How to get more & cheaper green energy....

Today’s post: Wednesday, 6-24-2009

The congress of the United States is working to restrict or cap CO2 releases and to begin making the burning of fossil fuels cost more.

As I’ve posted before, it may be economically safer and much more politically viable if the initial version doesn’t actually restrict very much.

(If it once exists, it will be rapidly upgraded and tightened up over time. And it that WILL happen once we have more & cheaper green energy sources and technology to substitute for fossil fuels. Plus even with those restrictions, population growth and resource depletion will increase the costs of fossil fuels also.)

But even in a weak form these new laws will begin to make burning fossil fuels for energy cost more.

Meanwhile new technology and multiple innovations are gradually making green energy cost less.

Once green energy costs less, the switch to it will accelerate very fast.

1. A recent NPR news story says that a think tank in the San Francisco Bay Area in Oakland, California called The Breakthrough Institute is making strong effort to get policy to focus on new technology to solve global warming as an economic opportunity; & to push programs to increase the pace of this and to bring the costs down.

Michael Shellenberger, 37, & Ted Nordhaus, 43, started the Breakthrough Institute 7 years ago.

They point out that the direct polling they’ve done found that this emphasis on inventing and innovating our way to a better economy that runs on green energy is many times more popular with voters and nonvoters alike than setting up more restrictions and costs.

They make a strong case that the best, most effective, and most popular way to solve global warming is “….very simple…. we need to make clean energy cheap worldwide."
People will get enthusiastic; Americans like new inventions an innovations; new companies will be formed; and the successful ones will do the job.

Their polls found that the Americans they polled LIKED the idea of revolutionizing energy technology.

Even better, the founders of this think tank are lobbying to get this focus into our national policy and to dramatically increase government funding to develop unusually effective new energy technology and get it to market and used.

There is NOT a lot more money now to do this. But the focus and energy on expanding green technology and green energy sources and making them begin to cost a good bit less, will engage people better than increasing their energy costs.

Even a little more of this kind of funding might help produce a key breakthrough.
But best of all, this focus will foster huge numbers of small efforts by individuals and companies, MANY of which will have an effect and some of those will also be key breakthroughs.

2. John Doerr was right in his comments a few weeks ago. The United States will get left behind (or already is ) unless we adopt this approach of making a massive effort to create new green technology and build new clean energy sources.
Today, Reuters online news had a story titled. “Asia Challenges the U.S. for Green Tech Supremacy.”

Next August, leaders from Japan, China & South Korea will meet so they can begin to combine their efforts & knowledge to develop & commercialize emerging green energy technologies.

The article points out that Japan has moved ahead of the U.S. in hybrid car technology.

China is making a strong effort to lead in electric cars, solar power & wind power.
The South Korean government is funding $31 billion for research into 27 clean energy technologies, including solar cells made without silicon (which already has more demand than supply), biofuels, and CO2 collection, storage & processing.

The article describes this collaboration is designed to combine Japanese and South Korean technology developments with China's very large manufacturing capacity, domestic market, & currency reserves.

The article also notes that last year Europe put $50 billion into clean energy – while the United States, Canada, & Mexico combined invested $30 billion.

So, if the United States fails to do begin to innovate in green energy technologies and install massive amounts of clean energy source by doing the things we do well, we will be at a very strong economic disadvantage.

The article does note some efforts in the United States noting that part of the $787 billion stimulus will be spent for green energy programs or research including: $2 billion for lithium-ion batteries and hybrid electric systems, $800 million for biofuels, $400 million for vehicle electric technologies & $400 million for geothermal energy & technologies.

We also have put billions of dollars in loans to companies to facilitate the building and sales of electric cars in the United States.

If we also begin to rapidly develop and use feed-in tariffs to support massive building of renewable energy, provide government support for private lending on green energy projects, help utilities charge separately for being connected to their grid and providing the energy in it, and rapidly build the smart grid to connect large scale renewable energy plants to the locations where the energy will be used, we will also accelerate the development and use of new green technology here.

It also might make sense to provide any venture capital firm that now invests in green energy projects access to extra capital for seed start ups in green energy and for expanding those that begin selling effective new green energy technologies. One way to do that might be to use a seed fund from the government and then sell government backed energy bonds to provide about ten or twenty times as much to fund this.