JANUARY 19, 2012 requirements and limitations. Interconnection processes are highly complex, costly, uncertain, and time consuming. Land use entitlements, environmental approvals, zoning, planning, building and safety issues all add additional barriers to solar development. Political and regulatory barriers, which add extra cost to solar power as they do to all renewables, are the reason why the United States, still the world’s largest economy, is lagging behind such nations as Italy, the U.K. and even Indonesia in the amount of electricity we get from renewables. And even though California is America’s renewable energy leader, the Golden State is still no great shakes in Rosen’s book. “Germany, with the same sunshine as Anchorage, Alaska, installed far more solar in the fourth quarter of 2012 than California has installed in total.” Again, don’t blame the sun or the wind. America is falling behind on renewables because of politics. Don’t let me get you down After surveying dozens of inspiring small-scale renewable energy projects from solar coops in Colorado to wind turbines in Minnesota to the combined heat and power biomass plant at Middlebury College in Vermont, Pahl gives a nod to the challenges of doing renewables in most parts of the U.S. From lack of a coherent national energy policy with on-again off-again federal incentives; to resistance from electric utilities; to the complexity of financing community energy projects; to inflexible and outdated government approval processes; to NIMBY opposition
additional incentives, primarily requirements for utility companies to offer their customers a certain minimum amount of clean energy. In some cases, the minimum would rise each year, meaning that the market for solar power would get bigger and bigger. Such a system has allowed both sunny California and un-sunny New Jersey to lead the U.S. in solar installations. Like the Golden State, the Garden State supports solar power through excellent public policy — a combination of a robust renewable portfolio standard (RPS) and the ability for renewable energy companies to enter into power purchase agreements with their customers, allowing a customer to use solar power without having to invest tens of thousands of dollars upfront in solar panels. Both policies are key to cutting costs for renewables and getting close to the holy grail of “grid parity,” where clean energy from an alternative source costs about as much as dirty power from the electric company. But with the exception of California, Colorado and a handful of traditionally liberal states in the Northwest and Northeast that have enacted serious policies to support renewable power, the rest of America remains a clean energy backwater. As California solar developer Al Rosen writes in Renewable Energy World, There’s no solar gold rush or windfall profit. Most solar developers and their projects are struggling. The failure rate is extraordinarily high. Financing and investment is hard to come by. There are few viable programs and they all have small capacity and difficult
STARK FACT The United States, the world’s so-called “superpower,” probably has as much renewable energy as Rwanda in Africa
M - ZITODAY N E+ ACTIVISM
38