Congress passed the Public Utility Regulatory Policies Act of 1978 (PURPA), which required power companies to buy electricity from small renewable generators. This spurred a green energy boom, especially in California, which offered producers long-term contracts at rates that were tied to the then-soaring price of natural gas (specifically, they were linked to future-cost projections). Virtually all of the renewable generating power the state has today came online under the policy. More importantly, the technical breakthroughs made in California during this era helped give rise to the modern renewable energy industry.
But this approach also had some glaring flaws, which came into focus in the early 1990s, when the price of natural gas tumbled. Rates for renewable energy sank so low that there was no incentive to invest, and the industry collapsed. Power companies were also stuck with high-priced contracts, which stirred a well of public resentment. Several key states, including California, rolled back the contract requirements, essentially taking the teeth out of PURPA.
But not every nation had the luxury of cheap, abundant fossil fuels. Even in the 1980s and ’90s, when the United States was flush with energy, Germany was struggling to meet its demand a by-product of its scant oil and gas reserves and the groundswell of opposition to nuclear power after the Chernobyl meltdown. One of the solutions the country settled on was dusting off the feed-in tariff model. The original German bill, passed in 1991, only created an incentive for wind and hydropower. Still, it doubled the share of renewable electricity the country produced, from 3 to 6 percent, over the next nine years. In 2000, the incentive was extended to all renewable energy sources. The pricing structure was also overhauled so rates were tied to the cost of production and varied by energy source a key point of distinction from PURPA. The aim of the policy was to cultivate a broad enough portfolio of renewable options that Germany could one day replace fossil fuels entirely, and do so outside conventional energy markets. "Big power companies have too many vested interests against renewable energy," explains Hermann Scheer, a member of the German parliament, who championed the policy. "They will never be the driving forces behind its development."
The policy has allowed Germany not only to meet but to exceed its renewable energy goals. Initially, the aim was to get 12 percent of its electricity from renewable sources by 2010. But it passed that milestone three years early, and has since reached the 15 percent mark the most rapid growth seen in any country. By mid-century, Germany aims to increase that share to 50 percent. Already, the nation, which is about as sunny as Juneau, Alaska, is home to almost half the world’s solar generating capacity, and churns out more solar power than any country except Japan. Although it is half the size of Texas, and far less windy, it is also vying with the United States for the number one spot when it comes to generating capacity for wind power.
The driving forces behind this boom are local communities and small entrepreneurs. If you travel the country top to bottom, you’ll see the signs of this everywhere, from the drizzly port of Hamburg, where wind turbines are tucked between stacks of rusty shipping containers, to villages in the Black Forest, where farmers are ripping out ancient waterwheels and replacing them with modern turbines. In Freiburg, a walled medieval city full of cobbled streets and Gothic spires, there are roof-mounted photovoltaic panels everywhere, from churches and schools to train stations and factories, even the local soccer stadium. Some residents have also found more creative ways to harvest energy. Among them is local architect Rolf Disch: his home, which looks like a squat upside-down rocket, has a billboard-sized solar array on the roof and wrap-around balconies with liquid-filled railings that double as solar heat collectors. It also rotates to follow the sun. All told, the building generates five times more electricity than it uses. Disch has also designed solar gas stations and a suburban housing development, where the homes act like mini power stations. But he is careful to note that his clients are not hippies or eco-rebels. "These are doctors, teachers, engineers," he told me when I visited Freiburg last June. "In other words, ordinary people."
What inspires ordinary Germans to invest in renewable energy? Part of the answer is that it’s about as safe as government bonds and brings a better return. Under the German system, renewable energy producers are given long-term, fixed-rate contracts, designed to deliver a profit of 7 to 9 percent. This makes green energy a secure bet for both investors and banks.
The German system contains another ingenious feature: every year, the rate paid for new contracts falls, so a company that installs a large rooftop solar array this year will lock in a rate that is nearly 20 percent higher than one that waits until 2011. This has two salutary effects. First, it creates an incentive for would-be entrepreneurs to get in the game as soon as possible, thereby spurring a rush of investment (which helps explain why Germany was able to meet its renewable energy targets three years early). Second, it forces the green energy sector to innovate. If they want to stay in business and hold on to their margins, manufacturers have no choice but to continually seek out new efficiencies.
This combination of a fast-growing market and rapid innovation has turned the country into a green industry powerhouse. Germany is the leading destination for green capital, with $14 billion invested in 2007 alone. It is also a front-runner in green job creation. Some 300,000 people work in the nation’s renewable energy sector today. By 2020 green technology is expected pass the auto and electrical engineering industries to become the nation’s top employer, with more than 700,000 workers. One of the forces driving this growth is exports. In fact, many of the windmills and solar panels that are cropping up from New York to the Texas panhandle are made in Germany.
The economic benefits of this green tech boom have reached into the poorest corners of the country, including ragged patches of former East Germany. The region between Frankfurt-Oder and Dresden was once as grim as the drabbest outpost in the American Rust Belt. But in recent years, a vibrant green energy corridor, known as "solar valley," has sprung up amid the abandoned coal mines and shuttered factories. Thousands of workers from the defunct East German semiconductor industry (some of whom had languished for years on unemployment rolls) are now gainfully employed in solar panel factories.
Most importantly, although Germany’s economy has been devastated by the downturn, its green energy sector continues to thrive. In fact, Ernst & Young recently ranked the nation number one on its index of most attractive markets for renewable energy investment. "Just as cash is king," the report found, "feed-in tariffs are favored by investors," especially in uncertain financial times.
You might expect that a system like this one that allows countless independent producers to sell electricity at premium rates would come with a hefty price tag. But that is not the case. Studies have shown that even though German-style feed-in tariffs encourage the use of relatively expensive forms of renewable energy, such as solar power, they produce power more cheaply on a watt-for-watt basis than other renewable energy policies. This is because there is less investment risk, and less risk means investors can get lower-interest loans for generating equipment. This is one reason installing a solar panel in Freiburg costs less than it does in San Francisco. Renewable energy producers are also willing to accept lower profit margins because the returns are all but guaranteed. In contrast, under other systems utilities are forced to pay hefty risk premiums. This is particularly true of the quota systems (known as renewable portfolio standards) that are in use in about half of U.S. states and some European countries.
These findings are not lost on Germany’s neighbors. To date, at least eighteen of the European Union’s twenty-seven member states along with some twenty-five countries, cities, and provinces elsewhere in the world have adopted feed-in tariffs. Mario Ragwitz, who is spearheading a long-term EU study comparing renewable energy incentives, says three-quarters of the renewable electricity that the bloc produces each year is a direct result of this trend. "Almost everything Europe has when it comes to clean energy stems from the feed-in tariff policy," he says. "No other system compares."
In some nations where feed-in tariffs have reached critical mass, there is evidence that they have actually driven down the overall price of electricity. This may seem counterintuitive after all, renewable energy is more expensive on average than, say, coal power. But the price of electricity is often driven by natural gas, a costly and volatile fuel that is frequently used to meet peak power needs. If you have a large volume of renewable energy (particularly less-expensive wind power) you can cut your use of natural gas, bringing prices down across the board.
In the United States, tax credits and quotas are still the policies of choice. But this may be changing. While the stimulus package expands existing incentives, it also has some novel twists. Namely, in lieu of tax write-offs, companies that break ground on renewable energy projects (such as solar, wind, and geothermal plants) in the next two years can recover 30 percent of their project costs from the Treasury in the form of direct grants. This opens the renewable market to a wide range of players, rather than just big companies with outsized tax bills.
Investors and industry analysts have hailed this as an enormous step forward one that, in concept, could unclog the pipelines of capital and breathe life back into the renewable sector. "Theoretically, this approach could really supercharge the industry," says Cai Steger of the Natural Resource Defense Council’s Center for Market Innovation. But they are divided over just how much investment it will attract. This is because, while the policy broadens the pool of potential investors, it doesn’t thaw the frozen credit markets, which have made it difficult to get financing for renewable projects (except in places where the return is guaranteed). Also, although the green energy measures in the stimulus package are longer term than past incentives (the production tax credits were extended for three years instead of one, as has often been the case in the past) they don’t entirely fix the quandary of market instability. Will the industry collapse again when the Treasury grants expire in 2010? Nobody really knows. Moreover, analysts expect the system will continue to favor large-scale projects. This means it is unlikely to spur the kind of small, local production, widespread economic development, and rapid job growth seen in places like Germany.
On this front, some lawmakers would like to see America give Europe a run for its money. "Why should Germany be dominating all this job creation?" Rep. Jay Inslee of Washington told me when I visited him on Capitol Hill in January. "It’s time for us to get in the game."
Last June, the Democratic congressman, who has long been pushing green energy as an engine of economic growth, introduced a bill for a federal feed-in tariff part of a surge of interest in the policy reaching from California to Maine. In recent months, there has been a flurry of white papers, reports, and conferences on the topic. Interest is also growing in research circles. Toby Couture of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory says that six to eight months ago many of his colleagues didn’t even know the policy existed. Now, he adds, "Everyone on my team is asking, ‘Why aren’t we doing this?’"
Congress, meanwhile, is clearing away some of the logistical stumbling blocks, like our nation’s aging, patchwork electric grid, which could make the intermittency of renewable energy difficult to manage, especially if large quantities come online at once. The stimulus package helps solve this problem by providing $11 billion to modernize our energy infrastructure and develop a "smart grid," with advanced sensors and distributed computing capabilities, so it can instantly reroute power to meet demand or avoid system overloads. This should pave the way for a better integration of renewable electricity and, perhaps, open the door to strong, consistent policy that channels America’s entrepreneurial drive into renewable energy.
The drive is there waiting to be unlocked. Just ask Tim Morgan. As the sun dipped behind the live oaks outside Ballyhoo, and "Margaritaville" blared over the speakers, he let me in on the grander scheme behind his Gainesville venture. As he trolls the city for rooftops where he can install photovoltaic arrays, he’s purposely gravitated toward chain stores. That way as other cities and states adopt feed-in tariffs, he’ll have ready-made inroads. "I wanted the system to be scalable, so I can expand," he explained. "If the incentives are right, there’s no reason there couldn’t be solar panels on every Walgreens and Sam’s Club across the country."
Will Tim Morgan turn out to be the Sam Walton of solar power? Who knows? But hearing his plan, I definitely had the sense he was a man on the ground floor of something big.”
“Mariah Blake is an editor of the Washington Monthly. This story is part of a "Big Ideas" series published in partnership with the New America Foundation.”
Today’s post: Wednesday, 3-18-2009
We have a proven method to create local and national jobs that is financeable NOW that will also put so much renewable energy in use, we can stop the worsening of global warming. And, this will create enough jobs and new energy to reverse the current recession by itself if we use it everywhere we can.
Why on earth aren’t we using it??!
It’s pretty simple. The people who should be putting it in place don’t know it exists or they know too little about it to see its value.
1. Right now we have a vicious circle effect in place. Banks and investors either won’t lend or invest or they will only look at extremely safe things that produce a near guaranteed positive return even if it’s not very high.
This is because they just lost money on almost everything else and have less money to lend or invest.
And, since, so far, such things are rare and do little to expand companies or trigger hiring of more people, we have virtually no growing areas of our economy hiring more people.
So many people have stopped buying and others have stopped buying because they lost their jobs and can’t buy. This has forced layoffs due to reduced demand.
And each step of this feeds back into the previous ones and keeps this circle of economic decrease in operation.
The emergency increase in production and willingness to work hard caused by World War II reversed this to end the depression.
So, to reverse this severe recession we need something that will have that effect now.
And, as we’ve seen, it has to fit the parameters that will get it financed in today’s economic conditions.
2. Other than the people in it, our economy only runs as well as the amount of productive energy use allows it to run. And, that means the energy sources have to be there to provide that energy.
But the fossil fuels our economy mostly runs on now, we need to stop using ASAP.
We are running out of them at just the time our population is increasing and many parts of the world have been growing economically. Recently that caused a severe run up in prices. And, if we continue relying on these fossil fuels, we’ll have economic collapse when they begin to run out. In addition to that, we have already put more CO2 in the air than we can allow and have our climate support our food supply & good health as well as it has been. So to preserve our food supply and way of life and health, we must very quickly stop using fossil fuels at all if we possibly can. Plus, we already will have large costs due to coastal flooding that will be even worse if we do not wean ourselves from fossil fuels very soon.
Here’s the story you likely missed that lays out in detail how this new but proven solution produces new jobs in abundance including jobs local to the places where it’s used and how effective it is in increasing renewable energy.
Even better, it needs NO tax dollars, is financeable even under current conditions, and it adds value so fast and efficiently, in practice. energy costs where it has been used have gone up very little.
“The Rooftop Revolution
A little-known policy is turning sleepy central Florida into a green energy hub.
Could it do the same for America at large?” (Clearly it can and will.)
“By Mariah Blake
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2009/0903.blake.html
This winter, as Congress was scrambling to pass the stimulus package, the bottom fell out of the renewable energy sector the very industry that lawmakers have held out as our best hope of salvaging the economy. Trade groups like the American Wind Energy Association, which as recently as December was forecasting "another record-shattering year of growth," began predicting that new installations would plunge by 30 to 50 percent. Solar panel manufacturers that had been blazing a trail of growth announced a wave of layoffs. Some have since cut their workforces in half, as stock prices tumble and plans for new green energy projects stall.
But there is one place where capital is still flowing:
Gainesville, Florida.
Even as solar panels are stacking up in warehouses around the country, this city of 120,000 is gearing up for a solar power boom, fueled by homegrown businesses and scrappy investors who have descended on the community and are hiring local contractors to install photovoltaic panels on rooftops around town.
One of those investors is Tim Morgan, a tall fifty something man with slicked-back hair and ostrich-skin boots who owns a chain of electrical contracting companies. His industry has been hit hard by the downturn, but he has a plan to salvage his business, which he explained over a drink at the Ballyhoo Grill, a gritty Gainesville bar with rusty license plates nailed to the wall and Jimmy Buffett blaring on the jukebox. Morgan intends to rent roof space from eighty Gainesville businesses and install twenty-five-kilowatt
solar generating systems on each of them, for a total of two megawatts a project that would nearly double Florida’s solar-generating capacity. He estimates the venture will cost between $16 million and $20 million and bring in $1.4 million a year. Already, he has lined up financing, found local contractors to do the installation, and staked claims to the rooftops of at least fifty businesses. "And we’re just one tiny player," he told me. "Look around. You can see how fast this thing is going to move.."
Indeed, around Gainesville similar projects abound. Paradigm Properties, a residential real estate company, plans to install photovoltaic arrays on fifty local apartment buildings and its downtown headquarters. Achira Wood, a custom carpentry outlet, is plastering the roof of its workshop roughly 50,000 square feet of galvanized steel with solar panels. Interstate Mini Storage is doing the same with its sprawling flat-roofed compound. Tom Lane, who owns ECS Solar Energy Systems, a local solar contractor, told me he’s planning to expand his staff from eleven to at least fifty. "The activity we’ve seen is just explosive," he said. "I’ve been in the business thirty years and I’ve never seen anything like it."
Why is the renewable energy market in Gainesville booming while it’s collapsing elsewhere in the country? The answer boils down to policy. In early February, the city became the first in the nation to adopt a "feed-in tariff" a clunky and un-descriptive name for a bold incentive to foster renewable energy. Under this system, the local power company is required to buy renewable energy from independent producers, no matter how small, at rates slightly higher than the average cost of production. This means anyone with a cluster of solar cells on their roof can sell the power they produce at a profit. The costs of the program are passed on to ratepayers, who see a small rise in their electric bills (in Gainesville the annual increase is capped at 1 percent). While rate hikes are seldom popular, the community has rallied behind this policy, because unlike big power plant construction the costs of which are also passed on to the public everyone has the opportunity to profit, either by investing themselves or by tapping into the groundswell of economic activity the incentive creates.
Though Gainesville is the first to take the leap, other U.S. cities are also moving toward adopting feed-in tariffs. Hawaii plans to enact one this summer, and at least ten other states are considering following suit. Among them is hard-hit Michigan, where Governor Jennifer Granholm has promised that the policy will help salvage the state’s economy and create thousands of jobs by allowing "every homeowner, every business" to become "a renewable energy entrepreneur." There is also a bill for a federal feed-in tariff before Congress.
Could this approach help revive our renewable energy market, and give a needed jolt to the U.S. economy?
There is reason to believe it could.
In Germany, which pioneered the modern feed-in tariff, it has given rise to the world’s most vibrant green energy sector. More than forty countries, from Nicaragua to Israel, have followed Germany’s lead, often with dramatic results. Study after study has shown that not only do feed-in tariffs deliver more renewable energy than other market incentives, they do so at a lower cost. "People hesitate to call anything a panacea," says Toby Couture, an energy and financial markets analyst at the Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory. "But if you’re interested in creating jobs, getting capital flowing, and expanding renewable energy, feed-in tariffs get the job done often more cost effectively than other policies."
To understand why feed-in tariffs are potentially revolutionary, you first have to understand how they differ from the system we’ve been using to drive investment in renewable energy so far. For the last fifteen years, the United States has relied on a patchwork of state subsidies and federal tax breaks mostly production tax credits for wind power, which let investors take write-offs for the energy produced. When Wall Street was riding high on mortgage-backed securities, this made green energy an appealing option for big banks, which funneled billions of dollars into sprawling wind farms as a way of lowering their taxes. But when the market collapsed and corporate profits dried up, so did the incentive to invest. Since last year, the number of tax equity investors mainly big investment banks sinking money into wind farms has dwindled from as many as eighteen to four, and the remaining players have scaled back.
This tax-based system has other drawbacks as well. Because Congress has to renew the tax credits and has often failed to do so renewable energy is a risky market. Frenzied bursts of investment are followed by near-total collapse, a pattern that has hampered the growth of our domestic green manufacturing sector. Also, tax incentives (and the quota systems in place in about half of U.S. states) end up favoring large-scale projects, mostly monster wind farms concentrated in remote places like the Texas panhandle. This has been lucrative for the companies, like GE and Siemens, that build them, but of limited economic benefit to local communities. What’s more, a lot of energy is wasted transporting power from the sparsely populated areas where it’s produced to the cities and coasts assuming it can be transported at all. Transmission lines are in such short supply that turbines (and occasionally entire wind farms) sometimes have to be shut down because of bottlenecks in the grid.
Feed-in tariffs promise to solve many of these problems by encouraging small, local production, driven not by Wall Street banks but by ordinary entrepreneurs a system that boosts efficiency and fortifies local economies..
Feed-in tariffs are not a new idea. In fact the United States tried them once before, in the 1970s. At the time the global economy was in shambles, the result of OPEC choking off the world’s oil supply. In a bid to ward off future oil shocks, Congress passed the Public Utility Regulatory Policies Act of 1978 (PURPA), which required power companies to buy electricity from small renewable generators. This spurred a green energy boom, especially in California, which offered producers long-term contracts at rates that were tied to the then-soaring price of natural gas (specifically, they were linked to future-cost projections). Virtually all of the renewable generating power the state has today came online under the policy. More importantly, the technical breakthroughs made in California during this era helped give rise to the modern renewable energy industry.
But this approach also had some glaring flaws, which came into focus in the early 1990s, when the price of natural gas tumbled. Rates for renewable energy sank so low that there was no incentive to invest, and the industry collapsed. Power companies were also stuck with high-priced contracts, which stirred a well of public resentment. Several key states, including California, rolled back the contract requirements, essentially taking the teeth out of PURPA.
But not every nation had the luxury of cheap, abundant fossil fuels. Even in the 1980s and ’90s, when the United States was flush with energy, Germany was struggling to meet its demand a by-product of its scant oil and gas reserves and the groundswell of opposition to nuclear power after the Chernobyl meltdown. One of the solutions the country settled on was dusting off the feed-in tariff model. The original German bill, passed in 1991, only created an incentive for wind and hydropower. Still, it doubled the share of renewable electricity the country produced, from 3 to 6 percent, over the next nine years. In 2000, the incentive was extended to all renewable energy sources. The pricing structure was also overhauled so rates were tied to the cost of production and varied by energy source a key point of distinction from PURPA. The aim of the policy was to cultivate a broad enough portfolio of renewable options that Germany could one day replace fossil fuels entirely, and do so outside conventional energy markets. "Big power companies have too many vested interests against renewable energy," explains Hermann Scheer, a member of the German parliament, who championed the policy. "They will never be the driving forces behind its development."
The policy has allowed Germany not only to meet but to exceed its renewable energy goals. Initially, the aim was to get 12 percent of its electricity from renewable sources by 2010. But it passed that milestone three years early, and has since reached the 15 percent mark the most rapid growth seen in any country. By mid-century, Germany aims to increase that share to 50 percent. Already, the nation, which is about as sunny as Juneau, Alaska, is home to almost half the world’s solar generating capacity, and churns out more solar power than any country except Japan. Although it is half the size of Texas, and far less windy, it is also vying with the United States for the number one spot when it comes to generating capacity for wind power.
The driving forces behind this boom are local communities and small entrepreneurs. If you travel the country top to bottom, you’ll see the signs of this everywhere, from the drizzly port of Hamburg, where wind turbines are tucked between stacks of rusty shipping containers, to villages in the Black Forest, where farmers are ripping out ancient waterwheels and replacing them with modern turbines. In Freiburg, a walled medieval city full of cobbled streets and Gothic spires, there are roof-mounted photovoltaic panels everywhere, from churches and schools to train stations and factories, even the local soccer stadium. Some residents have also found more creative ways to harvest energy. Among them is local architect Rolf Disch: his home, which looks like a squat upside-down rocket, has a billboard-sized solar array on the roof and wrap-around balconies with liquid-filled railings that double as solar heat collectors. It also rotates to follow the sun. All told, the building generates five times more electricity than it uses. Disch has also designed solar gas stations and a suburban housing development, where the homes act like mini power stations. But he is careful to note that his clients are not hippies or eco-rebels. "These are doctors, teachers, engineers," he told me when I visited Freiburg last June. "In other words, ordinary people."
What inspires ordinary Germans to invest in renewable energy? Part of the answer is that it’s about as safe as government bonds and brings a better return. Under the German system, renewable energy producers are given long-term, fixed-rate contracts, designed to deliver a profit of 7 to 9 percent. This makes green energy a secure bet for both investors and banks.
The German system contains another ingenious feature: every year, the rate paid for new contracts falls, so a company that installs a large rooftop solar array this year will lock in a rate that is nearly 20 percent higher than one that waits until 2011. This has two salutary effects. First, it creates an incentive for would-be entrepreneurs to get in the game as soon as possible, thereby spurring a rush of investment (which helps explain why Germany was able to meet its renewable energy targets three years early). Second, it forces the green energy sector to innovate. If they want to stay in business and hold on to their margins, manufacturers have no choice but to continually seek out new efficiencies.
This combination of a fast-growing market and rapid innovation has turned the country into a green industry powerhouse. Germany is the leading destination for green capital, with $14 billion invested in 2007 alone. It is also a front-runner in green job creation. Some 300,000 people work in the nation’s renewable energy sector today. By 2020 green technology is expected pass the auto and electrical engineering industries to become the nation’s top employer, with more than 700,000 workers. One of the forces driving this growth is exports. In fact, many of the windmills and solar panels that are cropping up from New York to the Texas panhandle are made in Germany.
The economic benefits of this green tech boom have reached into the poorest corners of the country, including ragged patches of former East Germany. The region between Frankfurt-Oder and Dresden was once as grim as the drabbest outpost in the American Rust Belt. But in recent years, a vibrant green energy corridor, known as "solar valley," has sprung up amid the abandoned coal mines and shuttered factories. Thousands of workers from the defunct East German semiconductor industry (some of whom had languished for years on unemployment rolls) are now gainfully employed in solar panel factories.
Most importantly, although Germany’s economy has been devastated by the downturn, its green energy sector continues to thrive. In fact, Ernst & Young recently ranked the nation number one on its index of most attractive markets for renewable energy investment. "Just as cash is king," the report found, "feed-in tariffs are favored by investors," especially in uncertain financial times.
You might expect that a system like this one that allows countless independent producers to sell electricity at premium rates would come with a hefty price tag. But that is not the case. Studies have shown that even though German-style feed-in tariffs encourage the use of relatively expensive forms of renewable energy, such as solar power, they produce power more cheaply on a watt-for-watt basis than other renewable energy policies. This is because there is less investment risk, and less risk means investors can get lower-interest loans for generating equipment. This is one reason installing a solar panel in Freiburg costs less than it does in San Francisco. Renewable energy producers are also willing to accept lower profit margins because the returns are all but guaranteed. In contrast, under other systems utilities are forced to pay hefty risk premiums. This is particularly true of the quota systems (known as renewable portfolio standards) that are in use in about half of U.S. states and some European countries.
These findings are not lost on Germany’s neighbors. To date, at least eighteen of the European Union’s twenty-seven member states along with some twenty-five countries, cities, and provinces elsewhere in the world have adopted feed-in tariffs. Mario Ragwitz, who is spearheading a long-term EU study comparing renewable energy incentives, says three-quarters of the renewable electricity that the bloc produces each year is a direct result of this trend. "Almost everything Europe has when it comes to clean energy stems from the feed-in tariff policy," he says. "No other system compares."
In some nations where feed-in tariffs have reached critical mass, there is evidence that they have actually driven down the overall price of electricity. This may seem counterintuitive after all, renewable energy is more expensive on average than, say, coal power. But the price of electricity is often driven by natural gas, a costly and volatile fuel that is frequently used to meet peak power needs. If you have a large volume of renewable energy (particularly less-expensive wind power) you can cut your use of natural gas, bringing prices down across the board.
In the United States, tax credits and quotas are still the policies of choice. But this may be changing. While the stimulus package expands existing incentives, it also has some novel twists. Namely, in lieu of tax write-offs, companies that break ground on renewable energy projects (such as solar, wind, and geothermal plants) in the next two years can recover 30 percent of their project costs from the Treasury in the form of direct grants. This opens the renewable market to a wide range of players, rather than just big companies with outsized tax bills.
Investors and industry analysts have hailed this as an enormous step forward one that, in concept, could unclog the pipelines of capital and breathe life back into the renewable sector. "Theoretically, this approach could really supercharge the industry," says Cai Steger of the Natural Resource Defense Council’s Center for Market Innovation. But they are divided over just how much investment it will attract. This is because, while the policy broadens the pool of potential investors, it doesn’t thaw the frozen credit markets, which have made it difficult to get financing for renewable projects (except in places where the return is guaranteed). Also, although the green energy measures in the stimulus package are longer term than past incentives (the production tax credits were extended for three years instead of one, as has often been the case in the past) they don’t entirely fix the quandary of market instability. Will the industry collapse again when the Treasury grants expire in 2010? Nobody really knows. Moreover, analysts expect the system will continue to favor large-scale projects. This means it is unlikely to spur the kind of small, local production, widespread economic development, and rapid job growth seen in places like Germany.
On this front, some lawmakers would like to see America give Europe a run for its money. "Why should Germany be dominating all this job creation?" Rep. Jay Inslee of Washington told me when I visited him on Capitol Hill in January. "It’s time for us to get in the game."
Last June, the Democratic congressman, who has long been pushing green energy as an engine of economic growth, introduced a bill for a federal feed-in tariff part of a surge of interest in the policy reaching from California to Maine. In recent months, there has been a flurry of white papers, reports, and conferences on the topic. Interest is also growing in research circles. Toby Couture of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory says that six to eight months ago many of his colleagues didn’t even know the policy existed. Now, he adds, "Everyone on my team is asking, ‘Why aren’t we doing this?’"
Congress, meanwhile, is clearing away some of the logistical stumbling blocks, like our nation’s aging, patchwork electric grid, which could make the intermittency of renewable energy difficult to manage, especially if large quantities come online at once. The stimulus package helps solve this problem by providing $11 billion to modernize our energy infrastructure and develop a "smart grid," with advanced sensors and distributed computing capabilities, so it can instantly reroute power to meet demand or avoid system overloads. This should pave the way for a better integration of renewable electricity and, perhaps, open the door to strong, consistent policy that channels America’s entrepreneurial drive into renewable energy.
The drive is there waiting to be unlocked. Just ask Tim Morgan. As the sun dipped behind the live oaks outside Ballyhoo, and "Margaritaville" blared over the speakers, he let me in on the grander scheme behind his Gainesville venture. As he trolls the city for rooftops where he can install photovoltaic arrays, he’s purposely gravitated toward chain stores. That way as other cities and states adopt feed-in tariffs, he’ll have ready-made inroads. "I wanted the system to be scalable, so I can expand," he explained. "If the incentives are right, there’s no reason there couldn’t be solar panels on every Walgreens and Sam’s Club across the country."
Will Tim Morgan turn out to be the Sam Walton of solar power? Who knows? But hearing his plan, I definitely had the sense he was a man on the ground floor of something big.”
“Mariah Blake is an editor of the Washington Monthly. This story is part of a "Big Ideas" series published in partnership with the New America Foundation.”
Wednesday, March 11, 2009
Economically safe ways to cut carbon use....
Today’s post: Wednesday, 3-11-2009
I. First the bad news.:
A. We may be running out of time to deal with C02 and other causes of man-made global warming.
One scientist said recently that we need to cut the current 385 ppm of CO2 to 350 ppm, which is a 10 % drop, to avoid severe economic dislocations due to unfavorable climate change within the lifetimes of many of the children being born today. Meanwhile we are actually still releasing MORE CO2 each year into the air than will allow this drop to happen though the rate of increase has slowed somewhat due to the global recession and some efforts to stop building coal-fired power plants and to install more renewable energy sources.
His take is that the only way likely to be effective to cut CO2 release fast enough is to immediately tax carbon that is burned for fuel.
B. Right now, most of our economies in the world get over 70 % of their energy from carbon fuels.
So adding to their cost now, while the world is trying to recover from a severe recession might prolong it or make it worse.
II. Clearly the have your cake and eat it too strategy is to initiate carbon taxes and cap and trade procedures now; but to minimize their near term economic costs in the near future AND to invest massive amounts of money adding renewable sources of energy, increasing our energy efficiency, and since it has political support and replaces carbon fuels, do our very best to build more nuclear plants that reuse their uranium input, so called breeder reactors, while making them as close to 100 % terrorist proof and radiation leak proof as possible.
This IS probably the wrong time for reversing the recession to add a dollar a gallon carbon tax to gasoline; and comparable taxes on burning diesel and jet fuels, coal, and natural gas –OR to initiate cap & trade rules that would incur similar costs.
However, we CAN:
a) Initiate feed-in tariffs to ALL utilities that generate electricity in the United States to support the building and financing of renewable energy sources of electricity.
That does increase costs slightly in the near term. But it increases cost moderately over the long term and very little in the first few years. That will create thousands of jobs as Germany’s use of feed-in tariffs proved already. And, while we are getting out of the current recession the increases in electricity cost will be low enough, there will be almost no drag on the economy.
b) Immediately create jobs doing inexpensive things like weatherizing homes to make them more energy efficient.
c) Where there ARE energy efficient choices already available, tax the less energy efficient choices enough to cause them to cost 10 % MORE than the energy efficient choices. That will cause little economic drag in the short term & will actually net out economic INCREASES within a year or two.
d) We can discontinue allowing companies to leave the real cost of their fuels unpaid -- such as by outlawing environmentally destructive coal mining practices and no longer allowing new coal fired plants to be built that allow ANY smoke or particulates to escape into the air.
e) Go ahead and set up carbon taxes and a cap and trade system NOW -- BUT make it contingent on the economy and the availability of renewable or nuclear substitutes in terms of when and how fast it kicks in.
They should kick in a tiny bit now to get people used to operating with them in existence and to build their payment infrastructure.
But, the base rate should be modified by the availability of noncarbon energy sources and the unemployment rate; and the base rate should go up very gradually at first.
For example, we may want and need to impose a combination carbon tax and cap & trade system to add $5 a gallon to the cost of burning gasoline or diesel fuels made from petroleum by the year 2039. But it clearly would a disaster to start with that now.
But we could add 5 cents a gallon now and likely do no harm. That would initiate these taxes.
Then, once commercial quantities of algae based biofuels are available in commercial quantities and plug in hybrids and electric cars are 40 % of all cars on the road and unemployment is again below 7 % nationally, it may make sense to start increasing the tax by 5 cents a month. Getting to those favorable conditions might take 5 to 10 years. But once we start this tax increase period, the taxes will reach a point where fossil fuels will cost MORE than the alternatives readily available with further tax increases on fossil fuels still to come. Even though that may take 15 to 20 years to completely happen, ramping these taxes up gradually in this way will make it economically safe to do. And by 25 years from now, CO2 levels in the world’s air will begin to actually go down.
Why pay $10 a gallon for gasoline when algae based fuel is $3 a gallon and running your car on solar generated electricity costs the equivalent of $1.50 a gallon? Once you can run your car on these sources, you won’t mind $10 a gallon gasoline as much as you would $4 a gallon gasoline now.
I think this IS doable.
My ideas sketched out here are not as clearly thought out as would be needed for actual legislation. But I think they contain the principles that will enable an economically safe transition that starts the taxes now but only allows them to begin to kick in fully as we bring alternatives online and our economy is recovering enough to overcome any of its short term negative effects.
Today’s post: Wednesday, 3-11-2009
I. First the bad news.:
A. We may be running out of time to deal with C02 and other causes of man-made global warming.
One scientist said recently that we need to cut the current 385 ppm of CO2 to 350 ppm, which is a 10 % drop, to avoid severe economic dislocations due to unfavorable climate change within the lifetimes of many of the children being born today. Meanwhile we are actually still releasing MORE CO2 each year into the air than will allow this drop to happen though the rate of increase has slowed somewhat due to the global recession and some efforts to stop building coal-fired power plants and to install more renewable energy sources.
His take is that the only way likely to be effective to cut CO2 release fast enough is to immediately tax carbon that is burned for fuel.
B. Right now, most of our economies in the world get over 70 % of their energy from carbon fuels.
So adding to their cost now, while the world is trying to recover from a severe recession might prolong it or make it worse.
II. Clearly the have your cake and eat it too strategy is to initiate carbon taxes and cap and trade procedures now; but to minimize their near term economic costs in the near future AND to invest massive amounts of money adding renewable sources of energy, increasing our energy efficiency, and since it has political support and replaces carbon fuels, do our very best to build more nuclear plants that reuse their uranium input, so called breeder reactors, while making them as close to 100 % terrorist proof and radiation leak proof as possible.
This IS probably the wrong time for reversing the recession to add a dollar a gallon carbon tax to gasoline; and comparable taxes on burning diesel and jet fuels, coal, and natural gas –OR to initiate cap & trade rules that would incur similar costs.
However, we CAN:
a) Initiate feed-in tariffs to ALL utilities that generate electricity in the United States to support the building and financing of renewable energy sources of electricity.
That does increase costs slightly in the near term. But it increases cost moderately over the long term and very little in the first few years. That will create thousands of jobs as Germany’s use of feed-in tariffs proved already. And, while we are getting out of the current recession the increases in electricity cost will be low enough, there will be almost no drag on the economy.
b) Immediately create jobs doing inexpensive things like weatherizing homes to make them more energy efficient.
c) Where there ARE energy efficient choices already available, tax the less energy efficient choices enough to cause them to cost 10 % MORE than the energy efficient choices. That will cause little economic drag in the short term & will actually net out economic INCREASES within a year or two.
d) We can discontinue allowing companies to leave the real cost of their fuels unpaid -- such as by outlawing environmentally destructive coal mining practices and no longer allowing new coal fired plants to be built that allow ANY smoke or particulates to escape into the air.
e) Go ahead and set up carbon taxes and a cap and trade system NOW -- BUT make it contingent on the economy and the availability of renewable or nuclear substitutes in terms of when and how fast it kicks in.
They should kick in a tiny bit now to get people used to operating with them in existence and to build their payment infrastructure.
But, the base rate should be modified by the availability of noncarbon energy sources and the unemployment rate; and the base rate should go up very gradually at first.
For example, we may want and need to impose a combination carbon tax and cap & trade system to add $5 a gallon to the cost of burning gasoline or diesel fuels made from petroleum by the year 2039. But it clearly would a disaster to start with that now.
But we could add 5 cents a gallon now and likely do no harm. That would initiate these taxes.
Then, once commercial quantities of algae based biofuels are available in commercial quantities and plug in hybrids and electric cars are 40 % of all cars on the road and unemployment is again below 7 % nationally, it may make sense to start increasing the tax by 5 cents a month. Getting to those favorable conditions might take 5 to 10 years. But once we start this tax increase period, the taxes will reach a point where fossil fuels will cost MORE than the alternatives readily available with further tax increases on fossil fuels still to come. Even though that may take 15 to 20 years to completely happen, ramping these taxes up gradually in this way will make it economically safe to do. And by 25 years from now, CO2 levels in the world’s air will begin to actually go down.
Why pay $10 a gallon for gasoline when algae based fuel is $3 a gallon and running your car on solar generated electricity costs the equivalent of $1.50 a gallon? Once you can run your car on these sources, you won’t mind $10 a gallon gasoline as much as you would $4 a gallon gasoline now.
I think this IS doable.
My ideas sketched out here are not as clearly thought out as would be needed for actual legislation. But I think they contain the principles that will enable an economically safe transition that starts the taxes now but only allows them to begin to kick in fully as we bring alternatives online and our economy is recovering enough to overcome any of its short term negative effects.
Wednesday, March 4, 2009
Bad news & good for Renewable Energy....
Today’s post: Wednesday, 3-4-2009
I. First the bad news.:
A. We may be running out of time to deal with C02 and other causes of man-made global warming.:
1. California, where I live, though we’ve had recent rains, has now experienced 3 unusually dry years in a row. And Governor Schwarzenegger just proclaimed we may need to begin to ration water here. That may just be where we are in a normal set of dry years which will reverse later as it has done in the past. But it may not be normal and may be our new climate due to the definite warming California has experienced over the last 15 or 20 years.
If it is our new climate as driven by global warming, this trend will worsen as the C02 to warm our state further is already in the world’s atmosphere.
If so, we need large infrastructure investments in all these areas NOW:
a) desalination stations up and down the California coast –at least 20 and maybe 100 of them – AND new pipelines to get that usable water to the people, businesses, and farms that need it;
b) severe restrictions on lawn watering and large subsidies for installing and then requiring drip irrigation and soil water content monitoring and control systems both for urban areas and for farms;
c)large subsidies to install flush free urinals or very low flow ones in all dual use bathrooms and men’s rooms and leak repairing plumbing checks and repair;
AND,
d) even more rapid build-up of solar and wind electricity generation to replace the hydro power we will no longer get due to less rainfall and snowfall.
We may be already out of time and need all that NOW or within 6 months at least. Oops!! With what money? The State of California is already cutting services and adding taxes due to the current recession to keep from running out of money.
But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Virtually every other part of the world will have some similar problems supporting agriculture and providing water supplies soon if climate change begins to become this far along already.
2. The increase in sea level and shrinkage of the ice in Antarctica is beginning to occur faster than was originally predicted and the C02 to warm the world further and speed this up more is already in the world’s atmosphere.
But this one is potentially scarier. At some point huge chunks of ice will simply break off and drop into the sea. For very large chunks, that may produce tidal wave like effects. And this would speed the rise of sea levels around the world MUCH faster than now predicted. Such ice chunks will melt faster once that occurs as they will have more surface area exposed to the warmer temperatures.
For many islands and coastal areas that means that serious trouble may happen within 15 or 20 years; and there might be less warning than the people there now expect.
B. Some parts of our ability to add renewable energy are shrinking just as we need to increase it by over ten times instead.
Many alternative energy projects have been delayed or dropped due to:
the shrinkage in available credit; or from government support drying up due to the recession deleting the money the governments had allocated to support renewable energy; or from the sharp drop in oil prices making it harder to compete with oil now with the temporarily more expensive renewable energy sources.
I. Here’s some of the good news.:
A. The current severe recession is global and has resulted in dramatically reduced consumption of fossil fuels and has temporarily reduced our production of C02 by doing so.
Timewise that is actually a bit of a reprieve. We may have 5 to 10 years longer than we otherwise would have before we have to deal with more severe impacts from global warming. And, we might have that much more time to switch out of fossil fuels before global warming becomes impossible to reverse.
B. In the United States, Barack Obama won our election and became our President; & he and his administration have already made progress in moving our economy to use more renewable energy and become more energy efficient. (He may be premature in trying to increase the cost of using fossil fuels and removing their tax breaks while we are in a severe recession and do not yet have the renewable energy to replace them. But he will succeed in doing both to some degree I think. And, anything he does in those two areas, however small initially, will speed the development & use of energy sources other than fossil fuels.)
C. Businesses, entrepreneurs, and governments all over the world are developing innovations that will make renewable energy more available and cost less or help make our economy more energy efficient and able to do without fossil fuels.
Even better, they are beginning to put the best of what they already have to large scale use!! We are in a kind of a war where time is our enemy. And the successful generals in United States history, notably Patton & Grant, proved that attacking NOW with the best of what you have gets more results than trying to wait until conditions are perfect.
D. Germany has now proved that feed-in tariffs dramatically increase bringing renewable energy online without excessive government subsidy or economic disruption. And there is a good chance feed-in tariffs will soon be in use everywhere in the world. (See our post last week, on Wednesday, 2-25-2009.)
In summary, the global warming bad news is almost scarier than the news of the current recession. But the good news gives us ample reason to hope and ways to help speed up solutions.
Today’s post: Wednesday, 3-4-2009
I. First the bad news.:
A. We may be running out of time to deal with C02 and other causes of man-made global warming.:
1. California, where I live, though we’ve had recent rains, has now experienced 3 unusually dry years in a row. And Governor Schwarzenegger just proclaimed we may need to begin to ration water here. That may just be where we are in a normal set of dry years which will reverse later as it has done in the past. But it may not be normal and may be our new climate due to the definite warming California has experienced over the last 15 or 20 years.
If it is our new climate as driven by global warming, this trend will worsen as the C02 to warm our state further is already in the world’s atmosphere.
If so, we need large infrastructure investments in all these areas NOW:
a) desalination stations up and down the California coast –at least 20 and maybe 100 of them – AND new pipelines to get that usable water to the people, businesses, and farms that need it;
b) severe restrictions on lawn watering and large subsidies for installing and then requiring drip irrigation and soil water content monitoring and control systems both for urban areas and for farms;
c)large subsidies to install flush free urinals or very low flow ones in all dual use bathrooms and men’s rooms and leak repairing plumbing checks and repair;
AND,
d) even more rapid build-up of solar and wind electricity generation to replace the hydro power we will no longer get due to less rainfall and snowfall.
We may be already out of time and need all that NOW or within 6 months at least. Oops!! With what money? The State of California is already cutting services and adding taxes due to the current recession to keep from running out of money.
But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Virtually every other part of the world will have some similar problems supporting agriculture and providing water supplies soon if climate change begins to become this far along already.
2. The increase in sea level and shrinkage of the ice in Antarctica is beginning to occur faster than was originally predicted and the C02 to warm the world further and speed this up more is already in the world’s atmosphere.
But this one is potentially scarier. At some point huge chunks of ice will simply break off and drop into the sea. For very large chunks, that may produce tidal wave like effects. And this would speed the rise of sea levels around the world MUCH faster than now predicted. Such ice chunks will melt faster once that occurs as they will have more surface area exposed to the warmer temperatures.
For many islands and coastal areas that means that serious trouble may happen within 15 or 20 years; and there might be less warning than the people there now expect.
B. Some parts of our ability to add renewable energy are shrinking just as we need to increase it by over ten times instead.
Many alternative energy projects have been delayed or dropped due to:
the shrinkage in available credit; or from government support drying up due to the recession deleting the money the governments had allocated to support renewable energy; or from the sharp drop in oil prices making it harder to compete with oil now with the temporarily more expensive renewable energy sources.
I. Here’s some of the good news.:
A. The current severe recession is global and has resulted in dramatically reduced consumption of fossil fuels and has temporarily reduced our production of C02 by doing so.
Timewise that is actually a bit of a reprieve. We may have 5 to 10 years longer than we otherwise would have before we have to deal with more severe impacts from global warming. And, we might have that much more time to switch out of fossil fuels before global warming becomes impossible to reverse.
B. In the United States, Barack Obama won our election and became our President; & he and his administration have already made progress in moving our economy to use more renewable energy and become more energy efficient. (He may be premature in trying to increase the cost of using fossil fuels and removing their tax breaks while we are in a severe recession and do not yet have the renewable energy to replace them. But he will succeed in doing both to some degree I think. And, anything he does in those two areas, however small initially, will speed the development & use of energy sources other than fossil fuels.)
C. Businesses, entrepreneurs, and governments all over the world are developing innovations that will make renewable energy more available and cost less or help make our economy more energy efficient and able to do without fossil fuels.
Even better, they are beginning to put the best of what they already have to large scale use!! We are in a kind of a war where time is our enemy. And the successful generals in United States history, notably Patton & Grant, proved that attacking NOW with the best of what you have gets more results than trying to wait until conditions are perfect.
D. Germany has now proved that feed-in tariffs dramatically increase bringing renewable energy online without excessive government subsidy or economic disruption. And there is a good chance feed-in tariffs will soon be in use everywhere in the world. (See our post last week, on Wednesday, 2-25-2009.)
In summary, the global warming bad news is almost scarier than the news of the current recession. But the good news gives us ample reason to hope and ways to help speed up solutions.
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