renewable energy

Colorado’s legislature approved one of the toughest renewable energy standards in the country on Monday.

Once the governor signs that legislation, utilities will be required to get 30 percent of their power from renewable sources by 2020. That follows an agreement Gov. Bill Ritter signed last week with Colorado’s largest utility, Xcel, and a coalition of energy companies and lawmakers to reduce pollution and shift several coal-fired power plants to natural gas by 2017.

The state’s clear move toward renewable energy — and away from coal — stands in stark contrast to some of its neighbors in the West, where the best and some of the worst of clean energy policies are on display.

If the U.S. government changes nothing about its approach toward energy and global warming, the nation's energy consumption will grow 14 percent by 2035. Fossil fuels will retain a relatively high share of that total, and U.S. carbon dioxide emissions from energy will increase by 8.7 percent.

Those are the latest long-term projections described by the Department of Energy's Energy Information Agency on Monday.

The findings highlight a need for federal regulations if greenhouse gas emissions are to be reduced as Congress is considering and members of the international community are demanding in Copenhagen this week. The findings also suggest that state efforts to increase energy efficiency and renewable energy use will begin to pay off.

In case we need more evidence that an urgent economic transformation is required to avoid catastrophic climate change, it can be found in a new study commissioned by World Wildlife Fund International.

Conducted by Climate Risk Pty. Ltd. of Great Britain and Australia, the study concludes:

"Runaway climate change is almost inevitable without specific action to implement low-carbon re-industrialization over the next five years.

"World governments have a window that will close between now and 2014. In that time they must establish fully operational, low-carbon industrial architecture. This must drive a low-carbon re-industrialization that will be faster than any previous economic and industry transformation.

"Today, only three out of 20 industries are moving sufficiently fast enough."

By “low carbon re-industrialization”, the authors mean energy efficiency and clean generation technologies, low-carbon agriculture, and sustainable forestry. They have identified 24 critical resources and industries the world will need to develop quickly to avoid climate catastrophe. Among their conclusions:

The new Greenpeace report Business as Usual describes "five maximum points of danger" in the House and Senate climate bills. SolveClimate is reposting each of those arguments over the course of the week.

Dear Mr. President,

What is especially dangerous, and frankly Orwellian, is that the American Clean Energy and Security Act and the Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act both provide insufficient and grudging support to clean energy.

What state governments and private enterprise are doing to promote the adoption of clean energy already surpasses what the federal government is now proposing to do.

In other words, even the clean energy provisions of the bill support the status quo, the continuation of business as usual. It is farcical that both bills have the words “clean energy” in their titles. They should instead be encouraging the rapid development and deployment of clean energy — the way we once encouraged a first lunar landing.

President Obama, you told the UN General Assembly that the U.S. “will move forward with investments to transform our energy economy, while providing incentives to make clean energy the profitable kind of energy.” The climate bill undermines that aim.

The British Wind Energy Association (BWEA) has unveiled new data on the nation's wind power industry, and it's a mix of good and bad news.

Europe's third largest electricity market passed the 4 gigawatt (GW) milestone for installed wind power capacity. The latest GW was added in less than a year, a big improvement over the 14 years it took to install the first GW.

"Deployment of wind is rapidly accelerating," the BWEA said.

Still, the windiest nation in Europe has a long, long way to go to catch up with competitors on the continent. Germany, which has one of the worst wind resources in Europe, has an installed capacity of 25 GW. No. 2 Spain is at roughly 17 GW.

For now, the BWEA says 12 GW are either operational or in the British pipeline. That puts wind squarely on track to beat out nuclear power in installed capacity by 2012. Another 9 GW worth of turbines is awaiting approval. If they get the go ahead, the UK will be two-thirds of the way to its 30 GW wind energy target by 2020.

That's a big if.

By the middle of next year, the nine campuses that make up the nation's largest community college system plan to be completely energy self-sufficient.

It's a huge step, and it will begin saving money immediately.

The Los Angeles Community College District (LACCD) started down this path in 2001, the year voters approved the first part of $5.7 billion in bond funding to renovate the campuses.

The LACCD Board of Trustees was thinking about much-needed modernization work and its first new construction in 35 years, but it was also thinking ahead. It passed a sustainable building policy mandating that all new buildings that use 50% or more of bond funding be LEED certified. The board had previously developed a renewable energy plan that aimed for a minimum 10% renewable energy standard.

At the time, the trustees were afraid that anything beyond that would be too costly, says Larry Eisenberg, executive director of Facilities, Planning and Development for the LACCD.

The system's chancellor and the implementation team saw greater potential, though.

They looked at the campuses' energy costs – around $9 million a year, growing to $10 million by 2010 – and realized that ramping up renewable power would be a money-saving move. The chancellor at the time, Darroch “Rocky” Young, adopted the 100% renewable energy goal as a budgetary measure.

“What began as an environmental policy turned into a budget initiative,” Eisenberg says, “and that’s where it’s been ever since.”

Read More

Bookmark/Search this post with:

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

• Leslie Berliant's blog
• 2 comments

A battle is brewing in Congress over a climate and energy issue that is pitting the U.S. Senate and states west of the Mississippi against the U.S. House and states east of the mighty river.

It's a fight over expansion of the electric grid – the building of a new "transmission superhighway" – with boosters claiming you can't have a clean energy future without it, and more cautious skeptics saying it could be a huge waste of money that would hurt both the economy and the climate.

A scene from this unfolding political drama was performed before Rep. Ed Markey of Massachusetts last week, who held a hearing on the future of the grid in his House Subcommittee on Energy and Environment and set the stage with his opening comments.

The landmark climate bill he has co-sponsored with Rep. Henry Waxman of California calls for the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) to report back to Congress within three years with recommendations for grid development. Markey said:

Some believe we should go further, by substantially expanding federal authority to plan and site new transmission lines. That includes overriding state decisions to reject proposed lines and using federal eminent domain authority if necessary. I think we need to look closely and skeptically whether such a step is warranted at this juncture.

Markey urged caution (see complete statement, attached below) as did many others who testified, including Christopher Miller, president of the Piedmont Environmental Council:

"Current and proposed transmission policies may produce a transmission grid that is over-built, overly complex and subject to reliability problems, and encourages increased reliance on fossil-fuel generation rather than distributed renewable generation, energy efficiency, conservation, and load management."

Nevertheless, action on federal transmission policy is picking up steam, with various proposals under consideration in both the House and the Senate, driven more by politics than policy wisdom.

It’s not news that the Sierra Club can envision a time when no new coal plants will be built. It is news when the Department of Energy agrees.

The DOE’s Energy Information Administration released its Annual Energy Outlook this week, and it anticipates only about two new coal plants being built between 2013 and 2025.

That projection may even overstate the need – the report did not account for the more than $70 billion in funding from the stimulus package for clean energy and transit and energy efficiency or new climate legislation that will significantly boost the renewable energy sector.

When you take future government action into account, there won’t be a need for even those two new coals plants, says Mark Kresowik of the Sierra Club’s Move Beyond Coal Campaign:

“Even by these very conservative estimates, it’s clear that there is no truth behind the coal industry’s claims that we must have new coal to have a secure energy future. This is more evidence for investors that the future for coal is weak."

Read More

Bookmark/Search this post with:

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

• Laura Shin's blog
• Add new comment

Ever since the economic crisis hit, lawmakers and businesses have been paralyzed by the fear that if they try to tackle environmental problems more jobs will be lost.

If they step back and analyze the situation, though, they will discover a very different reality.

The Union of Concerned Scientists, a non-profit science advocacy group, recently released a report on the potential impact of establishing national renewable electricity standards. It found that requiring U.S. utilities to obtain 25 percent of their energy from renewable sources would create 297,000 jobs in the next 15 years.

That’s three times as many jobs as are necessary to produce an equivalent amount of electricity from fossil fuels. The net benefit would be 202,000 new jobs by 2025.

There are many good reasons to build green, but for homeowners and small businesses, the high upfront costs can be prohibitive.

The key to advancing renewable energy use nationwide may be government involvement.

Federal, state and local incentives can help offset the big capital outlay that solar, wind and other renewable energy technologies require. Tax credit and rebates already go a long away. Now, innovative local funding programs are taking these projects even farther, making renewable energy installations as affordable as the monthly electric bill.