Tag Archives: carbon

Obama on climate change: big talk, not much action

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The President’s climate change program offers nothing new to impact carbon emissions.

On June 25, President Obama announced a goal of curbing greenhouse-gas emissions 17% from 2005 levels by 2020.  The key program to accomplish this is “…establish carbon pollution standards for both existing and new power plants.”

This would be the first-ever federal effort to regulate greenhouse-gas emissions from electricity generating power plants, the source of about one-third of such carbon emissions in the U.S.  The main strategy is to reduce the use of coal, in favor of cleaner, less carbon emitting fuels, mainly natural gas.

Obama is only a decade behind!  In the past decade (see charts), the electric utility industry has already reduced its coal usage by over 1/3, from 51% of total electricity generation in the U.S. to 37% in 2012, as reported by the Nuclear Energy Institute .

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Natural gas has taken up all of the slack, because natural gas fired plants are physically smaller, can be situated near customers in large cities, have much shorter regulatory approval cycles, and because horizontal deep fracking drilling has made natural gas plentiful and cost effective, now and in the future for North America. Over 90% of the new capacity for electricity currently in the approval process in the U.S.  is for natural gas fired plants. Natural gas’s portion of total electricity will continue to rise, with or without regulation by the federal government.

President Obama’s plan includes other measures meant to reduce emissions, including $250 million in federal loan guarantees for cleaner fossil-fuel energy projects; new fuel-economy standards for heavy trucks; and greater cooperation between the U.S. and major economies including China, India and Brazil. These proposals are either too small to have a meaningful impact, or they lack any specific proposals that could achieve meaningful results. Big talk, but little results will come.

Mr. Obama’s proposals don’t require congressional approval. One can expect legal and congressional challenges to regulating carbon emissions from power plants. But the electric utility industry will continue its progress away from coal, with or without those regulations.

 

 

Time to Rethink Solar Subsidies

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Solar prices have dropped by more than half in the last five years. Solar purchase or feed-in subisidies over the past decade were created by the governments of Japan, Germany, Spain, and other countries. America’s combination of state subsidies, especially California, combined with the U.S. tax credit for solar, have also contributed to accelerating the solar learning curve. In the latest Solarbuzz survey, 34% of solar module purchases are below $2.00 per watt, with the lowest retail prices about $1.06-1.10 per watt for silicon modules and $0.84 per watt for thin film modules. The long sought $1 per watt price point has been reached.

Unfortunately for the solar industry, record low natural gas prices have moved the ‘grid parity’ target lower again. And, the global recession has pinched all of the economies that were funding fast solar growth, resulting in greatly reduced or eliminated solar subsidies and reduced demand growth.

Where to go from here? Dieter Helm’s new book The Carbon Crunch: How We’re Getting Climate Change Wrong- and How to Fix It offers some interesting alternatives. He argues for a carbon tax on all energy sources (not a cap and trade system). A carbon tax would favor solar but also encourage natural gas as a medium term solution over coal and oil. It would be a new source of revenues for struggling government budgets. And it would generate a source of money to fund a broad range of new technology to help solar, such as better energy storage, and reduced solar installation costs.

Green activists won’t like his proposals. Neither will proponents of a expanding a regulatory approach to limiting fossil fuels. So it just might be the right approach for the next policy phase in evolving the world’s electricity fuel sources. And help restimulate the solar market in a time of economic slowdown.