Will CO2 reduction save or cost money?....
Today’s post: Wednesday, 5-20-2009
We need an 80% reduction in fossil fuel use by 2050 to avoid the worst global warming effects. And, practically speaking, we need to also double our electricity generation and double the useful work done per unit of electricity & other energy sources as well during that same time to have a decent economy.
But will CO2 reduction save or cost money?
Two emails I get this week suggest opposite answers.:
“Help curb global warming while saving consumers money” is the email from the Union of Concerned Scientists.
“Help Stop the National Energy Tax” is the email from the Republican Party.
It seems they expect different answers to the question will CO2 reduction save or cost money.
The Union of Concerned Scientists sounds more like they know what they are talking about as they include the results of an extensive analysis.
And, as is typical of the current Republican Party, they simply rely on their readers reacting to “taxes” as a bull reacts to a waving red flag.
My suspicion though is that they are BOTH correct despite the seeming incompetence of the current Republican party.
Here’s the statement from yesterday’s email from the Union of Concerned Scientists.:
"Today, the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) released the Climate 2030 Blueprint, a peer-reviewed study showing that the United States can dramatically cut global warming pollution while saving households and businesses in every region of the nation billions of dollars in energy costs.
The study shows that combining energy and transportation policies with a strong limit or "cap" on emissions-set at 56 percent below 2005 levels by 2030-would save the average U.S. household $900 on electricity, heating, and transportation costs in 2030. In that same year, businesses would benefit from collective net energy savings of $130 billion." "
I have reason to believe that this analysis is correct or nearly so.
When all the current Republican Party has to offer is in essence, “Taxes are bad. And we believe the current cap & trade efforts are an energy tax.” -- and says virtually nothing else at all, why do I think they might be correct that CO2 reduction might cost money similar to a new tax?
How can they both be correct?
The simple answer is to look at when the statements are correct.
Today, we depend massively on petroleum for transport and burning coal for generating electricity.
So when cap & trade and other CO2 reduction programs in some way costs the companies that provide petroleum and coal or which use them more money, they will charge us more to stay profitable and to survive.
Worse, there is evidence that cap & trade systems may be manipulated in a way that increases their cost to everyone concerned.
That’s why I favor having them phase in slowly and to have their full effect conditional on more renewable energy sources becoming actually available to do the job at what will then be a LOWER cost while making much more massive increases in renewable energy occur much faster then is now expected.
However, if we do build the renewable energy sources well and quickly and get to the point where we have cap & trade AND various kinds of carbon taxes, our real energy costs will be dramatically lower than they would have been had we not acted.
If we fail to act, we will have $8 to $10 a gallon costs for gasoline and diesel fuel due to global economic and population growth. And paying for the costs of pollution, armed forces to ensure oil supply, and the costs of global warming will all be dramatically more. So the taxes to pay for those will also be much more.
So my emphasis and that also I believe the country should emphasize is to dramatically speed up bringing much more renewable energy online, while postponing somewhat the full effect of cap & trade and carbon taxes, etc.
A second way to cut the initial cost of switching to an economy NOT based on fossil fuels is to work out ways to run our existing economy with less energy.
The recent sharp increase in the mileage required for new cars is clearly an extremely desirable and large scale step in that direction.
This may cause buyers to pay up to $1300 more for a new car but will return something like double that for sure in net savings if gasoline prices stay as low as they are now and much, much more than that if gasoline prices go up as I think they will.
President Obama also is quoted as saying this.:
"Consumers pay less for fuel, which means less money going overseas and more money to save or spend here at home. The economy as a whole runs more efficiently by using less oil and producing less pollution," he said. "And companies like those here today have new incentives to create the technologies and the jobs that will provide smarter ways to power our vehicles."
The president also said it will save 1.8 billion barrels of oil over the lifetime of the vehicles sold in the next five years.
He said, the reduction of oil burned in that five years in the United States will equal all of a whole year’s U.S. imports from Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Libya and Nigeria combined.
And, he pointed out that is a truly huge sum of money that will no longer leave the United States. That will improve our economy as well since those dollars will be available to fuel our economy when they would not have been available here otherwise.
This action also will increase our national security in ways that likely will save us money as well.
So, even though there will be some up front costs and cap & trade may cost far too much at first, if we focus mostly on these kinds of conservation steps, adding new technology that saves energy, and building huge amounts of renewable energy & the network to transport it to where it will be used, our costs soon WILL be far less than they would have been and our economy will be dramatically stronger.
Showing posts with label massive increases in renewable energy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label massive increases in renewable energy. Show all posts
Wednesday, May 20, 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, December 10, 2008
Extra Effort on getting to Renewable Energy soon......
Today’s post: Wednesday, 12-10-2008
Just a few weeks ago, Al Gore said we should move to 100 % renewable energy in 10 years or by 2018.
In a report called “Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World”, various experts & analysts in the US Intelligence organizations and from other places state that renewable energy will NOT be commercially viable by 2025.
And, this report was supplied to President-elect, Obama recently a current news article said.
If we don’t take action, massive coordinated action on several fronts to come much closer to Al Gore’s goal than this new report suggests is likely, we are in very serious trouble. Costs from global warming will begin to destroy our economy while our economy starves for energy at reasonable costs. For example gasoline prices of more than $5 a gallon in today’s dollars will return as the world’s economy tries to recover from the current recession.
Given that we may already have more CO2 in our air than is safe, the status quo of simply drilling for more oil and building more coal fired plants world wide is extremely dangerous.
Yet, a prosperous economy needs more usable, effective, energy to achieve that prosperity and keep it – not less.
That’s why we need not just an effort comparable to the Manhattan Project; but an effort comparable to the entire United States effort to win World War II to start immediately to begin to tax coal and oil use commensurate with their real economic costs; & to regulate their use; AND to use the funds generated plus further investments to increase energy-efficiency and add renewable energy on a huge scale as quickly as we ramped up war production in World War II—or faster.
1. Wind power is already competitive in costs with fossil fuels.
That’s why T Boone Pickens’ plan, or at least the part that adds lots of wind powered electricity generation and new transmission lines to transport it needs to be immediately expanded and implemented in every place that has enough wind.
2. Large solar thermal farms are very close to being competitive with fossil fuels. And there are huge areas in the United States and even more in Mexico (and in other parts of the world) that work well to build them. Plus we also need to add the new transmission lines to these solar thermal farms to deliver their electricity.
We need to have the United States government act in some way to make immediate financing on favorable terms available to build these plants and the transmission lines.
And, we need to have every utility reachable by those lines be required to get perhaps as high as 60 % of their electricity from that source alone by 2030.
This is because the energy is there NOW on that large a scale to be harvested; and the heated media can be efficiently stored to deliver power for several hours after the sun heats it and sets.
3. We also need to increase the incentives enough and drive down the costs enough over the next few years to build both solar photovoltaic farms in favorable locations AND to add roof top solar to virtually every usable rooftop of every building standing AND to build roofs over most of our parking lots that also have solar photovoltaic cells on them.
4. We need to begin to scale up the successful experiments that produce usable biodiesel, ethanol, and jet fuel and chemical feedstocks from algae or other methods that do NOT compete with growing food so that most liquid fuels can be made from processes that remove CO2 in addition to adding it back to our air.
5. We need to stop burning coal for fuel and to convert the coal we have into cleaner burning liquid fuels and gas that can be added to biofuels or used to replace petroleum.
In the near term this will prevent the coal businesses in the United States from a collapse immediate enough to dislocate the economies of the communities where they now are. And, it will provide these fuels while biofuels are just beginning to ramp up.
6. We need to start planning to replace all the coal burning plants we have now with renewable sources such as wind or solar or with plants that burn biofuels and cleaner burning fuels made from coal.
(It may be possible to sequester the CO2 and other pollutants 100 % that burning coal releases. We should certainly research that.) But meanwhile we should be winding down our use of the kinds of coal burning plants we have now towards zero.
And, both here and in the rest of the world, we should act NOW to prevent new coal burning plants from being built and used.
It’s clear in China and everywhere immediately downwind from China that the air pollution alone from burning coal on a very large scale costs almost more in added medical costs than the value of the electricity it generates. And, adding lots more CO2 to our air instead of less makes ZERO sense. So absolutely NO new coal burning plants should be built anywhere.
7. One of the backers of the CleanTech for Obama group has pointed out that many already cost effective steps to energy efficiency can be taken throughout the United States to lower our energy use without harming our economy such as adding insulation, heat proofing buildings with peaked roofs, and weather stripping windows all of which can be done by people in the United States needing jobs.
This would provide a huge number of jobs if it were to be done in every community in the United States to every building that now needs it.
We should definitely come as close to making that happen as possible in the next 4 to 8 years.
We need the jobs now. And, it will save more in energy costs than the money to do it will cost our economy.
This can also be accomplished by raising the money to replace and properly dispose of energy-inefficient refrigerators; and to give all our homes and businesses an energy management system that will safely power down TV’s, video game players, and other devices that now use energy while they are NOT in use.
8. We need to set up national prizes and funds for the kind of venture capital that rolls out new technology that works; and we should do this to incentivize the development and rapid deployment of new energy technology generally.
This will create jobs here. And these companies can bring money here by selling these products to the rest of the world.
In particular, we need to do this for LED light bulbs that are available at the cost today of fluorescent light bulbs or less and which will fit all the sockets that have been used for incandescent bulbs. Such bulbs use even less electricity than fluorescent light bulbs, perhaps a full third as much in fact. And, they won’t poison our homes, businesses, and planet with mercury as using fluorescent light bulbs looks likely to do and very likely IS doing now.
GE is developing a kind of wallpaper that lights up walls and ceilings with an ideally dispersed light source that uses LED’s. That’s a superb idea. But for now, the glaring need is for cost effective and readily available LED light bulbs to replace incandescent light bulbs and fluorescent light bulbs in the light bulb sockets people have now. (Pardon the pun.)
Again, this is an energy efficiency method that will save huge amounts of energy that both creates jobs and continues to give us the light we need.
It does NOT sacrifice our prosperity or quality of life like purposely living in dimly lit rooms to save energy would do.
I believe each of these goals is doable by 2030. But they will only happen and make the intelligence community report look timid and incorrect if we take massive action to achieve them all.
Today’s post: Wednesday, 12-10-2008
Just a few weeks ago, Al Gore said we should move to 100 % renewable energy in 10 years or by 2018.
In a report called “Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World”, various experts & analysts in the US Intelligence organizations and from other places state that renewable energy will NOT be commercially viable by 2025.
And, this report was supplied to President-elect, Obama recently a current news article said.
If we don’t take action, massive coordinated action on several fronts to come much closer to Al Gore’s goal than this new report suggests is likely, we are in very serious trouble. Costs from global warming will begin to destroy our economy while our economy starves for energy at reasonable costs. For example gasoline prices of more than $5 a gallon in today’s dollars will return as the world’s economy tries to recover from the current recession.
Given that we may already have more CO2 in our air than is safe, the status quo of simply drilling for more oil and building more coal fired plants world wide is extremely dangerous.
Yet, a prosperous economy needs more usable, effective, energy to achieve that prosperity and keep it – not less.
That’s why we need not just an effort comparable to the Manhattan Project; but an effort comparable to the entire United States effort to win World War II to start immediately to begin to tax coal and oil use commensurate with their real economic costs; & to regulate their use; AND to use the funds generated plus further investments to increase energy-efficiency and add renewable energy on a huge scale as quickly as we ramped up war production in World War II—or faster.
1. Wind power is already competitive in costs with fossil fuels.
That’s why T Boone Pickens’ plan, or at least the part that adds lots of wind powered electricity generation and new transmission lines to transport it needs to be immediately expanded and implemented in every place that has enough wind.
2. Large solar thermal farms are very close to being competitive with fossil fuels. And there are huge areas in the United States and even more in Mexico (and in other parts of the world) that work well to build them. Plus we also need to add the new transmission lines to these solar thermal farms to deliver their electricity.
We need to have the United States government act in some way to make immediate financing on favorable terms available to build these plants and the transmission lines.
And, we need to have every utility reachable by those lines be required to get perhaps as high as 60 % of their electricity from that source alone by 2030.
This is because the energy is there NOW on that large a scale to be harvested; and the heated media can be efficiently stored to deliver power for several hours after the sun heats it and sets.
3. We also need to increase the incentives enough and drive down the costs enough over the next few years to build both solar photovoltaic farms in favorable locations AND to add roof top solar to virtually every usable rooftop of every building standing AND to build roofs over most of our parking lots that also have solar photovoltaic cells on them.
4. We need to begin to scale up the successful experiments that produce usable biodiesel, ethanol, and jet fuel and chemical feedstocks from algae or other methods that do NOT compete with growing food so that most liquid fuels can be made from processes that remove CO2 in addition to adding it back to our air.
5. We need to stop burning coal for fuel and to convert the coal we have into cleaner burning liquid fuels and gas that can be added to biofuels or used to replace petroleum.
In the near term this will prevent the coal businesses in the United States from a collapse immediate enough to dislocate the economies of the communities where they now are. And, it will provide these fuels while biofuels are just beginning to ramp up.
6. We need to start planning to replace all the coal burning plants we have now with renewable sources such as wind or solar or with plants that burn biofuels and cleaner burning fuels made from coal.
(It may be possible to sequester the CO2 and other pollutants 100 % that burning coal releases. We should certainly research that.) But meanwhile we should be winding down our use of the kinds of coal burning plants we have now towards zero.
And, both here and in the rest of the world, we should act NOW to prevent new coal burning plants from being built and used.
It’s clear in China and everywhere immediately downwind from China that the air pollution alone from burning coal on a very large scale costs almost more in added medical costs than the value of the electricity it generates. And, adding lots more CO2 to our air instead of less makes ZERO sense. So absolutely NO new coal burning plants should be built anywhere.
7. One of the backers of the CleanTech for Obama group has pointed out that many already cost effective steps to energy efficiency can be taken throughout the United States to lower our energy use without harming our economy such as adding insulation, heat proofing buildings with peaked roofs, and weather stripping windows all of which can be done by people in the United States needing jobs.
This would provide a huge number of jobs if it were to be done in every community in the United States to every building that now needs it.
We should definitely come as close to making that happen as possible in the next 4 to 8 years.
We need the jobs now. And, it will save more in energy costs than the money to do it will cost our economy.
This can also be accomplished by raising the money to replace and properly dispose of energy-inefficient refrigerators; and to give all our homes and businesses an energy management system that will safely power down TV’s, video game players, and other devices that now use energy while they are NOT in use.
8. We need to set up national prizes and funds for the kind of venture capital that rolls out new technology that works; and we should do this to incentivize the development and rapid deployment of new energy technology generally.
This will create jobs here. And these companies can bring money here by selling these products to the rest of the world.
In particular, we need to do this for LED light bulbs that are available at the cost today of fluorescent light bulbs or less and which will fit all the sockets that have been used for incandescent bulbs. Such bulbs use even less electricity than fluorescent light bulbs, perhaps a full third as much in fact. And, they won’t poison our homes, businesses, and planet with mercury as using fluorescent light bulbs looks likely to do and very likely IS doing now.
GE is developing a kind of wallpaper that lights up walls and ceilings with an ideally dispersed light source that uses LED’s. That’s a superb idea. But for now, the glaring need is for cost effective and readily available LED light bulbs to replace incandescent light bulbs and fluorescent light bulbs in the light bulb sockets people have now. (Pardon the pun.)
Again, this is an energy efficiency method that will save huge amounts of energy that both creates jobs and continues to give us the light we need.
It does NOT sacrifice our prosperity or quality of life like purposely living in dimly lit rooms to save energy would do.
I believe each of these goals is doable by 2030. But they will only happen and make the intelligence community report look timid and incorrect if we take massive action to achieve them all.
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