Clean Energy Centers Growing Worldwide, Not in U.S.

Clean energy technology hubs are rapidly developing all over the world, except in the United States. Business leaders who met at the Reuters Global Climate and Alternative Energy Summit acknowledged that massive government investment has created vibrant clean energy markets in countries around the world, but unfortunately the U.S. has not taken part in this trend. As The Business Insider reports, Google Green Energy Czar, Bill Weihl noted:

“Other countries, China being one of the major examples, are investing very heavily in this space across the whole innovation pipeline…from shower to power, from the idea in the shower to generating the power (in a) commercial scale enterprise.”

Just yesterday, the China Greentech Initiative released a report describing how large-scale government investment is driving a clean energy market that could be worth upwards of US$1 trillion annually.

While China is home to some of the fastest growing clean energy centers, particular in the solar industry, Denmark, Japan, South Korea, India, North Africa, Singapore, and Abu Dhabi are all directly investing in creating domestic clean energy hubs.

Executives in Silicon Valley, who have become accustomed to leadership in key technology industries like IT and semiconductors are starting to sense the shift in power.

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US Must Not Blow Its Chance as Foreign Investments Bring Wind Jobs Ashore

It’s strange to hear of “insourcing”–the transfer of manufacturing jobs into the United States instead of out–but that’s exactly what’s happening with Denmark’s wind giant Vestas, according to a New York Times article yesterday.

According to the report, a combination of global recession and domestic stimulus spending on clean energy is adding up to a boon for the American clean energy manufacturing industry.

In Europe, Vestas has seen several nations slow down their rates of added wind capacity, and flagging government support combined with financial difficulties has impeded the construction of new projects. By contrast, the United States built 8,500 megawatts of wind capacity in 2008 to Britain’s 500, and demand for turbine technology is high. So for opportunities in a more robust wind market, Vestas has begun to look across the Atlantic.

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Nationalism: Rhetoric or Realpolitik, Part 2

A second piece on nationalism in the context of the clean energy race was published on Mother Jones’ blog MoJo, and is evidence that the growing body of discourse around this issue has struck a very resonant chord. In the post, entitled “Harnessing Nationalism,” Kevin Drum offers poignant, if somewhat veiled, criticism of the rhetoric behind the “clean energy race” narrative.

Inspired by The New Republic’s Bradford Plumer, the post starts with a lengthy quote whose primary point is this: the clean energy race is not a zero-sum competition because everyone stands to benefit if China makes a significant effort to reduce emissions by investing in clean technology.

First, as Drum puts it, Plumer’s commentary may be an attempt at “intellectual honesty,” but honesty doesn’t make it completely accurate. True, the whole world will benefit from advancements in clean energy no matter where it comes from, but China is not motivated to compete in the clean tech industry by emissions reductions – it is driven by the potential for economic gain.

As a (rapidly) developing nation, economic development, not emissions targets, is the highest priority. Thus, the race is not about emissions, it is about whose economy stands to benefit from leadership in clean technology.

Drum views the clean energy race through “green” tinted glasses, as well, preferring the “race” rhetoric to the alternative: the apocalyptic narrative that has clearly failed to motivate effective climate change action. Rhetorically speaking, framing the need to reduce carbon emissions as a clean energy race is both more engaging and more productive. As he aptly declares:

If this kind of thing got us to the moon, maybe it can save the planet as well. I say we go along.

The clean energy race, however, is more than just a new and improved framing mechanism or encouragement of America’s honed nationalistic tendencies – it is an economic truth. What Drum misses when he writes off the recent proliferation of clean energy articles as hype, is that this issue could both be an effective rhetorical tool as well as a humbling reality.

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Nationalism: Rhetoric or Realpolitik, Part 1

When the Breakthrough Institute’s Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus began advocating for a paradigm shift in the global approach to climate change in the early 2000′s, they could not have predicted that a paradigm shift of another variety might occur simultaneously. That is: a shift in the balance of global power.

In an op-ed entitled, “Rebalancing Relations with China,” published in the Washington Post this week, Henry Kissinger assessed the power shift occurring between the U.S. and China, calling for Sino-American cooperation in lieu of boisterous assertions of nationalistic superiority and hegemonic power.

A Nobel Peace Prize winner, former National Security Advisor and Secretary of State during the Nixon Administration, Kissinger is a known proponent of realpolitik. Although that term typically has a negative connotation in the U.S. and is often associated with power abuse, the word actually refers to a theory of politics grounded in the realistic assessment of power, rather than ideology.

In accordance with this theory, Kissinger’s puts forth an ideology-free assessment of the current relationship between the United States and China. China’s position as America’s largest creditor and the economic crisis, in combination, have served to level the playing field between the two nations. Faced with increasing economic interdependence and China’s conflicting interest in reducing that dependence, “ambivalence,” Kissinger asserts, “is the inevitable consequence.”

In Kissinger’s estimation, a new political framework that recognizes China as a global economic power will be crucial to revitalizing the world economy. From this standpoint, there are three ways a Sino-American relationship could play out on the global stage.

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CS Monitor: China Aims to “Leapfrog” U.S. in Clean Energy Race

Imagining China as a giant green frog seems a little ridiculous, but, as Peter Ford of the Christian Science Monitor reported last week in a piece entitled “China’s Green Leap Forward,” China’s intent to “leapfrog” the United States in the clean energy race is far from ridiculous – it may soon be a reality.

While the U.S. languidly inches forward in clean energy RD&D, China’s burgeoning clean and renewable energy industries are growing at an unprecedented pace for a developing nation. Much more than a response to the suffocating pollution clogging the airways of its major cities, the explosion of clean energy technology is part of a national strategy to dominate the industry. As Ford succinctly puts it:

China price” and “China speed” are poised to snatch the lion’s share of the next multitrillion-dollar global industry – energy technology… Indeed, China is pushing ahead on renewable technologies with the fervor of a new space race.

Indeed, China is approaching clean energy with a “space race” mind-set, however, the U.S. has yet to adopt the same sense of urgency. As Americans wait for a Senate decision on the significantly weakened American Clean Energy and Security Act (H.R. 2454), which will invest just $1 billion per year in clean energy R&D and $10 billion for clean energy investments broadly defined, China has already implemented a suite of clean energy policies beginning with the Renewable Energy Law of 2006.

By supporting the growing wind sector with subsidies, tariffs, and an obligatory renewable energy requirement for power companies, China now expects wind manufacturing to grow from 8GW in 2007 to between 12GW and 20GW by 2010. In comparison, the U.S. manufactured just 2.4 GW of wind turbines in 2007 despite having the largest wind market in the world.

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Tony Blair, Climate Group, and CAP call for public investment and technology-centric climate policy

Two new studies published last month — one by the Office of Tony Blair and the Climate Group, the other by the Global Climate Network and Center for American Progress (CAP) — strongly advocate a climate policy strategy based on direct government investment in energy technology development and deployment.

The studies independently reach conclusions similar to the Breakthrough Institute’s and are yet another indication of “The Emerging Climate Consensus,” which recognizes the limits of carbon pricing and advocates major increases in federal funding to deploy low-carbon energy technologies and drive down their costs through direct public investment in RD&D (research, development, and demonstration), deployment, and supporting infrastructure.

The Tony Blair and Climate Group report, titled “Breaking the Climate Deadlock: Technology for a Low Carbon Future (PDF),” provides a comprehensive sector-based analysis and concludes:

Governments should adopt a strategic top-down approach to ensure that critical technologies arrive on time and provide investment in disruptive options to allow radical transformation in the future… The reality is that carbon pricing does not address many other market failures along the innovation chain.

The study argues that direct public support is crucial to develop and deploy new technologies: “Market failures along the innovation chain require public spending to drive technologies down their cost curve to a point where the carbon price can take over and accelerate their deployment.” Echoing theBreakthrough Institute, International Energy Agency, and Energy Secretary Steven Chu (and defying critics like Joseph Romm), the report once again concludes that energy technologies must undergo major developments to meet emission reduction targets:

Although we have the technologies we need through to 2020, new technologies — many available but not yet commercially proven — will be needed to meet the more challenging long-term goals. Therefore, at the same time as we deploy existing solutions, we must invest in future options.

The report suggests that developed nations should double their public investment in RD&D by 2015 and quadruple it by 2020 and identifies key areas to target this investment. The report also cites the Stern Review, which recommends that global public deployment efforts double to $66 billion per year in 2015 and rise to $163 billion by 2025.

The analysis shows that global public and private investment of $48 trillion in RD&D, deployment, and commercialization of low-carbon and efficiency technologies (between 2005-2050) is necessary to sufficiently decarbonize the global economy. This is equivalent to over $1 trillion per year worldwide, and with the U.S. economy representing about 25 percent of the global economy, this could amount to over $250 billion annually in U.S. public and private investment in technology RD&D, deployment, and commercialization.

The Center for American Progress study makes many of the same recommendations. The study’s title — “Breaking Through on Technology: Overcoming the barriers to the development and wide deployment of low-carbon technology” — repeats our call for a government-led technology development strategy. From the outset the authors place technology front and center and break away from the dominant, regulation- and market-focused policy approach, claiming that “without a firm commitment to develop and transfer new technologies, with industrialised countries taking the lead on financing these endeavours, consensus will be difficult to reach and, in practical terms, emissions will be hard to reduce.”

The authors note that public finance is critical, particularly because of the threat of the “valley of death” between research and development and commercialization of new, clean energy technologies. Similar to the Climate Group’s conclusions, CAP’s main policy recommendations all emphasize the importance of public investment, particularly through direct deployment policy.

One of the study’s major policy prescriptions is to place technology at the heart of the Copenhagen negotiations by encouraging more focused incentives and “government-led finance to steer key technologies through the valley of death” at the international level. In addition, according to CAP, “all governments, individually or in collaboration — preferably the latter — must dramatically increase the supply of finance to support the new Technologies Initiative.” The Blair report also repeats this call for a new international strategy centered on technology:

The Copenhagen agreement should include a Technology Development Objective to scale up market creation and finance for new technology. In the past debates have focused on either delivering emissions reductions or on developing new technology. It is now clear that we must do both. Therefore, alongside emissions targets the Technology Development Objective should have an equal emphasis on innovation.

Breakthrough and our colleagues have similarly argued for a new international climate policy framework focused on technology development and energy modernization (see here, here, and here). Both the Blair/Climate Group and the Center for American Progress reports have made steps in the right direction by strongly advocating that low-carbon technology innovation be at the heart of national and global efforts to build a clean energy economy. That’s a strategy for the energy revolution we need.

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Secretary of Energy: Breakthroughs Essential to Fully Meet Nation’s Energy Challenges

Today, the U.S. Department of Energy announced $377 million in funding to establish 46 Energy Frontier Research Centers (EFRCs) pursuing potentially path-breaking basic and translational research at the cutting-edge of clean energy innovation.  Of this funding, $277 comes from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA, otherwise known as the stimulus package) and $100 million comes from the DOE’s FY2009 budget.  The funding will be sustained over the next five years, with the DOE committing $100 million of its budget to the research centers each year.

“Meeting the challenge to reduce our dependence on imported oil and curtail greenhouse gas emissions will require significant scientific advances,” said Energy Secretary Steven Chu as he announced the new funding for EFRCs.  “These centers will mobilize the enormous talents and skills of our nation’s scientific workforce in pursuit of the breakthroughs that are essential to expand the use of clean and renewable energy.”

The majority of EFRCs are based in universities, with several harnessing the skills and resources of the national laboratories, and just three awarded to non-profit organizations and private corporations.  Over the course of the program, these centers will employ over 1,800 people in research into four primary realms: Renewable and Carbon-Neutral Energy (including Solar Energy Utilization, Advanced Nuclear Energy Systems, Biofuels, and Geological Sequestration of CO2); Energy Efficiency (Clean and Efficient Combustion, Solid State Lighting, Superconductivity); Energy Storage (Hydrogen Research, Electrical Energy Storage); and Crosscutting Science (Catalysis, Materials under Extreme Environments).

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Shouldn’t Energy Innovation be Worth More than Rush Limbaugh?!

Despite President Obama’s call for an energy revolution, it is up to Congress to provide funding.  The Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy (ARPA-e) made a recent call for research proposals into “high-risk, high-payoff transformational energy-related R&D,” for projects that “(1) translate scientific discoveries and cutting-edge inventions into technological innovations and (2) accelerate transformational technological advances in areas that industry by itself is not likely to undertake because of high technical or financial risk.”

Over 3,500 research teams submitted proposals for a slice of the available $150 million.  As a result, over 98% of applicants we “discouraged” from submitting a full application.

Sure, some of the applications were “undoubtedly unrealistic, fundamentally flawed, written in crayon, or the like,” as Andrew Revkin aptly noted at Dot Earth.  But with 98% of all proposals rejected, there’s got to be another explanation for the high rejection rate as well.  Surely at least 5%, 10%, maybe even one third of these proposals are worth further consideration.  Remember: this round of project proposals was simply to get into the next round of consideration where ARPA-e program managers would being the real project grant selection process. No, the reason so many proposals were rejected has more to do with the fact that there is simply not nearly enough money to fund all the good, potentially game-changing clean energy ideas out there.

This problem is not unique to this ARPA-e or this round of research proposals.  It is a chronic symptom of this country’s (under)commitment to clean energy. 

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