Renewable Energy "Industry" Achievements for 2012
The people at ACORE, the American Council on Renewable Energy totally “get it.”
Below is a reprint of part of their piece, “Renewable Energy Industry Achievements for 2012.” In case it’s not obvious, the operative word here is “industry.” ACORE understands that the real obstacle that clean energy faces is its status as a bone fide sector of our economy, i.e., its standing against an industry.
After all, it faces vigorous opposition from the fossil fuels boys, and if there ever were an industry, that would be it. Perhaps the term “empire” is more apt.
Here’s a group that, by all accounts, owns Congress. If you think I’m exaggerating, simply note that the brave senators who voted last March to repeal the subsidies for the oil companies received one-fifth the campaign contributions per capita from Big Oil than those who ever voted to continue them.
As I’ve reported previously, ex-Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell speaks very precisely as to why clean energy is having a tough time. According to Rendell:
“There are too many special interests arrayed against it. Over 90% of Democratic voters are in favor of Congress passing legislation that prioritizes clean energy. In fact, over 75% of Republican voters are in favor of the exact same thing. Clearly, the will of the American people is being frustrated by special interests.
“Together, we can do this, but we can’t do it inside the Beltway. The lobbyists are raising campaign money for our senators and representatives in Washington seven days a week. It never stops. It never stops. There are fund-raisers happening literally every night. If change is going to happen, it needs to take place in hometown America. Your leaders have to hear it from you.”
Going back to ACORE, here are some of the renewable energy industry’s accomplishments last year:
Last year was marked by great successes for our renewable energy industry. In the first 10 months of 2012, 46.22% of new electrical generating capacity brought online was from renewable energy.
- The solar energy industry grew at an incredible rate of 13.2% and outpaced the growth of the economy.
- Wind power added 4GW in the first 9 months of 2012.
- Globally, geothermal supplies 11GW of electricity and the U.S. is still the global geothermal leader.
- Hydroelectric power generation increased by an annual average of 3% and new developments in tidal energy show the potential for commercial-scale tidal energy in America.
- Biofuels aided American families at the pump and the EPA’s decision to deny a partial waiver for the Renewable Fuel Standard continued to help American consumers, our military, and the biofuels industry.
- Electric vehicles experienced record breaking sales in the last few months of 2012.
- The waste heat power sector now has the potential to install 10GW, enough to power 10 million American homes.
This progress did not happen by accident; it happened because of your hard work and dedication to bringing renewable energy to scale in America. It happened because we all believe clean, renewable energy, strongly coupled with energy efficiency, is fundamental to fueling a more prosperous, sustainable future for our country.
My heartiest congratulations to the entire industry, and to everyone who honestly cares about the quality of life we leave for our descendants.
Probably it would be easier to get votes in favor of clean energy if a clean energy system that actually worked were proposed instead of clean energy system that is unlikely to provide reliable power at a price that would not precipitate a political rebellion. In any case, we must migrate away from fossil fuels.
We need to do more R & D to get a nuclear power system ready to implement, and it must be a system that circumvents the problems rightly associated with our present nuclear technology. Until that is done, we can temporarily expand a significant improvement of our present nuclear technology, i.e., the Westinghouse AP 1000 reactor which has a totally passive emergency cooling system which is adequate to prevent a melt-down.
The nuclear “waste” which we now have is actually unused fuel. Instead of permanently sequestering it, it should be safely stored in a manner that will permit it to be recovered in the future and destroyed by reactors that can use it as fuel. That would eliminate the need to sequester it for umpteen thousands of years.
The nuclear technology that seems to show the most promise is the liquid fluoride thorium reactor (LFTR), although there is no guarantee, and there are other nuclear technologies that may prove to be better than our present pressurized water thermal reactors that use uranium. The LFTR, or other variety of liquid metallic salt reactor, can actually use our present “waste” as fuel, thereby destroying most of it permanently. Already enough thorium has been mined to supply our need for power for more than a century without mining more of it.
Again, there would be less resistance to migrating to clear energy if the energy system in view had actually been proven to be capable of providing adequate and reliable power at an affordable price.
You know if you were to burn a pile of toxic plastic, oil, tires, or waste pesticide products in your back yard, you may get away with it easily, but would probably feel the pangs of guilt and be looking for the flashing blue and reds out front coming to write you up, but the petro, coal, and nuclear industries sponsor doing this every day. EVERY HOUR OF EVERY DAY.******** For free!********* Without cost!
For a small per cent of this profit margin, paid into the carbon dumping assesment, the nation could have a carbon funded, viable and profitable SREC program supported across the country, and solar electric and thermal energy production would be being employed in huge amounts by millions of people, each making a profit from clean energy that balances the true costs of dirty energy with their own investment in distributed solar. Many jobs would certainly come of it too! No, “NO” corporate centralized power production could equal the field leveling effects of employing distributed solar that is balanced by real cost crediting. We have become entirely too accustomed to the “corporate teat” of purchased centralized power. Community power purchase agreements can help those not in a position to engage on their own turf. I must be certainly myopic to see any sense in this idea. OR…. Look at it this way……… Would you like to live in a home that paid all it’s own expenses and taxes and then some??
I believe that it will take machines…
Will there be any jobs that machines, eventually, can’t do? Machines already took over the manufacturing sector (to a large degree), what happens when they drive cars for us and take over the service industries as well. They will build 3D cities with all infra, including roadways for electric cars, on every level. What will people do when machines even write science fiction (and take over the entertainment sector)?
What people will HAVE to do is divvy up the all the machine made profits (that should be more than now because machines create MORE prosperity by virtue of their quickness) and they shall work less (at things we can not yet imagine and for existing jobs where people want personal labor done by real people). They may not even need a money system at all… eventually.
But there IS one problem to all of this… Energy input. We can’t simply use machines to build an over abundance, just as we can’t just whiz on out to make space colonies. We face certain destruction of the biosphere if we do not address the seriousness of accelerating fossil fuel usage (and we need MORE power if we are to continue with such machine made realities, especially if “everybody” has even just one robot counterpart). Efficiency will reduce energy requirements a large degree, however, we still need to use much less fossil fuels, if we are to elevate ALL the world’s people to these standards (and allow room for growth).
Eventually, FF’s will run dry and we shall hope we have placed our advanced machine automation priorities on making hundreds of thousands of SQUARE MILES of solar panel… instead of just fashion and trivial pursuits! This way, people who DON’T know how to make money by machine (and compete with others that do) can still “work”, doing installs of machine made panels.
Machines will have to make electrical storage for cheap, too (if not, giant pools of molten metals and salt should do the trick cheap enough).
This way, (by converting 1 or 2% of the Earth’s land space into jobs) the world will have more time to figure out how to integrate the machine economy (which should be based on the efficient extraction of resources in an enviro acceptable manner) into the archaic monetary system (based on scarcity) that grew civilization up to that level!