How to have more renewable energy here....

Today’s post: Wednesday, 2-18-2009

To have more renewable energy in the United States, three new things need to happen.

1. Every political jurisdiction and utility company in Canada needs to put feed-in tariffs for renewable energy producers. In Canada, that will be mostly solar photovoltaic & wind. Some new transmission lines may help.

2. Every political jurisdiction and utility company in the United States needs to put feed-in tariffs for renewable energy producers. We have wind, solar photovoltaic, and solar thermal we can develop. Since wind & solar potential, particularly solar thermal potential, is often in a different part of our country than where the most people live, we definitely will need new transmission lines for much of this renewable electricity.

3. Every political jurisdiction and utility company in Mexico needs to put feed-in tariffs for renewable energy producers. The map we posted some time back of solar potential shows that almost all of Mexico has about three to five times as much or more potential for solar photovoltaic and solar thermal as the entire Southwestern United States.

This one is a bit more complex. It will also be important to help Mexico use this power to build clean industry that can provide jobs to people in Mexico and to help Mexico become enough safer in many places to allow investment and travel to reach its full potential. The good news is that if this is done, Mexico will still have enough electricity generated by renewable sources that by also building some new transmission lines, they will be able to export electricity to the United States.

Between these 3 countries, by using feed-in tariffs in each one, in 15 years or so we could easily have 60 to 100 times more renewably generated electricity as we do now.

Feed-in tariffs have been proven to work. (Germany has about as much solar potential as just British Columbia and over the past 15 years or so has built something like HALF the world’s solar capacity. They make building the renewable energy projects fundable by banks. And they are paid for as they come online by the utility ratepayers. They do NOT need new taxes to pay for the renewable energy. And, the ratepayers see only gradual increases in their bills. Even better, as fossil fuel sources become more expensive for several reasons, the utility bills using feed-in tariffs will eventually be LESS than they would otherwise have been.

Ask your representatives in your government and your local utility companies if they know what feed-in tariffs are. And if they do, why aren’t they already using them.

They work and are the key to fast and fundable increases in renewable energy.