What Will It Take to Achieve a US Renewable Portfolio Standard?
I was keeping a tally sheet at last week’s Renewable Energy Finance Forum, so I could let readers know the issue that was brought up most often and granted the most overall prominence. The clear winner: China is eating our lunch in the migration to renewables. Inexplicably and tragically, the US is content to drop further and further behind in the development of energy technology with each passing week. While China is hiring, researching, developing, importing, exporting — and dominating the world of 21st Century energy, we seem to be content to argue and point fingers at each other.
As Winston Churchhill observed, “America will always do the right thing — after it has exhausted all other options.” But can anyone see this moving anytime soon — for any reason — least of all because it’s “the right thing?” None of the promises of renewable energy: jobs, national security, addressing concerns about peak oil and the climate issue — seem to motivate action on our part.
Perhaps the most visible proof of our nation’s abdication of technology leadership is the absence of a federal renewable energy portfolio standard (RPS). What are we to make of the fact that we seem to be a million miles from such a piece of legislation? Clearly, it’s the result of leaders’ pandering for votes, while scrupulously avoiding areas of controversy that might be used against them.
And now, with the recent Supreme Court decision enabling corporations to provide unlimited funding to anonymous entities that can, in turn, spend millions of campaign advertising dollars to defeat perceived enemies, our leaders need to be even more careful than they were when their enemies had to identify themselves and use their own money to slander opponents. This, of course, is another true disaster for those of us who care about free and fair elections and continue (foolishly?) to hold out hope for the effectiveness of the democratic process.
But enough about that. What about the federal RPS? Is there any hope that we can re-establish ourselves as the leader in energy technology? Here’s another tidbit from the conference: Adding nuclear power into the mix of renewables might provide the political muscle to pass a federal RPS. After all, it IS carbon-free. Proponents claim, “Nuclear energy presents a safe, clean, and inexpensive alternative to other methods of producing electricity. Nuclear waste can either be reprocessed or disposed of safely.”
But is any of this true? No. Do most renewable energy supporters believe that nuclear should be included in the list of clean energy technologies? Of course not. But who cares? In the 10-or-so years it takes to plan and permit the next nuclear reactor, the cost/benefit of photovoltaics, wind, concentrating solar power, geothermal, and biomass will have improved to such a point that nuclear will be completely irrelevant.
Go on; invite them to the party. Give them all the political support they’ve worked so long and hard to purchase. In the end, it won’t matter. Despite the rhetoric, you’ll never see another nuke deployed in the US.
China is going NUCLEAR! As should the USA but with FREE market choices.
If you like China’s communist dictatorship policies then go live there….1.3 billion people and GDP per capita of only $6.6k per person…what a great life.
The only way evirnonmental extremists can shut down nuclear is to over regulate it to make too hard and expensive to build and operate a plant….that is NOT free market…that is CONTROL. So the economic truth never is allowed to play out. The only way most other CLEAN energy sources can “win” is with government subsidies which is NOT truly winning….just a control game. In the mean time we ALL lose. We need to get GOVERNMENT completely OUT of the energy business. Quit trying to use political CONTROLS to get your way…let the free market prevail and then the TRUE winners will win and energy costs will plummet and prosperity will prevail.
It’s all about the money! The poweers-to-be just haven’t figured out how to control and pocket most of the profits in alternate energy yet. When they do, look out world; the US WILL be number one in green energy. Just look at what happened to Stan Myers and his water powered dune buggie! The powers-to-be, i.e. OPEC(to name one) couldn’t own it so they shut it down. Him included. I know! I know! No one was ever blamed for his death. It was an “accident”, or “natural causes”, etc. The same goes for all the others that have found a better way and won’t sell out to “Big Businesses”. They just seem to disapear, along with all their information.
Let’s face facts, money makes the US go around. Our “Government of the people, by the peopl, for the people” has become the “Government of the MONEY, by the MONEY, for the MONEY!”. This, I believe, is our own fault, for many reasons, but mostly because of complacency. We simply allowed it to happen by not doing anything to prevent it.
OK! You can have my soap box back now.
Again and again we come back to the fact that Washington and Congress are made up of people who are mostly legal trained and have no knowledge of scientific principles or any understanding of the words proactive. Clearly our future is being squandered way. We must be proactive and that is something legal people do not understand. I quoted Jefferson in my last comment and how right he was. Thomas Jefferson said, “If the present Congress errs in too much talking, how can it be otherwise in a body to which the people send one hundred and fifty lawyers, whose trade it is to question everything, yield nothing, and talk by the hour? ”
What you say about alternative energy and China, is also true about US manufacturing and US dependence on oil. To create a level playing field sounds great, but to do nothing, which is what Congress has done for the last 50 years, is totally unacceptable. Same holds for oil dependency; say it is bad and do nothing. This what politicians do and we can’t take it anymore.
Creating a RPS is another good sound bite, but all that is needed is to set National Energy Policy that makes status quo more expensive than alternative energy over the long haul. RPS does not involve the consumer who must have their addictive habits of wasting cheap energy changed. I believe the consumer must realize that his current bill for gas and electricity are going to go up and that he has other companies or products he is able to buy and use that are going to save him money. That is how the free market system works. But Energy Policy must drive it.
And if that energy policy and other national policies (like pollution control, child labor laws, employee work rights, building safe products, etc) are right for us, than our compeititors overseas, must also adhere to them or we do not trade with them.
This is not a political bickering process. You state the facts and either you do it or you do not do it.
We need a wholesale change in Washington. Elect others who bring less legal thinging and more practical business, science, manufacturing, medical, agricultural experience to Washington. More legal BS is not required in a fast past technological world that we are in.
Good luck to us all this November.
You ranged afield a bit in this one, so I’m not seeing the common thread. They are all important topics in their own right, in any case.
I wish it were otherwise, but the political system has no care for the preservation of this country’s long term prosperity. I wrote before that we are in a kind of corporate oligarchy with politicians as the priesthood. In this particular time in history, Churchill’s comments are still applicable, but in this case, will be more than a day late. The USA will not likely catch up on this one.
Our ability to mobilize our resources is perhaps still largely there, but the reality of manhattan and apollo type projects is they are motivated by the political fear machine, and not a greater sense of intellectual or industrial achievement. Renewables have always fallen short of having that ‘hook’. Climate change, peak oil, what-have-you, don’t provide the appropriate levels of fear.
As your sentences on nuclear were written, you are technically correct. I do, however, disagree on the reprocessing. It is a well understood technology, very efficacious, and the terror argument is just so much deli meat. I do not see nuclear as a panacea, but it is a terribly important intermediate step while (the rest of) the world develops the technologies of energy storage.
You noticed that I “ranged.” I laughed when I read this, Arlene. I was thinking before I published it: I believe people will resonate with this, but if I were grading it as an essay, it would be a C-; too much jumping around. 🙂
THe ability of big oil to internalize profits and externalize costs such as health ,pollution ,security , and environmental have made most of the public unaware of the true cost of gas .While our politicians collect big bucks to help the charade. Alex is the perfect example of buying the wrong message .No one but the gov’t can bear the cost of insuring nuks ,no private firm will touch it because of the huge risks.And it’s those risks that make it unacceptable.NOt to mention the polution of getting uranium out of the ground and proccessed.There seems to be no good way other then grass roots to fight the entreanched billions of the energy status quo. SO Craig keep fight the good fight and for the rest of us forward this message to everyond with a reasonable brain. Thanks for all you do Craig
Thanks very much for the kind words. It is, indeed, something of a fight.
We’re stuck between a rock and a hard place – that is, between a pocketed government and the entrenched interests that pocketed it.
We cannot rely upon our present wolf’s-wool incarnation of “a free market” to produce the best solutions. The only value to which CEO’s, CAO’s, and CFO’s are held is profit – not just a fair profit, but an ever increasing profit sufficient to generate the 20% annual return that the boards and the shareholders demand. Executives are rewarded with kingly sums for making whatever decisions are required to maintain growing profitability during their brief watch. They are often granted lavish separation packages despite being summarily dumped, and even discredited, when profits are “flat”… or even when companies fold, and worker pensions are “lost”.
A corporation under present law has no stake in any of the nations or communities it exploits, except short-term financial gain. Social and environmental responsibility, charity, and ethics on the part of authorities within the corporate structure are in fact punished and prevented by the very nature of that structure.
Among the clearest proofs of this is the necessity of child labor laws, and the many bald-faced abuses of Wall Street that daily come to light. This is also why pharmaceutical interests pursue pill-a-day palliatives of dubious clinical value instead of permanent or even preventative cures.
Through mergers, buy-outs, and hostile take-overs this narrow and perverse value system under which we now labor consistently results in an elitist autocracy, in which moguls like history’s J. P. Morgan and William Randolph Hearst (or today’s Bill Gates and Rupert Murdock) own all the production, manufacturing, distribution, and service and retail infrastructure. “Conglomerates” hold the mines, factories, warehouses, and shops.
The elimination of competition leads to price fixing and gouging, and a hoarding of profits and wealth by an ever-shrinking circle of individuals. It was precisely this economically and socially unacceptable concentration of wealth, and market control, that led to the sweeping anti-trust legislation enacted in this country, generations ago, over the fierce opposition of J. P. Morgan and those like him. Morgan went as far as to walk unannounced into Theodore Roosevelt’s office and threaten the sitting President. …Teddy was not intimidated.
Since then, however, government has not been as forceful in curbing the excesses of “big business”. All over this country, people in middle- and low-income households struggled for economic justice – and sometimes died violently in mass demonstrations and strikes. These ‘labor movements’ were often brutally suppressed by armed elements of local, State and Federal governments. The actions of these brave citizens succeeded in forcing the enactment of the very child labor laws, and workplace safety regulations, the five day workweek, the eight hour day, and the overtime pay that many of us now take for granted.
Times have changed. As long as we continue to select our leadership based on the ability to grovel for piles of cash rather than their own ideas and accomplishments, we’ll continue to be increasingly ruled by the most ruthless greed and craven cowardice imaginable.
The sad fact is that our cherished and rare democratic republic is dying – slipping into oblivion…
The only way to resuscitate it is to get all the rabid foxes, on both sides of the same coin, to enact equal public-only financing of all campaigns, require equal media space for all candidates – and thus push each other out of their long-defended positions guarding the bloody remains in the henhouse.
No progress on any of the pressing issues of our time is possible unless and until this comes to pass – and this is especially true of alternative energy where our government supports dirty fuel interests to the tune of $550 billion annually (not to mention the flailing and self-defeating defense of their resource needs by the blood of our children and the treasure of our grandchildren).
The recent 5-4 decision by the SCOTUS in “Citizens (Orwellian) United” vs. the Federal Election Commission is already hastening the demise of any hope in this area – the people must act.
That’s a bit difficult, though, when most of us are wage slaves on anti-depressants and fluoride spiked water, and fed a wretched mix of lies, half-truths and pabulum by the corporate media.
God Help America
Yes, I have to agree that the Citizen’s Unitied decision (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._Federal_Election_Commission) is probably the biggest disaster to befall the democratic process since the days of ancient Athens.
China became the world third economic power few years ago, has become the second few months ago, and moving fast to accelerate its economy.
Although I am optimistic about the energetic US economy, I think the only way to stay ahead of world economy in the 21-Century will rely on the “Republicans”, who should cooperate sincerely and actively with the “Democrats” to reinvigorate the economy, by helping the small and the medium businesses, and the poor and the middle class employees, especially in the renewable energy sector, and stay away from the prevailing conditions of unjustifiable direct and indirect help of big businesses by hundreds of billions of USD annually…
Otherwise, no one should be surprised when China will easily surpass the US economy by 2050…
For some time, here in the U.S. we have spent practically nothing on nuclear energy research while other countries are doing nuclear research work. The results are sure to be unfortunate for us unless we also do more research work on nuclear energy. Russia is exporting nuclear technology to Arabian countries.
Uranium does not need to be enriched to be used in nuclear reactors; there are reactors which will operate on natural uranium. The enrichment process wastes most of the uranium and what is left is used very inefficiently by the reactor types we use here in the U.S. thereby generating more than 100 times as much waste as better nuclear technologies would generate.
Thorium, which is about four times as abundant as uranium, can be used in reactors designed to use thorium; the liquid fluoride thorium reactor (LFTR) is especially advantageous and would eliminate most of the objections people have to nuclear power, but more development work needs to be done before it can be put into production. It also offers no path to nuclear weapon proliferation. If we had done the necessary research and development work on LFTR technology, we would not now be concerned with Iran’s possibly acquiring nuclear weapons.
Solar and wind power have their place, but presently not as a major source of power except in places where power requirements are minimal and connecting to the grid is not practical. That could change, but we cannot wait to see. Quickly eliminating our dependence on fossil fuels cannot be done without increasing the use of nuclear power.
Rather then depending on energy companies and environmental organizations for information (all of these entities have their own agendum), I suggest that people do their own research work even if it takes weeks and months of effort; there is no other way to become adequately informed. I especially suggest doing a google search on “thorium reactor.”
Laws are not the answer. The entrenched power structure in the US delays, dilutes, and corrupts laws and regulations. And wing-nut corporatist courts nullify anything that remains.
Even if we could wave a magic wand and pass the best possible laws, these laws would only apply to the US. Many other countries would continue to pollute, and China would still beat us on labor costs and rare earths.
The answer is to develop breakthrough clean energy technology that cuts the legs from under dirty energy. We need to offer the world clean energy so cheap and decentralized that everyone will rush to adopt the new technology.
Massive research, development, and Global deployment is essential. We have only five years. There is no time to spare…and there is no reboot.
This is it.
I do agree that China will become a top rank of the world on RE development, not only for their own use but also for export market. We imported wind turbines, PV modules, and gas engines from China for many projects. In my opinion, the quality of their products is getting better and better, specially we don’t have to be in long queue when order those products compare to others.
Hen you isa! [Very interesting].. Please keep in mind China’s skills in prevarification, statistics massage and illusion. Just the same, I would have LiFePos technology in my EV right now if I weren’t dead set against supporting the Chinese Air Force or Chinese Army. Historically, China pushes until someone pushes back, as long as “Democrats” and “Republicans” remain locked horns, the Chinese will push forward with impunity. I haven’t been there in a long time, I see no difference in the cultures anymore, except who is sleeping.
If you have been traveling and doing renewable energy business in China, then you will know Europeans has been dominating many of the renewable business…not China, not India…I will pick wind energy as an example, there are no wind blade designers in the entire Asia. China is not or has not export any turbines to US. In US, GE is holding a monopoly in this market with the help of trade barriers (i.e. Buy American Act whenever it involves givernment money) and GE Renewable Finance. China has been pushing 3MW, 5MW. and GE has been selling 1.5 & 2.5MW. Why we are behind to EU-27, China & India in wind??? The obvious answer is the policies set by the politicians who in turned controlled by Big Oil and Big Coal.
Craig Thanks for your critically important site and “right on” comments. I plan to keep [ I hope pleasently] reminding you of the nexus of carbon free energy and water desalination and purification along with fertilizer production. When my patent pending is at a stage where details can be revealed I hope you will be an ally. The engineering department at the University of Colorado and chemistry department at Colorado State University are now working on this project lending credibility to it. Potable water, fertilizer and energy [ in the form of H2 which can be transmitted and stored ] can be obtained on a scale suitable backyard [nonpotable waterside use]. Water is declared a human right but energy and fertilizer are of commercial value. My hope for you is that recognition of the nexus of clean energy and water will speed our entry into a sustainable future and benefit all. Bruce
I can’t wait to learn more about it, and provide any help I can.