There are thousands of such incentives, and their purpose is to accelerate the adoption of renewable energy in the United States. There are so many incentives, and they change so often, that it can be a full-time job to keep up with them, potentially undercutting their effectiveness.

That’s where the Database of State Incentives for Renewables & Efficiency (DSIRE, pronounced “desire”) comes in. This Department of Energy-funded project attached to North Carolina Solar Center at North Carolina State University operates a web site that provides continuously updated information on renewable energy incentives and policies at the federal, state local and utility levels.The information is searchable and browsable and serves a diverse array of users including homeowners, businesses policymakers and researchers.

The site receives some 200,000 unique visitors per month–ten times the level of 4 or 5 years ago–as well as some 200 e-mail inquiries monthly, according to Rusty Haynes, who works on DSIRE at the Solar N.C. State Solar Center.

What’s new is that in response to requests from commercial users of the information, DSIRE recently launched myDSIRE, a set of customized information services–XML fees, RSS feeds, and a policy tracking service–that are available to commercial users for a fee.

This is a great development. Making this data available programatically should make it more useful and, in a small way, help lower the barriers to the advancement of renewable energy in the U.S. 

It seems likely that a material portion of the automotive fleet in the U.S. will consist of electric vehicles in the next 20 to 30 years. I haven’t done a forecast of the electric vehicle market, but many others have (for example here and here).

Others have also shown that electric vehicles can be less polluting than internal combustion engine vehicles–even if the electricity is produced by burning fossil fuels–because electric motors are more efficient than gasoline engine in converting stored energy to motion.

So I was wondering whether renewable energy sources like solar and wind might ever power a significant amount of our driving. My highly superficial analysis suggests that’s plausible but far in the future.

Consider this: it is estimated that today’s electric vehicles will travel a mile on between .2 and .4 kilowatt hours of electricity.

Last year, according to the Federal Highway Administration, U.S. residential vehicles travelled some 2,922 billion miles. According to the Energy Information Administration (EIA), some 843 MW hours of solar energy and some 52,000 MW hours of wind energy were generated in the U.S. last year. Together that’s enough to power about 176 billion miles of driving, or just about six percent of the total. Little to none of that electricity was actually used to power electric vehicles, though. The EIA says that in 2007, the most recent year for which I could find figures, all electric vehicles consumed just 168 MW hours of electricity.

Today, wind and solar account for a relatively small share of the country’s supply of renewable energy; hydropower is the largest source, and there will be very little hydropower capacity added in coming years. The EIA expects that our supply of renewable energy will nearly double by 2030 compared to 2007 levels, with growth led by solar and biomass. If half of that increase is used to power electric vehicles, assuming their efficiency doesn’t improve (a conservative assumption), that will be enough to power them for nearly 500 billion miles, a substantial share of the total.

It seems plausible, therefore, that renewably generated electricity could power a significant portion of the country’s driving needs over the next decades. Whether strong demand for plug-in electric vehicles will develop remains uncertain, of course. And like any analysis of the country’s energy needs, this one suggests that energy will continue to come from a broad mix of sources for the foreseeable future.

I welcome your perspective on the electric vehicle future and the role of renewables in it.

It’s a good thing that some of the economic action around cleantech manufacturing is happening in this country. I recently came across this graphic showing the large disparity between Chinese and U.S. silicon manufacturing capacity.

Sourcce: Sun & Wind Energy 9/2009

Mind you, silicon is a raw material while the panels that Suntech plans to manufacturer in the U.S. are closer to the finished product. Still, the gap is eye opening.

Meanwhile, Seeking Alpha reported just about ten days ago that U.S. solar panel maker Evergreen Solar will shift its manufacturing from Massachusetts to China.

Suntech is seeking a 30 percent investment tax credit provided in the stimulus package that applies to U.S. solar manufacturing, while Evergreen is seeking lower manufacturing costs.

The irony is striking.

The New York Times reported today that utility-scale solar energy projects in the sun-rich but water-poor Southwest and California are running into obstacles as project developers compete with local interests for access to water. One proposed solar project in Nevada, for example, would have used some 1.3 billion gallons of water per year.

If water is the new oil, water-guzzling energy installations will face justifiable skepticism, especially in dry areas.

The article references BrightSource, a solar developer with a relatively less water-intensive approach to power generation. It quotes BrightSource investor (and my new favorite VC) Alan Salzman of VantagePoint Venture Partners explaining his decision to invest in BrightSource:  “Our approach is high sensitivity to water use …. We thought that was going to be huge differentiator.”

As alternative energy sources are developed and deployed, it clearly critical that investors, developers and regulators consider the big picture environmental impacts of new projects.

What’s your perspective?

The panel discussions at the excellent Financial Times conference on the U.S. energy business yesterday prompted me to reflect on this question. (You can see my conference tweets here.)

Yes, the opportunities are huge. And yes, the core problems the sector is tackling, including climate change and energy availability, are critically important. Beyond that, though, there’s this: the hurdles facing this set of industries are high. If you like hard challenges, clean tech has a lot to offer. Consider these challenges, all of which surfaced in discussion at the conference.

Scientific and technical. Researchers are working to break new ground in areas ranging from basic materials science in photovoltaics and batteries to engineering and systems design in smart grid. No new scientific breakthroughs were announced at the conference but there was buzz about the successful IPO of battery maker A123 Systems. It was observed that this IPO was not a mere liquidity event for the investors. It was a critical capital infusion necessary to enable the business to scale up while continuing to perfect its technology.

Political. This area is way more political than IT or even financial services, two areas where I’ve spent a good chunk of my career. From BP America chairman Lamar McKay arguing for the “equitable” distribution of costs of moving to a low-carbon economy to PSE&G president Ralph LaRossa complaining of his utility’s struggle to get a permit to run a transmission line on an existing right of way, so much of the commercial and environmental promise of clean tech depends on clearing political hurdles.
Financial. The financial needs of the clean tech sector present a variety of challenges. A few examples:

• Most consumers and businesses are not prepared to make capital investments to obtain electric power. So new financing mechanisms have had to be invented to make it easier for businesses and consumers to buy solar power, rather than solar panels.
• Given the importance that coal is expected to continue to have for a long time, carbon capture and storage (CCS) is an experimental technology that is drawing  a lot of interest. But, as Alan Salzman of VantagePoint Venture Partners observed at the conference, it does not fit the model of venture capital investing.At least it’s been tough for start ups in this area to attract much VC.
• Energy is a giant business, and most energy generation technologies need to be able to scale up to enormous volumes to be practical. Salzman’s panel was in agreement that while VC investments might be able to help get some of these companies to $100 million in revenue, they will need some kind of bridge financing to get them to the billion-dollar level that can establish their long-term viability.

Behavioral and Attitudinal. Some clean tech plays depend on changes in consumer behavior:  electric vehicles, for instance, obviously require a change in how consumers fill up their cars. Home energy management, a promise of the smart grid,will require a change in consumer attitudes too. According to a consumer survey conducted earlier this year by Pike Research, some 30% of consumers felt that “demand response” programs smack of “Big Brother.” (Demand response programs allow utilities, with the consent of consumers, to turn off or turn down certain power loads at consumer homes.) LaRossa of PSE&G said his customers were not ready for it.

Clean tech is a highly interdisciplinary field, and not only because the definition is broad. It’s also because its future depends on tackling challenges across science, finance, politics and consumer behavior. What more fun could you ask for?

If this post inspired any thoughts, please consider leaving a comment.

Solar Revolution: The Economic Transformation of the Global Energy Industry
Solar Revolution” provides an excellent overview of the spectrum of solar energy technologies and the prospects for the growth of solar energy. It is the

most thorough treatment I’ve ever read on the subject. Travis Bradford presents a holistic model comparing the total cost of solar energy with grid-based electricity alternatives and finds that solar is already more cost effective than many people realize. He also develops a sophisticated and persuasive model of the growth of the solar industry to show convincingly that solar is destined to become “the preferred energy choice for a large majority of locations and applications.”

Earth: The Sequel: The Race to Reinvent Energy and Stop Global Warming
Interesting and inspiring overview by Fred Krupp, president of Environmental Defense Fund, of the many technologies that are pointing the way to a carbon-free future and a chance of averting environmental catastrophe. Plenty of specific examples and some colorful characters as well. The book returns repeatedly to the importance of creating a cap and trade system in the U.S. It’s logic is as good as any I’ve seen, but it gives the carbon-tax approach short shrift (which is the author’s prerogative.) An engaging read for folks newly wondering how the world will get past fossil fuels.

Harvard Business Review on Green Business Strategy (Harvard Business Review Paperback Series)
Good collection of some classic and more recent articles on the topic of Green Business Strategy, including must-read “A Road Map for Natural Capitalism” by Amory Lovins, Hunter Lovins and Paul Hawken.

Getting Green Done: Hard Truths from the Front Lines of the Sustainability Revolution
Charming and witty look at how sustainability happens–and doesn’t–at real companies. Real-world, nitty-gritty examples mixed with some punditry and policy, this book is a good complement to the literature about greening and sustainability. And author Auden Schendler is an engaging storyteller.

Making Sustainability Work: Best Practices in Managing and Measuring Corporate Social, Environmental and Economic Impacts (Business)
Dry but systematic and tailored to the needs of executives and corporate sustainability professionals. Recommended for those kicking off or managing corporate sustainability initiatives.

Strategies for the Green Economy : Opportunities and Challenges in the New World of Business
Nice, crisp and current overview of green/sustainability from corporate and corporate marketing perspective by long-time pundit and consultant Joel Makower.

Green to Gold: How Smart Companies Use Environmental Strategy to Innovate, Create Value, and Build Competitive Advantage
Packed with light case studies and some handy frameworks. If you are doing corporate sustainability you should probably read it, but but I suspect it works best as a lead generator for the authors’ consulting business.

The Clean Tech Revolution: The Next Big Growth and Investment Opportunity
Good overview of the clean tech space.

The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power
Liked it a lot. See my thoughts at elsewhere on this blog.

I welcome your comments on the above or your suggestions for other reading.

The first figures are on electric capacity. According to the EAI data, solar capacity hardly grew between 2003 and 2006 and then spiked in 2007. Capacity is generally expected to expand briskly in the coming years.

It’s important to note that solar accounted for just .05% of US electric generating capacity in 2007.

The second set of figures are for electric power generation.

Solar/photovoltaic power accounted for just .17% of the US total in 2007.

Given all the hoopla about alternative energy, it’s striking to see how insignificant an energy source solar has been–until recently.

Now, if you have a favor source of numbers, I’d appreciate it if you left a comment pointing us to it. Otherwise, I’ll continue work on my cheat sheet for solar and the rest.

• paradoxically increasing greenhouse gas emissions
• distorting agricultural land use
• reducing supply and increasing cost of human and animal food sources
• necessitating increased use of fertilizers

It turns out that all energy technologies carry some baggage of unintended consequences. Here are some others.

Fossil fuels, the granddaddy of alternative energies:

• greenhouse gas emissions and climate change
• environmental degradation
• geopolitical blackmail

Nuclear energy:

• safety issues
• disposal of radioactive waste
• dispersal of weapons-related technology

Electric vehicles:

• batteries may depend on access to scarce minerals (see “geopolitical blackmail” above)
• Those minerals are primarily found in environmentally sensitive areas (see “environmental degradation” above)

Also see my post on “Is Lithium Better than Petroleum?“

Carbon capture and sequestration:

We don’t really know, since it hasn’t been tried on a large scale. But some are worried about the consequences of storing massive quantities of carbon. Under what conditions does it present a safety or environmental risk?

Photovoltaics:

• Can release ultra-powerful greenhouse gases in the production process (See this article, for example.)

Compact Fluorescent Bulbs:

• Contain toxic mercury that is not present in incandescent bulbs

Sunshading:

This is far out. It refers to mad scientists’ plans to release particles into the atmosphere that would create a kind of sunshade to counteract global warming. The possible consequence here?

• Diminishing the efficiency of photovoltaics

No Way to Avoid ‘em

At the Aspen Environment Forum last month, a panel titled “Energy and the Law of Unintended Consequences”  examined this topic in some depth. There panel asserted that, given the seriousness of the global warming “there is no choice for humanity but to try out as many types of new technology as possible in an effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.” But, said the experts, according to an account of the panel in the Aspen Times, there is “no way to avoid the potential for unintended consequences that can arise from a willingness to try new things, and can create problems as serious as the ones they solve.”

If you are interested in the idea that all technologies come with unintended consequences, you should have a look at Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences (Vintage). The book is from 1996, so may seem a bit dated, but the arguments are the same. There is also a good reading list of some of the fundamental arguments about this topic.

Have any observations about unintended consequences? I’d love to hear about them. Please leave a comment.

Carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) involves extracting carbon from waste streams such as flue gases, compressing it, and placing it in long-term storage, either under the ground or beneath the sea.

Processes for removing carbon from various materials have been used for a long time. As in other areas of energy research, the challenges here are devising systems that work are very large scale and that provide attractive economics.

Just as solar and wind power present challenges beyond the generation of the power itself (such as the transmission and variability of the power), CCS entails more than simply efficiently removing carbon from power plant emissions. Other factors include transportation of the captured carbon (by pipeline or ship, for example) and storage. Each presents its own economics and own risks, which are in some cases interdependent. (Transportation costs might be reduced by choosing a storage site located near a power plant, for example. But that storage site might offer lower capacity or present greater risks of leakage than one further away.) A systems approach is required to analyze the costs and benefits.

According to the IPCC, three industrial-scale CSS projects are currently deployed, which together avoid the release into the atmosphere of 3-4 million tons of carbon dioxide annually. I haven’t found number modeling the total global CO2 reductions that could be economically achieved via CSS [please let me know if you come across them] but I presume them to be large enough to be interesting.

While solar and wind have  “point applications”–where power can be generated and used in small scale installations  (on roof tops, for example), there are fewer such applications for CSS. (A recent article in The Economist cites a couple of them.) The most important applications require large scale–fitting big power plants with scrubbers, exploring large-scale geologic storage–comparable in scale to “big energy” projects. Meaning they are costly and take time.

According to the Carbon Capture and Sequestration Technologies Program at MIT, “Interest has been increasing in the carbon sequestration option because it is very compatible with the large energy production and delivery infrastructure now in place.” That includes exploration methods, needed to identify suitable sites for storing carbon, drilling and pipelines for distribution, among other aspects.

But the New York Times blog Green Inc. explains that public funding of CSS is controversial in part because it is seen as a distraction in the move away from coal and other fossil fuels. Every dollar spent on CSS is a dollar that can’t be spent on renewable energy sources. One wonders, though, whether opponents of the oil and gas industry are hostile to CSS in part because the oil and gas incumbents would stand to gain from its development.

Energy is largely about economics, and economics remains a barrier for this technology under current energy policy regimes. According to the DOE one study put costs for CO2 capture at $50–60 per metric ton of CO2 captured. The Economist recently reported a range of cost estimates for CSS:

In 2005 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a group of scientists that advises the United Nations on global warming, came up with a range of $14-91 for each tonne of emissions avoided through CCS. Last year, the IEA suggested that the price for the first big plants would be $40-90. McKinsey, a consultancy, has arrived at an estimate of €60-90, or $75-115.

Either way, that is more than the price of emissions in the European Union: about €10 a tonne. America does not have a carbon price at all yet. A bill defeated last year in the Senate would have yielded a carbon price as low as $30 in 2020, according to an official analysis. So CCS might not be financially worthwhile for years to come.

The economic case for case for CCS seems a bit harder to the one for alternative energy. Alternative energy becomes more attractive as fossil fuel costs rise. CCS is interesting from an economic perspective only when carbon costs rise. And those are purely a function of public policy.

Any light to shed on CCS? Feel free to leave a comment.

If you travel in Internet circles and are tracking developments in clean tech or alternative energy, you have noticed that Web 2.0 and energy have sometimes shared a stage.

We had, for example, climate change fighter Al Gore speaking at O’Reilly’s recent Web 2.0 Summit (update: produced with TechWeb). At least one energy-related play took the stage there as well. Elon Musk, founder of electric-car maker Tesla was there as well.

The Link Between Energy and Web 2.0 Seems Tenuous

Al Gore and others have cited the potential of Web 2.0 to reach, connect, galvanize and organize consumers and social entrepreneurs to fight climate change.

And Web 2.0 and energy technology have both attracted lots of investment in recent years.

Nonetheless, the link between Web 2.0 and energy would seem to be tenuous. Indeed, as Michael Arrington of TechCrunch noted about Musk’s appearance at the Web 2.0 conference, “What do space flights and electric cars have to do with Web 2.0? Absolutely nothing.”

Future of Energy Depends on Some Principles at the Heart of Web 2.0

But Arrington missed an important connection between energy and Web 2.0 at the level of the principles that are driving both.

Web 2.0 means different things to different people but at its core there are a few phenomena that underpin the success of some of today’s biggest internet businesses and have accounted for a large changes in consumer behavior. These phenomena include

• The long tail
• Broadcasting to consumers gives way to dialog
• User participation & empowerment; the rise of consumer-created content

(Here I face an audience problem. If you are a reader from the Internet world—the types of folks I talked to every day at Jupiter and Forrester, the list above needs no explanation. If you are a reader from the energy world, this may seem like impenetrable jargon. Sorry about that I hope that what follows clears things up a little.)

You can see these phenomena at work in the coming energy environment.

The Long Tail. The premise of The Long Tail is that blockbuster products are not the only interesting ones. With the Internet reducing the cost of discovery and distribution, viable marketplaces can be created by aggregating a large number of niche products which collectively attract a large number of consumers.

What we see in the energy world is a gradual expansion beyond blockbuster sources of energy (coal, gas and oil) to a more diverse set of energy sources including wind, solar and biomass. According to the US Department of Energy, 87% of energy production in 2006 was from top 4 sources but that will drop to 82% by the year 2030. Niche sources of energy are arriving on the seen that complement the dominant sources and may create a Long Tail energy market. The New York Times recently reported one whimsical but technically feasible example: biodiesel made from coffee grounds.

The Internet is an enabling technology for Long Tail markets and no real analog exists in the energy sphere. But visions of an upgraded electrical grid will certainly lower electricity distribution costs and create more liquid markets for electricity that could make small-scale providers viable.

From Broadcasting to Dialog. In the old world of media and marketing, marketers and media companies broadcast their messages to passive consumers. In the Web 2.0 world, consumers are understood to be active participants in the creation of brands and of media itself. Utilities today have a broadcast relationship with their customers. Utilities provide power and opaque monthly bills and expect nothing but payment from their customers.

But we are moving toward a world in which power customers will be in dialog with their suppliers. They will receive regular or even real-time information about electricity pricing and demand, and will be able to manually or automatically adjust their energy demand to take advantage of variable pricing. Utilities are deploying smart meters with this scenario in mind. (A recent post of mine discusses this.) Consumers will also be able to see how their power consumption compares to the averages in their area and with the power of this collective intelligence modify their demand. A startup called Greenbox is working on this.

User Participation. Online user participation this can refer to user comments and ratings, blogging and user-generated advertising, among other things. In the energy sphere it includes phenomena like user-generated power sources—such as rooftop solar panels or personal wind microturbines–being connected not only to homes but back to the power grid, so that consumers can sell excess power back to utilities when they don’t need it themselves.

Overall, a lot of what I see happening in energy involves exploiting connectivity, communication, decentralization, and the aggregation of small-scale inputs. Another one that has been theorized along these likes has to do with plug-in electric cars, whose batteries, by the millions, could be used as a distributed form of electrical storage available to local or even regional power users when cars are idle, fully charged and connected to the grid in their garages.

Power at an Intimate Scale

Some of these ideas were explored a few years back by Rebecca Willis, an independent researcher and Vice-Chair of the UK Sustainable Development Commission, in a great “pamphlet” titled “Grid 2.0: The next generation”.

Her vision of how electric power generation will change in the future can be captured in a couple of quotes from the document:

In Grid 2.0, much more power will be generated at community and household level through renewable and low-carbon technologies like solar and wind power, small-scale combined heat-and-power, heat pumps and biomass boilers.

Microgrids, peer-to-peer networks linking generators within a village, housing estate or university, for example, will allow efficient use of smallscale generation

I have not seen her ideas cited much over here, perhaps because they were locked up in a PDF file; perhaps because she’s UK-based. But her work is worth reading.

Do you buy the idea that the future of energy will exhibit some of these Web 2.0 characteristics? I’d love to hear your thoughts.