The best way by far to add more green jobs....

Today's post: Wednesday, 4-21-2010

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.

At some point, the oil that we’ve been using to power much of our economy will begin to run low enough that our world economy will shrink due to lack of supply or excessive costs or both.

And, once the demand for oil picks up again with the apparent economic recovery or supply begins to plateau or drop, the prices will again go back up. That will cause more hard times economically unless we have enough alternative sources of energy to turn to.

Further, it’s extremely clear that the most supported and economically beneficial solution to add energy that does not use oil nor burn fossil fuels to release more CO2 into air that already has too much is to build massive amounts of new renewable energy production, particularly those that generate electricity & to dramatically increase energy efficiency and reduce the amount of energy that is now wasted.

And, of those, the more important long range solution is to build massive amounts of new renewable energy generation.

Today’s post:

What is the best way to add more green jobs?

Is it by trying to manipulate in what country they are added?

Not by a country mile.

We desperately need to add more jobs in the United States to get our unemployment rate down from 10 % or more to 4 % or less.

And, we are still doing less than 10 % in the United States as we need to do to add more solar and other renewable and clean energy. Plus we are still doing less than 10 % of what we need to do to make our homes, businesses, and other buildings more energy efficient.

In Texas recently, some people were agitating against buying wind power turbines from a Chinese company saying we needed to buy them from a company inside the United States.

The rationale for this was NOT that there was such a company inside the United States that made turbines that generated more electricity or were more reliable or were less expensive to install. It was that we need jobs here in the United States.

We DO need more jobs here and more green jobs here—LOTS of them; but this effort is extremely unproductive and unfortunate. It has the potential to anger the Chinese who acted in good faith. It may SLOW DOWN this project when it would pay us to help see to it that it is completed as quickly as possible. Worse, it does nothing to ensure that a better company inside the United States exists to fill the order. Worst of all, it ignores what we need to do to create more than 25 times more jobs and green jobs here than are at stake in this particular dispute.

First of all, jobs that make our homes, businesses, and other buildings more energy efficient are located mostly AT those homes, business facilities, municipal buildings, etc. That means they are ALL inside the United States.

If we did ten times as much of this as we do now, we’d add far more jobs than this misplaced effort has a prayer of creating.

For example, very few buildings in California are adequately heat proofed with insulation, double pane windows, and under the roof ventilation so that the summer heat no longer enters the buildings. Since that’s so, we need huge amounts of electricity every summer to run air conditioning that pumps heat out of those buildings when good heat proofing would have prevented the heat from getting into them in the first place.

Since we do not have a massive effort to fix this, there are thousands of creatable AND LOCAL jobs we do not now have.

I’m not sure how to fix that. But clearly it’s doable and of far more value in creating jobs soon and locally than trying to rip off a company in China.

The MUCH better news is on the other side.

There IS a way to add massive amounts of jobs in the United States and in California in building LOTS of solar installations.

The PROVEN multiplier of the jobs in building that much more solar already exists. We can build from 9 to 15 times more solar soon than we did last year!

Even better, this need not be delayed initially to build more transmission lines. (We will be very well served when there is a project to build those needed transmission lines comparable to when we built the Interstate Highway system. But it may take 20 or 30 years to get there. The good news is that there is ALSO a way to build solar that simply plugs into existing distribution lines. So no waiting for those new jobs is needed.)


FIT’s or feed-in tariffs are the secret strategy Germany has used to install HALF the world’s solar in a country that gets about as much sun as British Columbia in Canada.

It’s very simple. Installers of solar are offered guaranteed contracts by utilities over a fixed time period that both ensures the return of the capital to build them AND a decent return on that investment. The extra money that now takes over the current cost to generate electricity is then passed down to the ratepayers. This does tend to increase current rates but by only about 5%. BUT, it helps ensure that electricity will be reliably available AND since these installations produce electricity for decades after they are installed, it also means that future increases in rates will be dramatically less or even none at all where they would have been quite large otherwise.

The three key benefits to these projects are that

these contracts make it safe for banks to lend on them and even charge lower rates precisely because the payments are extremely sure to arrive;

LOTS of solar gets installed as a result;

AND, LOTS of local, installation jobs are created.

This means that EVERYONE who wants more local green energy jobs has something they can advocate that is GUARANTEED to produce them.

If in California AND in the United States we had such feed-in tariffs closely modeled on those that work extremely well in Germany AND the majority of those were used for projects that connect to existing distribution networks, we could easily generate thousands if not hundreds of thousands of green jobs in the United States.

In addition, since we do not have this now in the United States as a whole and when California, our largest solar market, does get such FIT’s and they begin to create those jobs, this will make it far more likely that they will be then enacted for the United States as whole country.

So, since that’s happening in California now, if you want more jobs and green jobs in the United States, spend some time or money supporting the proposals to add effective Feed-in Tariffs in the California.

Here are some excerpts from an article emailed to me by Craig Lewis of the FIT Coalition.

“Can the U.S. or California Institute a Feed-In Tariff?”

“ The way to grow the PV market in the U.S. is with a Feed-in Tariff, according to the FIT Coalition.”

Since it’s PROVEN to work, that’s true -- AND a bit of an understatement as you’ll see shortly

“.... the U.S. solar market remains thwarted by tight financing, fragmented policies, and spotty permitting, as well as restrictive access to public lands. Arguably, policy trumps technology in matters of energy, and the U.S. has a long way to go in developing a favorable energy and solar policy.”

“Ted Ko of the FIT Coalition spoke….at the SVPVS at PARC in Palo Alto to advocate for feed-in tariffs as the best policy to get solar into the U.S. market….”

“... the FiT Coalition, and Craig Lewis' consultancy, RightCycle, all advocate for WDG (Wholesale Distributed Generation) -- deployments under 20 megawatts with the energy sold to the utility. These WDG deployments are on the distribution grid, not the transmission grid, and as such, don't require transmission build-out.”

“.... there is significant...benefit to WDG....distribution-interconnected generation is 35 percent more valuable than transmission-interconnected generation because of low transmission losses and not having to build out the transmission grid.”

“...solar's best bet is "smaller projects that can get us there fast with no transmission lines and can deliver 5 percent ratepayer savings." “

“The answer.... is getting a feed-in tariff imposed in California and in the U.S. ...."the most effective policy in the world for getting cost-effective renewable energy online. It's simple, fair and effective." “

“In California, the 2008 IEPR recommended instituting FiTs. The IEPR is a bi-annual report published by the California Energy Commission.”

“The FiT Coalition is pushing for REESA, the Renewable Energy and Economic Stimulus Act, to include a feed-in tariff. The Coalition claims that the FiT can make the 33 percent RPS real, on schedule, and achievable.....”

"a FiT is the reason that Germany installed fifteen times more solar than California." He also asserts that "Germany is the gold standard for FiTs."

“Here's a list of some FIT or FIT legislation activity in progress:

Municipalities

Gainesville, FL enacted a German style FiT in early 2009, which is sold out to 2016. This municipality has high rates in the 26 to 32 cent range.
California's SMUD launched a massive FiT early this year with low rates in the 14 to 15 cent range.
Discussions for FiTs are in the early stage with Palo Alto, California and several local utilities in Colorado.

States and Provinces

Vermont enacted the first statewide FiT in mid-2009.
Ontario, Canada has just enacted a comprehensive FiT.
REESA and AB1106 are now active in California.

National

HR6401 (Inslee) will be re-introduced in mid-2010."

************

California has installed more solar than anywhere else in the United States. This article ends with a graph showing that Germany has installed dramatically more solar every year than California has in 2006, 2007, & 2008.

This article says that Germany installed 10 times as much solar as Germany in 2009. That may be a touch off. A recent article on solar in the San Jose Mercury News had the numbers. In 2009, more solar was installed in California than ever before. But Germany only installed a bit over NINE times as much.

Meanwhile there is enormously more solar potential in CALIFORNIA than in Germany. The article says California has 50% more or 1.5 times as much. My analysis shows that it's likely closer to FIVE times as much. Even more important is that this is certainly true in the summer in California when the peak load on the grid for electricity is driven by air conditioning.

So to return to my main point…..

Why make an effort to prevent other countries from selling green products here that are made there when we can add over 10 times that many jobs here by advocating a policy that is already proven to increase solar installation jobs by that much?