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by Craig ShieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Business

I thought I’d mention that a friend has asked 2GreenEnergy to perform a small marketing project for a company called Chrysalife, an importer and distributor of high-end silk bedding. 

To be honest, I knew next to nothing about silk bedding and its numerous health benefits; if you Google the subject, you’ll learn all about the idea that silk enables the human body to rest and rejuvenate more thoroughly when we sleep.  Silk, often called “nature’s perfect bed,” is a smooth, non-irritating protective fiber, resulting from billions of years of evolution as Earth’s most comforting and soothing substance.Here’s another point: where polyester is one of the zillions of substances that is derived from petroleum, silk is natural and sustainable.  

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by Craig ShieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Business

I just pulled back into my driveway from a few hours at the Smart Grid Conference at the Los Angeles Convention Center. I’m a huge believer in the long-term importance of smart grid technology, but I have to say that there is altogether too much chatter about it at this point. The result of a 40-minute talk on network standards for smart grid communication? There are no standards; they’ve yet to emerge. Oh really? Couldn’t that have been summed up in a 15-word email? Or skipped entirely? (more…)

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by Craig ShieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Business

2GreenEnergy senior investment advisor Bill Paul appeared on PBS’s Consuelo Mack’s show WealthTrack, which is airing on about 200 PBS affiliates in North America this week. Needless to say, the traffic on the site – and one my phone – is fairly intense. It’s wonderful to hear so many great questions and opportunities in the renewable energy space. Check out the show (linked above); he did a fantastic job as always.

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by Craig ShieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Business

I’ll be hitting the Smart Grid Conference at the Los Angeles Convention Center over the next couple of days, and I hope to see numerous 2GreenEnergy readers there. 

If you want to meet for coffee, please hit “contact” and let me know.

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by Craig ShieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Business

I was keeping a tally sheet at last week’s Renewable Energy Finance Forum, so I could let readers know the issue that was brought up most often and granted the most overall prominence. The clear winner: China is eating our lunch in the migration to renewables. Inexplicably and tragically, the US is content to drop further and further behind in the development of energy technology with each passing week. While China is hiring, researching, developing, importing, exporting — and dominating the world of 21st Century energy, we seem to be content to argue and point fingers at each other.

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by Craig ShieldsPosted on Posted in Fossil Fuels

If there is a central theme to the Renewable Energy Finance Forums generally, it’s pragmatism.  You can listen to every word from the presenters — as well as from each the other participants as they network on breaks between the marathon sessions — and trust me: there isn’t so much as a breath of idealism.  The show isn’t about what should happen, it’s about what will happen.

I had lunch the other day with an incredibly bright guy, a very practical physicist whose business characterizes materials for companies in solar, wind, and electric transportation — as well as dozens of other industries.  I immediately saw that he was lukewarm on renewable energy.  “I’m here to drum up business, but I’m reluctant to be connected with an industry that relies on subsidies,”  he sneered.

When I pointed out that oil and gas get 12 times the subsidies that clean energy receives, he looked down at his arugula sheepishly and replied quietly,” Well, I guess what I meant to say is ‘subsidies that might go away.'”

Those few words encapsulate the root of the clean energy problem.  Not only are the subsidies for fossil fuels enormous, they are taken for granted; they’re so well entrenched that they’re completely invisible.  Contrast that to the mountain that is made out of the relatively small tax credits and government grants under TARP and ARPA-E to stimulate development of clean energy.

I have to hand it to these oil companies for the deftness with which they’ve soaked us for everything we’re worth.  The checks that we taxpayers write to them every day go completely unnoticed. These people have taken larceny and elevated to the plain of art.  The lesson here is clear and simple: we must not underestimate the skill of the people we’re playing against.

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by Craig ShieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Business

Michael Eckhardt, the president of The American Council on Renewable Energy (who’s retiring after many years of wonderfully effective service to us all), served as the emcee of the Renewable Energy Finance Forum West 2010. At one point, he attempted to put the concept of “one trillion” into perspective for the audience. A million seconds is two weeks; a billion seconds ago, it was 1970; a trillion seconds ago, it was 30,000 BC.

A poignant example came up in a story about the difference between the Chinese commitment to renewables versus our own here in the US. One of the presenters had recently fought hard to get a matching $1 million grant from the DoE under the ARPA-E program, and was thrilled that we had bested the other contestants in this victory, but he heard the news as he happened to be in China, talking to an associate who had recently received the equivalent of several billion dollars. “We’re talking days and weeks; they’re talking decades and centuries,” he said.

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by Craig ShieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Business

It doesn’t sound like a piece of cake to be a CEO of a power utility. Sure, as we have discussed elsewhere, there are ways to lock in and hide profits, while staving off the world’s insistence that we migrate to renewables. But there are a great number of issues that make life extremely complicated for these folks.

Demand is declining, as technologies for energy efficiency and smart grid begin to reduce the overall consumption of kilowatt-hours.

Even the small incursion of renewables (especially solar) means reduction of on-peak (highest-rate) billing

Utilities will soon be in competition with the oil companies, as people begin to plug in their cars.

Most of the states have done a fairly decent job at legislating Renewable Portfolio Standards (RPSs) that force utilities to cut Power Purchase Agreements (PPAs) with solar and wind developers.

Overall: times must be fairly interesting at the utilities.

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by Craig ShieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Business

In the Renewable Energy Finance Forum session in which presenters from Citibank, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, and JP Morgan, offered their observations on the industry, several pointed to the strategies that multinational oil companies (BP, ExxonMobil, Chevron, etc.) have vis-à-vis renewables. From the content of these talks, it became obvious that such participation is divisive – even within their own ranks — for a number of reasons.

While clean energy may be the way of the future, if you’re an oil company, it’s certainly the enemy of the present. Even the most aggressive repositioning of the oil companies as “energy companies” (BP as “beyond petroleum,” Chevron as “part of the solution” etc.) is such obvious PR fluff that it leaves most people with a very bad taste in their mouths about these entities’ sincerity and their status as corporate citizens.

On another line, from the standpoint of internal capital allocation, the return on asset stats associated with oil exploration beats the pants off the development of renewables. Thus prudent and responsible managers, who themselves are managed according to the short-term profits they drive, have only disincentive to push investments in renewables.

At the end of the day, we see a great ebb and flow, as internal arguments play themselves out.

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by Craig ShieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

I was talking with a friend the other day who asked me about the political affiliation of conservationists.  After all, Theodore Roosevelt, the father of modern conservationalism, served as president as a Republican, and there is no doubt that even today, one can find many conservative republicans who work very hard to preserve our great gifts of nature.

Having said that, I believe that most of the more active conservationist organizations tend to endorse democrats and more progressive independents.  Here are the Sierra Club’s endorsements: http://www.sierraclub.org/politics/endorsements/.  And more radical groups like GreenPeace are obviously even less likely to endorse political conservatives. 

As it turns out, my friend is one of those rare birds who embraces the best tenets of both sides of the political fence.  I congratulated him on his ability to look at different, opposing ideas openly and thoroughly.  “Not everyone can do that,” I praised, reminding him also what Aristotle taught us:  It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.

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