Renewable Highlights October 2013
Ken Bossong produces the best renewables weekly report called The Sustainable News Summaries. Here are my favorite stories from the most recent one:
Renewables will be 70% of new energy investment by 2025 according to CitiBank. This is the same CitiBank which did the new energy investment analysis and found investing in new reactor construction failed all 5 criteria. So let’s be clear here, this is not Greenpeace with some ecological agenda, This is a capitalist bank, which believes in externalizing internal costs where ever possible (meaning they want you the tax payer to cover the cost of nuclear waste, accident insurance, investment risk and more). CitiBank is in the business of making money for their shareholders, this quarter. If the climate is destroyed or huge regions of the planet are left uninhabitable, this is not their concern. And what they are saying is that nukes are basically off the table. Nothing says you are winning like the vast majority of new investments going your way.
California leads the way on Renewables in the US. Germany is a renewables poor country. Yet long before Fukushima it decided that increasing it’s clean energy contribution was the path it wanted to follow. Unable to bring in more sunshine, or whip up great winds, Germany did what it could to encourage renewable energy development – it changed the tax law. This has been fantastically successful. In a similar fashion California has now decided to up the stake on renewables. What this new law does is:
- Requires state utilities to have at least 5.2 GW net metered generation – permitting customers to sell mostly solar and wind to the grid.
- It removes the cap on net metered electricity (previously 5%) which ill spur investment in household renewables
- Keeps California (which currently produces 20% of its electricity from renewables) on target to get to 33% by 2020.
- Separately, California is requiring utilities to have storage for almost a million households with of electricity. This enables more renewables at home.
On the down side persistent low natural gas prices in the US are impeding energy efficiency efforts.
If you want to see the full sustainable energy news Oct 19th, 2013 report it is available here.
You can subscribe by writing Ken at [email protected]
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