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by Craig ShieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Business

I wish I could attend the BusinessClimate 2010 show hosted by the Carbon War Room in NY City, but I just don’t think I can fit it into my schedule.

The ideas are so intriguing: essentially, use of free-market capitalism – rather than government mandates – to shift the focus of business into directions that are sustainable. In addition to the organization’s founder and perhaps the world’s most famous entrepreneur Sir Richard Branson, there will be a ton of incredible speakers on this subject, including the former president of Costa Rica, Jose Maria Figueres.

In my numerous talks with CEO Jigar Shah on this subject, including the interview I conducted for my book, I’m always intrigued with the creative ways he proposes to kick-start the race towards wealth creation in sustainability through the use of “Expectations Driving Investment Yielding Innovation.”

I’m confident that anyone attending the conference will walk away with some pretty heavy ideas.

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by Craig ShieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Business

This Wednesday, September 15th, energy industry guru Bill Paul will star in another 2GreenEnergy webinar on Alternative Energy Investing, in which he presents: The Five Alternative Energy Companies Likely to See 100% Gain in the Stock Price over the Next Six Months. I hope you can make it. (more…)

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by Craig ShieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Business

We have been using solar energy for thousands of years. And we have been generating electricity with solar energy for decades. And many new technologies are developed to help us use the energy more effectively.

If you will pay attention to solar industry, you may have heard about Graphene. It is a new type of solar cell which is a one-atom-thick planar sheet of sp2-bonded carbon atoms that are densely packed in a honeycomb crystal lattice. It is basic structural element of some carbon allotropes including graphite, carbon nanotubes and fullerenes. So, that is to say, the Graphene should be lighter and have better flexibility comparing to the past silicon solar panel. Some solar equipment such as solar lighting, solar water heater etc. will get rid of the heavy weight of large solar panel. Is that true? Let’s see it. (more…)

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by Craig ShieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Business

I got home late last night from a visit to the East Coast that featured a trip through Baltimore to visit my much-respected friends at GreenChipStocks.  I spoke for an hour and change with Jeff Siegel, and then went upstairs to meet Nick Hodge.  These are fantastically astute folks, and I’m thrilled to know them.

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by Craig ShieldsPosted on Posted in Solar Thermal

I’ll be at the Utility Scale Solar show in San Diego on Wednesday. I know this is a debatable topic, but I tend to get more excited about utility scale anything, not because I think we can count on utilities to be progressive in the migration to renewables. (Do I look like I just fell off a turnip truck?) I just think it’s asking too much to hope for millions of people to make individual decisions to install rooftop solar (or wind, or whatever) and create a “farmers’ market” of renewables.

It’s also true that some of the most promising technologies don’t make sense at small scale. You can’t make economically viable 10 kW systems for solar thermal, geothermal, or algae biofuel.

The transition to renewable can happen – and will happen – when enough people demand it.

If you are in the San Diego area and want to come by and say hello, please hit “contact” and let’s set up a meeting.

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by Craig ShieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Business

General Electric (GE) has some exciting things going on. GE is a top 10 world manufacturer of wind turbines, and is active in renewable energy efforts on several fronts. Many have heard the recent announcement of the GE WattStation.  For electric vehicles to advance in the U.S., to be used easily and accepted, the infrastructure has to be in place and available – and that includes availability of chargers.  GE is, in fact, a technical advisor for Project Get Ready, a non-profit initiative led by the Rocky Mountain Institute. Project Get Ready is all about helping communities prepare for use of electric vehicles on a (more…)

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by Craig ShieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Business

As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, I’m in the process of studying the size and shape of job creation that will come as a welcome by-product of the migration to renewables. 

How this sits in the constellation of benefits to renewables depends on whom you ask. But regardless of the level of importance that job creation has compared with national security, fiscal responsibility, the health and safety of the world’s population, and stemming the long-term ecological damage wrought by extracting and burning fossil fuels, it’s got to be in there someplace.

Yet job creation is a very complicated subject, as it comes with so many moving parts:

  • What percent penetration of renewables are we talking about? What type? In what time-frame?
  • How are market forces affected by the actions of Congress (e.g., removing/perpetuating subsidies that keep the price of oil artificially low, creating incentives for renewables, state legislatures enacting renewable portfolio standards)?  
  • What’s happening outside the US, where many countries are taking aggressive action to move to renewables?
  • What are the strategies of the corporate giants like GE and Siemens in this global economy?  From here, it looks like they don’t care where the green jobs are; if the US misses the boat, that’s too bad.  Is that true?
  • What brown jobs will be lost (e.g., coal mining) simultanously to the build-up of green jobs? Do we have the political stomach to deal with any job loss?
  • What will be the impact of all the green job training in the community colleges?

I’ve become particularly interested in the issue of subsidies, as they seem to be so critical in forming the climate in which private investors will climb on board the clean energy bandwagon.  But because macroeconomics isn’t my strength, I’m going to have to speak with a great number of economists, analysts, and political pundits to get this right. 

It appears that the reason this is so complicated is that subsidies take many forms, some of them (deliberately?) hidden:

  • Construction bonds at low interest rates or tax-free
  • Research-and-development programs at low or no cost
  • Assuming the legal risks of exploration and development in a company’s stead
  • Below-cost loans with lenient repayment conditions
  • Income tax breaks, especially featuring obscure provisions in tax laws designed to receive little congressional oversight when they expire
  • Sales tax breaks – taxes on petroleum products are lower than average sales tax rates for other goods
  • Giving money to international financial institutions (the U.S. has given tens of billions of dollars to the World Bank and U.S. Export-Import Bank to encourage oil production internationally, according to Friends of the Earth)
  • The U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve
  • Construction and protection of the nation’s highway system
  • Relaxing the amount of royalties to be paid – apparently, we get about 40% of revenues from oil on public land vs. 60% – 65% in most other countries
  • Not forcing the industry to deal with the “externalities” – healthcare costs, long-term environmental damage, etc.  — costs that are becoming increasingly clear and subject to quantification

If anyone has a suggestion for people I should interview in this regard, please let me know.

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by Craig ShieldsPosted on Posted in Efficiency

Progress Energy Florida claims that its “Save the Watts” program is a success. The Fortune 500 company says in a recent announcement there has been a 45% drop in energy use since it started the program in 2007 through 2009. That is 87,000 megawatt hours in savings. (2010 figures are not yet available.)

Progress Energy reveals that in 2009 its customers participated in 56,000 free home energy checks, the most performed in any year.  The company is headquartered in Raleigh, NC and has 22,000 MW of generation capacity.

The “Save the Watts” program mission is to help 1.6 million Florida customers reduce and conserve energy. The program (more…)

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by Craig ShieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Science

When I was back in New York a couple of weeks ago, I took a walk with some friends around Lake Onondaga, arguably the most polluted lake in the country.  The lake was ruined primarily with industrial dumping and sewage contamination; the main culprit was the contamination from some 82 tons of mercury dumped into the lake over decades by the former Allied Chemical factory complex (now Honeywell) in neighboring Solvay.

When I asked what was being done to remediate the situation, my friends explained that there are a few good ideas, but that each one (dredging, filtration, lining the bottom of the lake, etc.) is prohibitively expensive.  Each year, a gaggle of engineers and chemists submits a new set of ideas, only to be rebuffed due to the enormous costs. 

I bring this up not to point fingers, but to remind us of the extreme consequences of our turning our backs to environmental damage. 

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I recently became aware of the picture here – Adam Nieman’s incredible 2003 work, aimed at getting us to appreciate the environmental challenges we face. It depicts the actual size of the Earth’s oceans (the small blue sphere on the left) and atmosphere (if it were at sea-level air pressure, the small white sphere on the right).

It may be expensive to keep our planet clean, but it’s even more so to clean it up once it’s dirty.

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by Craig ShieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Business

Over the next few months, I have committed myself to performing comprehensive research into the pragmatic issues that prevent a rapid migration to renewables.  I’m not 100% sure how to organize this research, and even less sure how to present the findings, but for now, I’m just trying to make a list of the big, obvious issues, and then do enough reading and interviewing that I feel I’ve reached a reasonable conclusion. 

Of course, each major country on Earth is going to have its own story to tell.  To whatever degree I’m able, I’d like to explore the workings of places like China and Brazil, where, I’m told, they get things done by government mandate.  I’m more familiar — though not completely so — with the US, in which we have a weird balance between the public and private sectors — part of the ongoing debate on limits of governmental power to regulate, etc. 

I’ve decided to start looking at the issue of job creation in the US.  Part of the accepted reality that has existed since the 1930s’ response to the Great Depression is the idea of governmental regulation into most if not all of the macro-economic factors that form the framework in which we make our basic business decisions: borrow money to start or expand businesses, hire people, purchase capital equipment, sell our products to customers outside the US, etc. 

Government always wants high employment (especially now with the crisis) knowing that unemployed people are angry people who vote to remove incumbents.  But there are obvious limits to the government’s ability to fork over money that it doesn’t have to stimulate job growth in renewable energy or any other area. 

Here are a few questions:

How true is it that a concerted effort to move away from fossil fuel consumption will add net new jobs in significant number?

How does this work, exactly?  Suppose the Congress passes a certain “clean energy jobs” bill.  How — and how quickly — does that translate in public or private organizations actually hiring people?

What will most of these jobs probably be like?  I would think that society would consider it a net “win” to have jobs mining coal replaced with building PV or CSP plants.  But is that true?  I’d be surprised if the coal industry saw it that way.

Doesn’t almost all of this surround subsidies?  The price of oil determines essentially all of this, doesn’t it?  Everything from unconventional oil extraction techniques like tar sands and shale oil to the dozens of different forms of clean energy are contemplated vis-a-vis the competition that oil provides at a certain price.  So let’s look at the oil and gas industries and try to understand what actually determines those prices.

For this we will turn to dozens of researchers and analysts. 

We will also explore the conditions by which capital formation occurs, noting that this is the worst environment for capital formation since the 1930s.  Why is that?  How and when is this likely to change?

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