Interstate Cooperation for Clean Energy

I wrote up a policy  memo for a class last week.  It made me realize how much of a problem coal still is, largely because it is not easy for coal-miners to transition to other jobs.  

California, Arizona, New Jersey are leading the nation in manufacturing and installing solar power.  Arizona alone has over 316 solar companies, supplying a variety of parts for solar installations[i]. 

The number of solar installations has been growing across the nation, increasing 15% in Q2 of 2013[ii].  States with solar manufacturing are well-positioned to benefit as more states install more solar power.  Those states will have more well-paying jobs and tax revenues as the solar industry grows. 

On the other hand, there are many opponents of solar power.  About 40% of the electricity generated in the United States is from coal.  Coal mining in the US is concentrated in some states, particularly Kentucky, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Wyoming.  These and other states such as Ohio, Virginia, Indiana, and Illinois have strong pro-coal lobbies and constituents[iii].

Coal miners and their communities are justifiably concerned about losing their jobs and economic security.  Right now, they support ways to keep coal cheap, which works directly against the interests of the solar industry and Arizona generally.

In order to undercut the support for cheap coal, I recommend that states without coal industries share some of the benefits of their growing solar industries with coal miners.  Continued access to healthcare and education are particularly valuable.  Solar producing states should offer scholarships to family members of coal miners to their state universities.  They could also contribute to a fund to pay for healthcare for families of coal-miners.

Those directly affected by the decline of the coal-producing industry are relatively few, about 20,000 coal-miners in Kentucky, for example[iv].  Providing a safety net for those people would go a long way towards reducing the urgency of keeping coal production going.  This would give coal producing states less opposed to clean tech.  They would also have more resources to develop jobs in other industries rather than coal mining.

Solar producing states should partner with coal producing states to find mutually beneficial solutions to their economic, environmental, and health problems.        

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[i] ‘Arizona Solar’, Solar Energy Industries Association [accessed 5 December 2013].

[ii] ‘Solar Industry Data’ [accessed 5 December 2013].

[iii] Kris Maher and Tom McGinty, ‘Coal’s Decline Hits Hardest in the Mines of Kentucky’ [accessed 5 December 2013].

[iv] ‘Mining Employment and Production Trends’, The Impact of Coal on the Kentucky State Budget .

Berkeley Energy Conference

The Berkeley 2011 Energy Symposium is coming up in October. Pretty exciting!

Trustmark for Boosting Wind Power

There was an interesting article in Fast Company about Vestas, which is promoting a trustmark, WindMade.

In order for consumers to account for the externalities of business such as environmental damage, more information is needed about products other than just quality and price. That is why certifications such as Energy Star, USDA Organic, and Fair Trade will be increasingly important for helping consumers make decisions about products and business models. How can this be implemented? Third party certification and reviews may become a bigger industry. On the other hand, this might be expensive for the consumer as well as small businesses. It would be an additional barrier to entry for a startup, which is not necessarily something we'd want. It would be desirable to achieve greater transparency without the extra cost.

Make Gas Cheaper

Obama throws Big Oil a bone. I haven't really looked into the details, but of course I'm skeptical that it will even reduce prices. I am also concerned that reducing gas prices will further delay innovation and investment in clean technologies.

Energy futures week

Next week is Energy Futures Week at MIT, and the focus is on energy efficiency this year. I will be trying to go to as many events as possible to learn, network, and get a job.

Good Venue for Climate Change Agreements

How to Change the Global Energy Conversation

Latest Breakthrough Institute article in the Wall Street Journal

Richard Kauffman on Energy Reform

Richard Kauffman (Professor, Yale School of Management; Former CEO, Good Energies; Former Partner, Goldman Sachs) gave a speech at the Coalition for Green Capital's "Future of Energy Reform" conference last week

Richard Kauffman's Speech

The problem is that the money is one place and the incentives are in the other. In particular, we do not have a financial structure that is effective or efficient in promoting renewable energy production or energy efficiency adoption.

Financial structure seems to be a vague term, perhaps with different definitions in different fields. I plan on looking into this more soon.

It seems that many clean energy projects cannot get the funding even though there is funding available.

Projects are funded with bank debt, even though the projects are long-dated assets.

project equity. The money is there, but obstacles prevent from flowing to where it is needed. While there are billions of dollars in funds eager to invest in wind and solar projects, the yield requirements of these funds exceed the yields the projects can offer. Infrastructure funds typically target 15-20 returns while, as noted above, returns the projects can deliver are less, 9-12 percent. Hence, even though these are objectively attractive rates of return, projects that could be built, aren't being built because developers can't find equity at these lower levels.

Kauffman ends by talking about how the US has focused on trying to build green industry by funding innovation instead of deployment or creating demand. Interesting! since I just wrote my NSF proposal about the impact of policies on clean technology diffusion (deployment), precisely because of the importance of post-adoption innovation. Innovation from deployment does not just lower costs because of scale. It lowers costs because of improved reliability, improved performance, experience and availability of human capital, and improved logistics.

Moore's Law is not an independent law of physics but rests on the role of markets; without a vibrant market into which to sell integrated circuits, the shape of the performance curve would look very different.

YES!

Kansas Hypocrisy We Like

Conservative Kansas conserves energy for a change. Prof John Sterman has been touting the successes of Kansas in his talks for a while now. The picture is kind of silly, though, since candles have more carbon emissions/lumen than any other light bulb.

In a way they are being hypocritical if they still don't want Climate regulation since they benefit from it. In some sense, they are being much less hypocritical, though, because they are being true conservatives.

Solar Panels for the White House

NYT

"The White House did the right thing, and for the right reasons: They listened to the Americans who asked for solar on their roof, and they listened to the scientists and engineers who told them this is the path to the future," said McKibben, the co-founder of the nonprofit 350.org. "If it has anything like the effect of the White House garden, it could be a trigger for a wave of solar installations across the country and around the world." Bill McKibbon

RFID Sensors in Florida

I just got caught up with a former coworker from Tagsense, who is now working at Locus Traxx, which is a small engineering firm in Florida. They are using some Tagsense products in some of their products to make sensors and energy harvesters. They are using piezo energy harvesters but also looking into this new kind for wind power. They were also making some sensors to sense the oil in the ocean from the BP oil spill. I wonder if fish will just eat those things, though. I may be able to do an internship there for the spring, which would be really cool.

Clean Energy in Portugal

Really interesting article about clean energy projects in Portugal, the challenges, and issues specific to Portugal.

To force Portugal’s energy transition, Mr. Sócrates’s government restructured and privatized former state energy utilities to create a grid better suited to renewable power sources. To lure private companies into Portugal’s new market, the government gave them contracts locking in a stable price for 15 years — a subsidy that varied by technology and was initially high but decreased with each new contract round...

Portugal was well poised to be a guinea pig because it has large untapped resources of wind and river power, the two most cost-effective renewable sources. Government officials say the energy transformation required no increase in taxes or public debt, precisely because the new sources of electricity, which require no fuel and produce no emissions, replaced electricity previously produced by buying and burning imported natural gas, coal and oil...

But a decade ago in Portugal, as in many places in the United States today, power companies owned not only power generating plants, but also transmission lines. Those companies have little incentive to welcome new sources of renewable energy, which compete with their investment in fossil fuels. So in 2000, Portugal’s first step was to separate making electricity from transporting it, through a mandatory purchase by the government of all transmission lines for electricity and gas at what were deemed fair market prices.

Bloom Energy

I saw this in a magazine. It's a new technology for tiny power plants turning oxygen into electricity and water. Do we really have enough oxygen? I suppose it depends if the demand would grow exponentially or not.

Jon Stewart on Energy Independent Future

On the Daily Show last week, Jon Stewart did a cool video essay on presidents who promised to move away from foreign oil and invest in alternative energy.

Raise Fuel Standards

Obama Mandates Raising Fuel Efficiency Standards for Cars

bill gates and technology development vs just go get stuff done

http://www.grist.org/article/2010-03-02-bill-gates-and-our-innovation-addiction-a-recipe-for-climate/

too late, i've already sold out! as of monday i'll be a real employee of IVL.

Bill Gate's website actually also looks really interesting, will have to read more of that.

Demand Management

MIT Energy Club talk on electricity demand management.

They posted some links to some good articles

NCSE Conference Debriefing

I went to DC last week for a conference on the New Green Economy put together by NCSE (National Council for Science and the Environment), a non-profit independent NGO, and it was really great.

It was a three-day conference packed with events. Most of the events were at the Ronald Reagan and International Trade Center Building in downtown DC, which is also where the EPA offices are located. (Interesting tidbit: There was a lot of security in those buildings. You get screened when you come in, and there were a lot of places where you needed different levels of security clearances.)

It was attended primarily by representatives of universities like heads of the sustainability programs and people who worked in the government like EPA employees. There were also a number of small business owners in the renewable energy market and various environmental and economic consultants.

On the whole, discussions were very interesting and several major themes emerged.
1. The current economic model of exponential economic growth is not environmentally sustainable. At the very least, material throughput and carbon emissions need to stop growing. It's unclear how this is possible while maintaining full levels of employment. Not everyone was behind this idea. It's unclear if the business people really understood what this meant, and certainly many panel speakers had never heard of this concept. More work needs to be done in the field of ecological economics as an alternative to neoclassical economics to provide a robust framework for national economic policy.
2. Everyone needs to think about what a "new green economy," an environmentally sustainable economy will look like. People at this conference were interested in providing a better quality of life for people, a stable society, a stable economy, and providing for future generations.
3. There is still a lot that can be done within the current economic framework to increase energy efficiency and reduce material throughput. The most useful things the government can do is to create demand through incentives so that energy efficient technologies and renewable energy businesses can break into the market. People were interested in more accurate accounting of positive as well as negative externalities, which includes pricing the usage of resources such as water.
4. A lot of the demand needs to come from the bottom up, which means we have a long ways to go to educate the public about these issues. Politically, there have been major setbacks to those who are interested in a new green economy. People were certainly starting to feel a little sick, almost despairing, but in general felt even greater urgency than before and committed to action. It got to be like rallying the forces by the end.

I took a lot of notes and will be blogging about all the events I went to in the next few posts.

Energy Talk at MIT with Sterman

This is from last year IAP, actually. John Sterman, the system dynamics guy is the moderator, and Harvey Michaels is a speaker along with some other people I'm not that familiar with yet. Through this, I found some interesting companies.

XENERGY

Environmental Law Institute

and also driving to work today, I saw Alteris Renewables

Synapse Energy Economics

Went to a talk at MIT today, and the ECO of Synapse Energy Economics was there.

China and Rare Earth Metals

Interesting article on China and rare earth metals. Apparently, they mine 97% of the world's supply, and they may be limiting the amount they export. This would be very interesting if it's true since these metals are crucial to green technology.