A new green energy blog

Posted on March 20, 2008
Filed Under Uncategorized |

by Willy Ritch

A new energy blog appeared last week–it’s called “Green Energy War” and is written by John Geesman, a former Commissioner of the California Energy Commission. The first thing I did when I heard about it was to go figure out what’s behind the name of the blog. In Geesman’s own words:

War as metaphor is a dubious tradition in modern American politics. Presidents use it to effortlessly summon urgency, priority, mobilization and (implied) sacrifice for a crusade against some amorphous foe. In the past several decades, various Commanders in Chief have declared wars on Poverty, Crime, Drugs, Cancer, Inflation, and Terror.

We’ve waged an energy war before, he says. It began when Jimmy Carter called the energy crisis of mid 70s “the moral equivalent of war.” As we all know, that one didn’t really work out very well.

Blame it on the policies. Blame it on the commanders. Blame it on the troops. Blame it on the public. Regardless the cause, the Moral Equivalent of War evolved pretty quickly into the Moral Equivalent of Desertion.

So now, Geesman argues, we’re in a green energy war and he seems to have signed on as a battlefield correspondent. In his first batch of posts he covers nuclear power, CFLs, carbon capture and storage, renewable energy in the UK and–one of my current favorite topics–feed-in tariffs. The idea behind FITs is that your local utility would be required to buy any electricity you make from a backyard wind turbine or (more likely) solar panels on your roof. The homeowner gets a guaranteed rate for their home-made electricity usually good for something like 20-years. Here’s the sweet part: the utility has to buy the electricity you make at a significantly higher rate than it gets when it sells it back to you. And the utility is not just buying excess electricity–they have to buy everything you produce, then you buy back what you need. The end result is an actual profit for the homeowner and a land-office business in things like solar panels.

The economics have worked out pretty well in many places. Germany is the most successful case study: feed it tariffs cost the average rate payer less than $2 a month and a massive, thriving solar industry has sprung up in the country, creating a quarter of a million jobs. And that doesn’t even begin to get into all the CO2 that is not being emitted because of the wide-spread dependence on solar.

Geesman makes a point about feed in tariffs that I hadn’t ever considered:

What makes this policy design so successful? It shifts bargaining power away from the incumbent utility to the renewable generator. The legal entitlement to sell its output at a predetermined price provides the stability necessary to allow long-term financing for the renewable generator.

(We are considering a feed-in tariff here in Maine, as are a number of other states. I’ll let you know what happens.)

I’ve already bookmarked Green Energy War and it will undoubtedly become a regular part of my routine. Check it out for yourself.

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