Welcome back to Bright Ideas, a weekly newsletter about the surprising rise of clean energy. My name is Julian Spector. I live in Los Angeles and report on clean energy for Greentech Media, and I write this for fun since MoviePass shut down and so did all the theaters.
Oh, and I almost forgot to follow-up on Julian's thoughts on Kamala missing some major opportunities:
1) How Trump has really betrayed the coal miners (though not the coal mine owners). A drive through certain parts of West Virginia ties you to wind country. I imagine a that workforce that would trade tunnels, dynamite, noise, and coal-dust for working in the fresh air of WVA building the new age of renewables.
2) The whole idea that the Green New Deal can be said to have grown as much from California as from solar and wind generation in Texas, Kansas, Iowa, and Oklahoma. Irony, indeed.
3) And that the future is a better place to to make things better than using the past to make the future worse (hmm....sorry about that, but I think it makes sense).
Not to be outdone by friends and family, here are some comments:
First--
Behind the Texan veneer of unmeddlement from the state government, it was policy-makers who got the wires unspooling. Here's an excerpt from something I was editing for the World Bank, based on "Transmission Expansion for Renewable Energy Scale-Up - Emerging Lessons and Recommendations," by Marcelino Madrigal and Steven Stoft, World Bank –SEGEN, Paper 26, June 2011:
When Texas reformed its state energy program in 1999, it initiated a goal of increasing the role of renewable energy. In what may be considered a two-tier approach, it used a Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS) to require energy utilities to increase their proportion of renewable energy generation from eligible renewable energy sources in accordance with RE goals.
To minimize costs to the taxpayer, the Texas renewable energy program created Competitive Renewable Energy Zones that rely on the private sector to provide infrastructure and operations for generation and transmission, while the state provides planning, facilitation, and regulation.
After establishing its commitment to renewable energy, the first challenge Texas faced was how to create a private sector-based renewable energy network. Texas is a big state with a rugged geography, so the second challenge was how to connect remote generators to the electricity grid. And a third challenge was how to assure participants provided the highest quality infrastructure and operations at a competitive and sustainable price.
The magic of all this was logistical. As wind farms were being built, the transmission system for the power was planned so it would be ready by the time the wind farm was set to go. Pretty amazing.
Second--in the realm of 'never assume people will do things the right way,' (also from another World Bank paper, "Design and Performance of Policy Instruments to Promote the Development of Renewable Energy: Emerging Experience in Selected Countries" (and supporting materials) by Gabriela Elizondo Azuela: around 2006, or thereabouts, India created some tax incentives to get entrepreneurs and the private sector to build wind-farms. A number of wind-mills were built, but where there was neither wind nor a grid. People got their tax credits and no-one got any electricity.
thirdly -- among delicious mushrooms, as ants well know (if they are conscious to being controlled by fungi, are some very scary, poisonous ones. The Atlantic has articles about both, but this one is particularly compelling:https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/06/death-cap.../530028/
Oh, and I almost forgot to follow-up on Julian's thoughts on Kamala missing some major opportunities:
1) How Trump has really betrayed the coal miners (though not the coal mine owners). A drive through certain parts of West Virginia ties you to wind country. I imagine a that workforce that would trade tunnels, dynamite, noise, and coal-dust for working in the fresh air of WVA building the new age of renewables.
2) The whole idea that the Green New Deal can be said to have grown as much from California as from solar and wind generation in Texas, Kansas, Iowa, and Oklahoma. Irony, indeed.
3) And that the future is a better place to to make things better than using the past to make the future worse (hmm....sorry about that, but I think it makes sense).
Steve from Washington, DC
Not to be outdone by friends and family, here are some comments:
First--
Behind the Texan veneer of unmeddlement from the state government, it was policy-makers who got the wires unspooling. Here's an excerpt from something I was editing for the World Bank, based on "Transmission Expansion for Renewable Energy Scale-Up - Emerging Lessons and Recommendations," by Marcelino Madrigal and Steven Stoft, World Bank –SEGEN, Paper 26, June 2011:
When Texas reformed its state energy program in 1999, it initiated a goal of increasing the role of renewable energy. In what may be considered a two-tier approach, it used a Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS) to require energy utilities to increase their proportion of renewable energy generation from eligible renewable energy sources in accordance with RE goals.
To minimize costs to the taxpayer, the Texas renewable energy program created Competitive Renewable Energy Zones that rely on the private sector to provide infrastructure and operations for generation and transmission, while the state provides planning, facilitation, and regulation.
After establishing its commitment to renewable energy, the first challenge Texas faced was how to create a private sector-based renewable energy network. Texas is a big state with a rugged geography, so the second challenge was how to connect remote generators to the electricity grid. And a third challenge was how to assure participants provided the highest quality infrastructure and operations at a competitive and sustainable price.
The magic of all this was logistical. As wind farms were being built, the transmission system for the power was planned so it would be ready by the time the wind farm was set to go. Pretty amazing.
Second--in the realm of 'never assume people will do things the right way,' (also from another World Bank paper, "Design and Performance of Policy Instruments to Promote the Development of Renewable Energy: Emerging Experience in Selected Countries" (and supporting materials) by Gabriela Elizondo Azuela: around 2006, or thereabouts, India created some tax incentives to get entrepreneurs and the private sector to build wind-farms. A number of wind-mills were built, but where there was neither wind nor a grid. People got their tax credits and no-one got any electricity.
thirdly -- among delicious mushrooms, as ants well know (if they are conscious to being controlled by fungi, are some very scary, poisonous ones. The Atlantic has articles about both, but this one is particularly compelling:https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/06/death-cap.../530028/
That's all for now,
Steve Spector