Here’s a video that describes the most recent in our series of “Tough Realities” reports. I hope you find it valuable; you can download it here: The Tough Realities of Renewable Energy. (more…)
Last January, AeroVironment closed the deal with Nissan to supply electric vehicle home-charging stations and installation services to customers of the LEAF. Since that time, they’ve been particularly difficult to get on the phone to discuss an appearance on the 2GreenEnergy Report, or my other favorite topic, advertising on EVWorld.com. Fortunately, I ran into my old friend and long-time AV exec Charlie Botsford at the Alt Car Expo in Santa Monica last weekend; he had drawn “booth duty” and he gave me some new names to contact.
I never quit.
I just got a glowing note from the editor of Globe-Net.com, a wonderful website on the business of the environment from a Canadian perspective, asking permission to reprint one of our white papers. The answer is always yes. Of course, we appreciate a backlink in the attribution — it never hurts to build up those little puppies.
I thought I’d mention that a friend has asked 2GreenEnergy to perform a small marketing project for a company called Chrysalife, an importer and distributor of high-end silk bedding.
To be honest, I knew next to nothing about silk bedding and its numerous health benefits; if you Google the subject, you’ll learn all about the idea that silk enables the human body to rest and rejuvenate more thoroughly when we sleep. Silk, often called “nature’s perfect bed,” is a smooth, non-irritating protective fiber, resulting from billions of years of evolution as Earth’s most comforting and soothing substance.Here’s another point: where polyester is one of the zillions of substances that is derived from petroleum, silk is natural and sustainable.
I just pulled back into my driveway from a few hours at the Smart Grid Conference at the Los Angeles Convention Center. I’m a huge believer in the long-term importance of smart grid technology, but I have to say that there is altogether too much chatter about it at this point. The result of a 40-minute talk on network standards for smart grid communication? There are no standards; they’ve yet to emerge. Oh really? Couldn’t that have been summed up in a 15-word email? Or skipped entirely? (more…)
2GreenEnergy senior investment advisor Bill Paul appeared on PBS’s Consuelo Mack’s show WealthTrack, which is airing on about 200 PBS affiliates in North America this week. Needless to say, the traffic on the site – and one my phone – is fairly intense. It’s wonderful to hear so many great questions and opportunities in the renewable energy space. Check out the show (linked above); he did a fantastic job as always.
I’ll be hitting the Smart Grid Conference at the Los Angeles Convention Center over the next couple of days, and I hope to see numerous 2GreenEnergy readers there.
If you want to meet for coffee, please hit “contact” and let me know.
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.
If there is a central theme to the Renewable Energy Finance Forums generally, it’s pragmatism. You can listen to every word from the presenters — as well as from each the other participants as they network on breaks between the marathon sessions — and trust me: there isn’t so much as a breath of idealism. The show isn’t about what should happen, it’s about what will happen.
I had lunch the other day with an incredibly bright guy, a very practical physicist whose business characterizes materials for companies in solar, wind, and electric transportation — as well as dozens of other industries. I immediately saw that he was lukewarm on renewable energy. “I’m here to drum up business, but I’m reluctant to be connected with an industry that relies on subsidies,” he sneered.
When I pointed out that oil and gas get 12 times the subsidies that clean energy receives, he looked down at his arugula sheepishly and replied quietly,” Well, I guess what I meant to say is ‘subsidies that might go away.'”
Those few words encapsulate the root of the clean energy problem. Not only are the subsidies for fossil fuels enormous, they are taken for granted; they’re so well entrenched that they’re completely invisible. Contrast that to the mountain that is made out of the relatively small tax credits and government grants under TARP and ARPA-E to stimulate development of clean energy.
I have to hand it to these oil companies for the deftness with which they’ve soaked us for everything we’re worth. The checks that we taxpayers write to them every day go completely unnoticed. These people have taken larceny and elevated to the plain of art. The lesson here is clear and simple: we must not underestimate the skill of the people we’re playing against.
Michael Eckhardt, the president of The American Council on Renewable Energy (who’s retiring after many years of wonderfully effective service to us all), served as the emcee of the Renewable Energy Finance Forum West 2010. At one point, he attempted to put the concept of “one trillion” into perspective for the audience. A million seconds is two weeks; a billion seconds ago, it was 1970; a trillion seconds ago, it was 30,000 BC.
A poignant example came up in a story about the difference between the Chinese commitment to renewables versus our own here in the US. One of the presenters had recently fought hard to get a matching $1 million grant from the DoE under the ARPA-E program, and was thrilled that we had bested the other contestants in this victory, but he heard the news as he happened to be in China, talking to an associate who had recently received the equivalent of several billion dollars. “We’re talking days and weeks; they’re talking decades and centuries,” he said.
