We CAN have more renewable energy & jobs....

Today’s post: Wednesday, 1-21-2009

We CAN have more renewable energy & jobs SOON.

How soon? Maybe in a single year and for sure within 4 years – NOT 20 years -- and up to 5,000,000 jobs.

Archimedes once said given a fulcrum and a lever long enough he could move the whole earth.

I’d heard that such a lever to create more renewable energy had been invented in Germany &/or put into use there.

I’d also wondered why my state, California, and the United States weren’t both already using it.

Thanks to Craig Lewis of GreenVolts in San Francisco, I know now I was incompletely informed.

This renewable energy lever is about 100 times more effective than I’d realized or heard. It has the capacity to not only bring new renewable energy online, it has the capacity to add as much as 5,000,000 million jobs in the next two years if we do it well nationally here in the United States.

So why on earth aren’t we using it yet?!!

By the way, it also makes lending on renewable energy projects as safe for the lender as a 100 % cash backed loan -- just like lending you $2500 because you use your $2500 savings account as collateral.

It’s called a feed-in tariff. And the most effective version requires that the utility “must take” the power generated and “fed-into” the grid and pay what it cost the renewable energy provider to create it, which will often be more than what the utility pays now for power they already generate on a larger scale with fossil fuels.

Martin Roscheisen, CEO of Nanosolar has also suggested that the federal government mandate a rate paid for renewable energy from such must take feed-in tariffs must be at that rate or higher.

This rate can be set initially at a rate that is doable by most well run solar projects but gradually decreased as the costs come down to reward innovation and better technology and management. (My idea.)

Just how well does this work in practice?

I’d heard Germany did well with Feed-in Tariffs but I had NO IDEA how well.

It seems that Germany, which is about as far North as British Columbia and has about as much solar potential, has HALF of all the world’s solar power production now. It also gets 16% of its energy from renewable sources between the solar and the wind power they’ve installed because of their feed-in tariff.

Since the United States, between being farther South, much larger, and having deserts with more land area than Germany by themselves, has at least 20 times and maybe more like 100 times more solar potential between photovoltaic and solar thermal, AND has nearly that much more wind potential, we may be looking at more like getting 80 % of our energy from renewable sources here.

Germany did create about 250,000 jobs with their feed-in tariff according to something I read. So, if our solar potential is as little as 20 times bigger than Germany, I think it’s a good bit more, we will create 5,000,000 jobs or more if we adopt feed-in tariffs here!

It goes farther than that. Here in the Silicon Valley solar companies with solar projects that have been approved and contracted for are LOSING jobs and laying people off. One, OptiSolar laid off half its workforce. It seems that the banks won’t finance the projects now.

Mark Twain once said that if a cat sits on a hot stove once, it won’t sit on a hot stove again. But it won’t sit on a cold stove either.

So far the banks in the United States have not been any smarter than Mark Twain’s cat.

Because they lent money to high risk borrowers in large volume, they got burned. So now they won’t loan money to the low risk and low moderate risk borrowers, both individuals and businesses, they are in business to serve either.

For renewable energy projects, feed-in tariffs make lending on renewable energy projects so extremely safe even the most in-shock and brain dead banks will lend on it.

This means that feed-in tariffs can not only create jobs and new renewable energy installations on a very large scale, it can prevent job LOSS and might even turn the whole economy around.

So, why on earth hasn’t California and several other states already begun using feed-in tariffs? Why haven’t other states done it?

We know in part why the United States hasn’t done it. But that administration left yesterday.

The power of feed-in tariffs is so great that isn’t the entire answer though.

Most of the people in charge haven’t known we’d need to create 5,000,000 jobs to jump start our economy or that we’d need to create new renewable energy as badly as we now know we do.

And, none of them have had a clue that feed-in tariffs would do the job.

I’m writing this post because I want to publicize the fact that feed-in tariffs have proved they do the job in practice. They created half the world’s solar in Germany and added 250,000 jobs there.

Now our leaders on all levels know we need more renewable energy and jobs. I want them to know that it’s imperative they ensure we have feed-in tariffs for renewable energy to produce that renewable energy and jobs and that it’s virtually guaranteed to work.