Archive for May, 2009

As posted to CleanTechBlog.com

One of the more popular policy prescriptions often made by ardent renewable energy advocates is the adoption of a “feed-in tariff” (FIT).

With a FIT, the government sets a price for electricity supplied by a qualifying renewable energy source, and the price is usually sufficiently high to produce a good return for the investor to install the renewable energy project. This, in turn, provides a substantial economic motivation for the growth of the renewable energy sector.

Supporters love the fact that a FIT policy provides a long-term, stable, predictable, and lucrative return on renewable energy investment. Naturally, this leads to booming markets for renewable energy where FITs are in place.

FITs are in wide use in many parts of the world – mainly in Europe, but increasingly in Canada as well. Correspondingly, these markets are experiencing exploding growth for renewables.

However, to date, traction has been slow to come for FITs in the United States because the policy mechanism is innately at odds with the prevailing philosophy of the American economy: to let market forces sort things out. 

In the U.S., the renewable portfolio standard (RPS) has been the preferred policy mechanism to promote the penetration of renewable energy (along with the predictable potpourri of incentives and subsidies buried in the piles of the tax codes). In an RPS, the government sets a target for a quantity of renewables to be adopted by a certain date, and then lets market forces dictate what mix of renewables will supply the requirement, as well as the price implications of that mix.

By contrast, a FIT explicitly puts the government in the position of price-setter, and picks technological winners by placing prices as a function of the renewable energy technology in question. 

If the price of the FIT is set too high, unquestionably this pushes renewable energy adoption but tramples competitive forces in doing so: bad (meaning, to me, highly uneconomic) projects get done, and/or companies or investors make outrageous profits. On the other hand, if the price of the FIT is set too low, then the policy won’t have any impact at all: no incremental investment in the desired renewables will occur.

In other words, the government has to be able to set the price at exactly the right level to induce a lot of investment, but no higher so as to provide a free wealth grab, and no lower so as to discourage the market from happening at all. No government is that smart to be able to perfectly set the price of a FIT. So in practice, FIT prices are very high – and the renewable energy interests profit immensely from it.

Although FIT policy has historically gone nowhere in the U.S., that may be changing, as FITs are starting to get more serious consideration. In early 2008, the California Public Utilities Commission adopted the first FIT in the U.S. to promote up to a maximum of 480 megawatts installed. Earlier this year, the city of Gainesville, Fla., enacted a feed-in tariff for its municipal utility. Even in Michigan, not considered one of the leading states in pro-renewables policies, the Public Service Commission is considering a pilot feed-in tariff.

I am not sold on the FIT mechanism as good policy, because it is so heavy-handed and arbitrary. However, as the rest of the world adopts FIT policies, they extend their leadership over the U.S. And the leadership is not just in market size, but also in technological advancement. If the U.S. doesn’t maintain technological leadership, then we’ve lost arguably our best asset. If a FIT policy is necessary to be leaders in renewable energy, then maybe it’s a necessary evil.

It wouldn’t be the first time I’d have had to swallow hard in lukewarmly supporting a policy that otherwise I find fundamentally challenging.

Some have argued that the aggregate economic subsidy associated with a national FIT policy is outweighed by the faster reduction in costs associated with renewable energy advancement promoted by the FIT, plus the avoided expenditures on fossil fuels displaced by the increased renewable energy production caused by the FIT. It’s an interesting argument, but counter-intuitive to me, and I’d like to see some quantitative support for this line of reasoning.

As posted to CleanTechBlog.com

You heard it here first: The energy consultancy Douglas-Westwood is claiming in a May 11 white paper that “peak oil” may have already happened, as far back as October 2004, and that the oil price boom followed by economic collapse is indicative of how things will play out over the decades to come as oil supplies are unable to expand in the face of increasing demands. Stay tuned….

The American Wind Energy Association (AWEA) exposition WINDPOWER 2009 attracted 23,000 attendees to Chicago earlier this month. Glad AWEA didn’t ask me to do the headcount!….

Your stock portfolio isn’t the only thing that’s plummeted. According to a snippet in the March 2009 issue of Power, so too have PV prices fallen, by an estimated 10 percent since last October, with a further 15 to 20 percent decline expected in the coming year. Seems that, after several years of tight supplies, there’s now a glut in the market due to collapsing demand in Europe….

Lots happening in D.C. these days. Looks like cap-and-trade requirements for carbon dioxide emissions are making real progress, embodied in the grandiosely named “American Clean Energy and Security Act” (H.R. 2454) - better known as the Waxman-Markey bill. Cap-and-trade might even pass the House sometime this summer. Don’t think it’s going to be so easy in the Senate, though….

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has created ARPA-E to fund the initial evaluation of new whizbang ideas for energy, just like DARPA’s been doing for out-of-the-box defense gizmos for decades. One can only imagine what’s going to come out of that shop in years to come….

It also appears that the e-DII concept floated by Brookings earlier this year (to create Clean Energy Innovation Centers mainly affiliated with universities) is gaining traction, now having been tucked into the Waxman-Markey bill. Wonder what the national research labs, such as NREL, NETL, ORNL, LBNL and other alphabet soupers, think of this?….

Speaking of NREL, hats off to Joel Serface, who just completed a year’s residence there on behalf of uber-VC firm Kleiner Perkins to help accelerate technology commercialization and spinouts from the lab.  A year in Golden/Boulder is hardly hardship duty, but as Joel indicates in a recent blog post, it wasn’t enough time to make much of a dent in the bureaucracy….

Congratulations to my former colleague Cathy Zoi, who’s been tabbed by President Obama to lead the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy at DOE. Wish her good luck:  She’ll need it!….

Let’s hear it for Joseph Romm, now a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. He calls ‘em like he sees ‘em. In a note in the May/June Technology Review, Romm claims “it’s not possible to have a sustained economic recovery that isn’t green” and calls our economic system a “global Ponzi scheme: investors (i.e., current generations) are paying themselves (i.e., you and me) by taking from future generations.”  Whew!….

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce just released a study performed by Charles River Associates estimating 3 million jobs to be lost in the U.S. by 2030 as a result of climate change legislation. Last year, the chamber commissioned a similar study announcing a similar doom-and-gloom result. I’m not saying there won’t be job losses as a result of cap-and-trade – there certainly will – but I don’t think it’s going to be apocalyptic, either….

Gotta hand it to Bob Galvin, former chairman of Motorola. Not content to be retired, he has launched the Galvin Electricity Initiative to promote a “Perfect Power System” to help prevent future blackouts. In a sense, he’s trying to Galvinize the grid….

Last Wednesday evening, the Cleveland chapter of the American Jewish Committee honored the Cleveland Foundation for its advanced energy initiative. Accepting the award on behalf of the foundation was President and CEO Ronn Richard. A good time was had by all….As posted to CleanTechBlog.com

As posted on CleanTechBlog.com

One of my favorite bumper stickers of all time reads, “My Karma Ran Over Your Dogma.”

In addition to being a wonderful word play, the one-liner reflects my deep disdain for those who are far too certain of their positions - whatever their positions may be. I haven’t done any statistical analysis, but I often find that the strength of people’s opinions is inversely correlated with their knowledge of the subject.

So it’s actually a service to be reminded by intelligent people offering alternative views with substantial supporting evidence that what we think we really know may not actually be truth.

In the energy realm, I’ve encountered a number of articles by or about very accomplished and expert individuals who don’t subscribe to conventional wisdom.

For instance, in late March, the New York Times Magazine ran a provocative article called “The Civil Heretic,” profiling the Princeton mathematician Freeman Dyson, who has been the subject of significant and hostile criticism for suggesting (as has Bjorn Lomborg, author of The Skeptical Environmentalist) that too much concern is being paid to the phenomenon of climate change.

On the oil front, Ruchir Sharma, the head of emerging market research at Morgan Stanley wrote an article in the April 20 Newsweek titled “If It’s In the Ground, It Can Only Go Down.” Sharma doesn’t buy the peak oil theory, and he argues that the long-term trend of declining oil prices will reemerge.

Even if you disagree with their positions, you can’t say they are stupid people. There are grains of truth in their arguments that we are all well-served to recognize and embrace.

As stated so beautifully in The Tree of Knowledge by Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela: “The knowledge of knowledge compels. It compels us to adopt an attitude of permanent vigilance against the temptation of certainty. It compels us to recognize that certainty is not a proof of truth. It compels us to realize that the world everyone sees is not the world but a world.”

We must be honest with ourselves in admitting that the future is not knowable with certainty in advance, and that all projections can at best only be grounded speculations. Being confronted by obviously smart and wise people who hold different views than ours about the future is a good exercise in humility for all of us. If we respond thoughtfully to considerate alternative views, we are driven to reexamine our own thinking and logic, and strengthen or alter it accordingly.

As posted to CleanTechBlog.com

The federal government is a mighty bureaucracy, so it’s impossible to keep track of all the parts. Still, few areas are as unknown by the general public as the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC).

The FERC (it’s always referrred to as “the FERC”) is responsible for interstate regulation of energy markets, which in practice means the transmission or transportation of electricity and natural gas. As a result, the FERC is going to be a key player in all Smart Grid developments, which in turn will be a key driver of a variety of new energy technologies: renewable energy, energy storage, advanced meters, and so on.

President Obama recently appointed Jon Wellinghoff to be chairman of the commission. Wellinghoff is a long-time proponent of environmental protection, so it’s no surprise that he’s rapidly making moves to promote renewable energy and energy efficiency. For instance, Wellinghoff recently announced the formation of the Office of Energy Policy and Innovation, to be effective today. (Innovation in a Federal agency? Hmmmmm.)

Wellinghoff has already demonstrated the gall to radically challenge conventional wisdom, which is always a risky and courageous thing to do in the electricity sector. In late April, as noted in the New York Times, Wellinghoff told reporters following a United States Energy Association forum that baseload generation options may not be necessary in the future, thereby undercutting one of the key selling points for the construction or continued operation of nuclear and coal-fired powerplants.

Quoting Wellinghoff: “I think baseload capacity is going to become an anachronism…People talk about ‘Oh, we need baseload.’ It’s like people saying we need more computing power, we need mainframes. We don’t need mainframes; we have distributed computing.”

Of course, Wellinghoff’s seductive vision depends on a major and costly overhaul of the national power grid, which seems light years away to me. In his seminal New York Times editorial last November, Al Gore projected the cost of a Smart Grid at $400 billion - whereas the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (a.k.a., the stimulus bill) allocates a seemingly large but comparatively paltry $4.5 billion to Smart Grid projects.

To get over the formidable humps we face in Washington, we’re going to need leaders who are willing to rattle the china on the dinner table. In Wellinghoff, it looks like we have one.  His comments no doubt have a lot of people in the energy sector muttering, “What the FERC?”