Fast progress on renewable energy jobs......

Today’s post: Wednesday, 12-17-2008

The Obama administration will do a good deal more than previous ones on installing more renewable energy generation.

The current website for the administration for participation by individuals is
http://change.gov/ under the agenda tab and then by clicking on Energy and Environment lists the goals they have now.

It begins with this:

“The Obama-Biden comprehensive New Energy for America plan will:

Help create five million new jobs by strategically investing $150 billion over the next ten years to catalyze private efforts to build a clean energy future.”

It seems clear to me that the initial job program in an economic stimulus package is likely to include many jobs upgrading infrastructure across the country driven by projects that are needed in the part of the country that are represented by each of the members of congress. The votes need to come from somewhere; and the jobs created will be in the state or district represented or near it in a way that will benefit their constituents.

These jobs will also help improve the economy by increasing safety on our roads or by making our drinking water more reliable and safer to drink and avoiding or postponing expenses for the communities involved. New, safer, bridges will get built. Highways will be made smoother and safer that are in bad shape now. And, water systems will get upgraded so they will last longer, deliver cleaner water, and leak enough less of it to cut the need to in put water in half or more.

This is actually desirable and good for the economy as well as politically doable and even likely.

However, it also quite clear that we now ALSO need to have a huge effort to add jobs that actually make fast contributions to energy efficiency or to adding renewable energy capacity. And we need it immediately.

Here are some ideas on HOW to do this.:

As we posted last week:

A. “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.” I added that this includes such things “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.”

In many parts of the United States houses already tend to be well insulated and weather-stripped; but even there it’s not 100 %. Why not help lower income homeowners and apartment owners in lower income areas to do this even if federal money &/or money from that state with add-on money from the federal government is needed to make that happen?

And, in many parts of the West and Southern United States, the need is far greater because for much of the year people can get by with no weather stripping and little or no insulation. But this causes a large use of wasted energy each winter. Why not add jobs in those communities to correct this?

These jobs will be somewhat temporary though this process might take10 year or more to be completed. But even a ten percent start almost immediately would put thousands of people to work all over the country.

In areas where people use air conditioners now, typically well over half and often as much as ninety percent of the energy used is wasted to remove heat from the building that could have been prevented from entering at a dramatically LOWER cost in energy.

Adding insulation and double pane windows will help do this.

Even more effective in houses and apartments with peaked roofs is adding well screened air access ports around the base of the roof and installing convection powered turbines toward the peak of the roof. Other than those areas so hot that a powered and thermostatically controlled extractor fan needs to be added, once these heat proofing methods are installed, they cut 50 to 95 % from the energy needed to cool the house or apartment building every summer and need ZERO energy to do this once they are installed.

So, once this is done, will cooling the house to slightly too cool temperatures first thing in the morning and then turning off the air conditioning until the temperature goes above 75 degrees. In a heat proofed building this will not even happen on most days. And at 75 degrees you can be decently comfortable if you have installed ceiling fans.

So, heat proofing is only moderately expensive and saves huge amounts of electricity every summer after it’s done.

Projects like these across the United States would provide a huge number of jobs if it were to be done in every community in the United States and 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 is well known but has NOT been acted on yet.

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.”

Doing this would also create jobs.

B. I also suggested this. “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.”

Many of these ideas can be put into place or initiated in the first 6 months of the Obama administration.

C. Solar thermal “farms” in just the appropriate parts of the United States has the capacity to generate all the electricity we currently use. (See
http://www.ausra.com/ .)

In addition, it efficiently stores the heated medium to allow electricity generation up to 16 hours a day.

The federal government could ask each utility within a reasonable distance from these areas and in them to create a plan to add close to 100 % of the thermal solar capacity available by 2030 and to find the best sites to do first that will add at least 10 % of this capacity in the next 4 years and calculate what dollar amounts this would cost and what new transmission lines would be needed.

Then the government could help pay for the transmission lines to be built and do some kind of loan guarantees or partial financing and fast tracking approvals to enable utilities to put these farms in place.

(Later it will make sense to extend this to building such solar farms in Mexico because jobs there will help solve the immigration problem here and because the solar thermal potential there is perhaps as much as THREE times the potential in the United States.)

There will be jobs created to build these plants and transmission lines soon if this is done. But the reliable and abundant electricity generated can also power plug-in hybrid cars and energy and cost efficient and partly automated new manufacturing facilities that will add even more jobs.

D. The administration could also offer some tax credits to businesses that: install solar photovoltaic panels on their building roofs;
& to those that add roof canopies over their parking lots and also install solar photovoltaic panels on them;
& to those that reduce waste of energy and add energy efficient devices to lower their energy needed & with a bonus to those companies that harvest enough solar electricity over a year’s time to exceed 50 % of their energy use by doing all three.

E. Germany has a fraction of the solar photovoltaic potential as the United States but has installed dramatically more solar photovoltaic capacity per capita than the United States. They do this because of the way the utilities there help pay for these installations through slightly increasing utility bills and by giving people who generate more electricity than they use a payment equal to the costs of the utility to generate it otherwise.

It would create jobs across the country if it became a country wide requirement for each utility here to adopt that policy by the end of 2009.

It’s been so effective there I cannot fathom why even the Bush administration didn’t do this already.

I think it is imperative that the Obama administration do everything it can to get this done country wide in 2009.

F. I think that the federal government should back the wind electricity generation and the added transmission lines part of the “Pickens Plan” in every part of the United States that has enough wind.

(I think plug in hybrids and all electric cars powered by renewable energy are a superior solution to using natural gas. So I think that the use of the natural gas not needed once the wind power is in place to generate electricity should not get extra funding. That said, it would replace gasoline now made from imported oil.

My hope is that we will be able to use plug-in hybrids and biofuels and liquid fuels made from coal instead. Here’s why: Natural gas is a superb fossil fuel for cooking and heating. To generate any electricity we still need besides what we get from renewable sources natural gas is dramatically cleaner than burning coal and far easier to transport. And, natural gas too is a finite resource that we should conserve.)

However, even without adding the costs of medical care caused by burning coal and the costs generated by doing so to fight the global warming effects this causes to its use to generate electricity with taxes or carbon cap & trade systems, wind power is already competitive with burning coal in cost. So, backing the nationwide implementation of the wind powered electricity generation and added transmission lines part of the Pickens plan is a way to add jobs and renewable energy that deserves an extremely high priority.

G. We can also add jobs and renewable energy by enabling every competent company now installing photovoltaic panels in homes and apartment buildings and small businesses to have some kind of subsidy that helps pay their installers.

And, we can see to it that every community college in the United States has an effective program that will train an installer in a year or less that the federal government helps to fund.

What’s the right answer to adding jobs
AND renewable energy at the same time?

I’m virtually certain there’s a list as long as this one of other ways that might work that I simply don’t know about yet. Many of them should also be used.

But I DO know ONE right answer likely to be adequate to get the job done already.

It’s to see to it that everything in this list of things here in this post that are already known to work be done as early as possible during the next four years.