This is Rio de Janeiro right now: “Hey, London, nice job with the terrifying brain slug mascots and logo that evokes cartoon incest. We’ve also been doing some design innovation for our Olympics! Yeah, we just made this giant beautiful waterfall that will generate renewable energy for the Olympic Village. But yours is good too!”

The 345-foot tower, designed by Swiss firm RAFAA, is ringed by solar panels at its base, which provide power to the city and the games. The structure stores extra energy from those panels by pumping up seawater, which can then be released to run a turbine — and, on special occasions, to create an impressive waterfall effect. It also houses an amphitheater, cafeteria, and observation deck to keep Olympic tourists busy, and a bungee-jumping station to thin the herd.

Will this make 2016 the first zero-emissions games? Yeah, not likely. The Olympics are a gigantic energy-suck, even before you factor in the carbon-spew side effects of getting the athletes there in the first place. But this will be one Olympic spectacle that can, at very least, power itself. That’s more than London’s army of flying Marys Poppins can say.

Germany now generates 25 percent of its electricity from renewable sources. The nation has not, however, won any Olympic medals.

Germany produced 67.9 billion kilowatt hours of renewable energy in the first half of 2012, a record high and an increase of 19.5 percent from the same period last year, industry figures showed on Thursday. …

Wind energy was the largest contributor of green power, accounting for 9.2 percent of all energy output, BDEW said.

Biomass, or material acquired from living organisms, accounted for 5.7 percent and solar technology for 5.3 percent.

After the Fukushima meltdown in Japan, Germany pledged to eliminate all nuclear power, increasing its use of renewables to 35 percent by 2035. If it were to keep increasing at 19.5 percent a year, it would hit that target by 2015.

For Germany to match its 2008 medal haul, it needs just under three medals a day for the rest of the Olympics.

No one likes to be left out. (Photo by charamelody.)

Last week, I highlighted some energy projections from 2000 or so that substantially underestimated the growth of renewables. Mainly I wanted an excuse to repost Michael Noble’s list. So as not to merely thieve, I added a few musings of my own, reflecting my ongoing obsessions with the dynamics of distributed energy and the values-based assumptions buried in economic models. I didn’t think about it all that much, to be honest, nor did I aspire to offer a comprehensive account of why projections fail. (The much-more-qualified Nate Silver has a book on that subject coming out in September.)

Turns out, though, the post was quite popular! It has now been linked to by both David Leonhardt and Paul Krugman of The New York Times. Normally I’d be thrilled, but the post in question has the unfortunate feature of being, um, wrong. Well, maybe not wrong, but it nibbles around the edges and misses the main course.

Why were projections of renewable energy growth from 2000 so woefully off the mark? The main answer, which I passed over in my post, is policy.

The International Energy Agency and U.S. Energy Information Administration do not try to predict policy changes; they project based on the current policy regime. In 2000, there wasn’t much in the way of clean-energy policy. Since then, however, there’s been a great deal, and those policy changes are the biggest driver of renewable energy growth. Michael Levi makes the point well: “without supportive policy that wasn’t in place a decade ago, renewables wouldn’t have done nearly as well. If we want more renewable energy in the coming years than the EIA and IEA currently project, we’re going to need new and more robust policies too.”

Yes. It’s important to remember that policy has driven the expansion of renewable energy. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.) And as energy smart guy Alan Nogee reminds me, people busted their asses to get those policies passed! They deserve to be heralded.

What policies are we talking about? The federal tax credits for wind and solar are a big chunk. They’ve been fitful and inconsistent — the graph below shows what happened to wind when the PTC lapsed in 2000, 2002, and 2004:

Click to embiggen.

Nonetheless, the tax credits have been better than nothing, federal policy-wise.

Lest Michael Grunwald strike me down, I can’t discuss clean-energy growth without mentioning the extraordinary boost it received from Obama’s stimulus bill, which put $90 billion toward clean energy projects and leveraged another $100 billion in private financing. That’s huge (and also visible on the graph above). Installed wind and solar have doubled during Obama’s tenure.

It looks like the tax credits and the stimulus money are about to drop off a cliff, by the way, as federal energy policy gets polarized like everything else. That could put a real crimp in my optimism.

And here we come to state renewable energy standards — the real, unsung workhorses of the U.S. renewable-energy revolution. As I mentioned the other day, 29 states and D.C. now have mandatory renewable standards in place, which together represent nearly two-thirds of the nation’s generating capacity. Those were not easy victories, either. A lot of them took long, grinding fights.

This is a projection of renewable energy growth done by the Union of Concerned Scientists in 2009, based on state renewable energy standards (assuming they are met):

Now that’s impact! There is also, FYI, a ballot initiative in Michigan this year that would double the state’s renewable energy target, from 10 percent by 2015 to 25 percent by 2025. Meeting the current renewables standard has been cheaper than expected and generated $100 million in investment for the state.

What state renewable energy standards do is what Germany’s feed-in tariffs do: create a broad-based constituency. It’s no coincidence that clean energy is most popular in places where its benefits have been most widely spread, like California and Germany. We’re seeing that dynamic start to impinge on partisan politics in swing states like Iowa (19th on the 2012 State Clean Energy Index) and, yes, Michigan (12th).

U.S. energy policy over the last decade has not been ideal, to say the least, but it’s been enough to get renewables growing way faster than the baseline projections. Just imagine what we could have done if we’d followed Germany’s lead and created a stable, predictable, transparent system of feed-in tariffs for clean-energy technologies in 2000, keyed to decline as costs decline. More than 20 percent of Germany’s energy now comes from renewables. I bet we could do that too!

One more note: The question remains whether outfits like IEA and EIA should be trying to predict policy shifts. It is, after all, highly unlikely that policy will remain static over the course of the next decade. You could argue that they’re not equipped to predict what Congress will do, but modeling no-policy leaves you with projections that are a) useless for prediction purposes or investment decisions, and b) used to nefarious ends by people trying to downplay clean energy’s prospects. Alternatively, they could project for a whole range of different policy scenarios, but then you end up effectively saying, “there will be as much renewable energy as governments decide there will be,” which isn’t that helpful.

If you want to know what’s going to happen in U.S. clean energy, it’s best to survey the opinions of those with a broad view, those who understand economics and finance but also the realities of the political economy. Good discernment and judgment are needed — nay, even wisdom. Spreadsheets can’t provide that.

[UPDATE: I left something very important out of this post. So when you're done with it, read this.]

Last month, Michael Noble of Fresh Energy put up a fascinating list of projections made by energy experts around 2000 or so. (I got there via Brad Plumer.) Suffice to say, the projections did not fare well. They were badly wrong, and all in the same direction — they underestimated the growth of renewable energy. It’s worth quoting the whole list:

WIND

• In 2000, the International Energy Agency (IEA) published its World Energy Outlook, predicting that non-hydro renewable energy would comprise 3 percent of global energy by 2020. That benchmark was reached in 2008.
• In 2000, IEA projected that there would be 30 gigawatts of wind power worldwide by 2010, but the estimate was off by a factor of 7. Wind power produced 200 gigawatts in 2010, an investment of approximately $400 billion.
• In 1999, the U.S. Department of Energy estimated that total U.S. wind power capacity could reach 10 gigawatts by 2010. The country reached that amount in 2006 and quadrupled between 2006 and 2010.
• In 2000, the European Wind Energy Association predicted Europe would have 50 gigawatts of wind by 2010 and boosted that estimate to 75 two years later. Actually, 84 gigawatts of wind power were feeding into the European electric grid by 2012.
• In 2000, IEA estimated that China would have 2 gigawatts of wind power installed by 2010. China reached 45 gigawatts by the end of 2010. The IEA projected that China wind power in 2020 would be 3.7 gigawatts, but most projections now exceed 150 gigawatts, or 40 times more.

SOLAR

• In 2000, total installed global photovoltaic solar capacity was 1.5 gigawatts, and most of it was off-the-grid, like solar on NASA satellites or on cabins in the mountains or woods.
• In 2002, a top industry analyst predicted an additional 1 gigawatt annual market by 2010. The annual market in 2010 was 17 times that at 17 gigawatts.
• In 1996, the World Bank estimated 0.5 gigawatts of solar photovoltaic in China by 2020, but China reached almost double that mark — 900 megawatts — by 2010.

What should we take from this?

Well, mainly that fossil-fuel energy was really cheap in 2000. Oil was about a third the price it is now, coal for electricity about half. That colored those projections. But that’s a boring lesson. Let’s speculate about some others.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

The projections weren’t just off, they were way off. You can find similarly poor projections from the ’70s that underestimate the spread of energy efficiency and other demand-side technology solutions. (They thought they were going to need hundreds of nuclear plants. See Alexis Madrigal on this.) Similarly terrible projections were also common in the early years of cell phones.

What do cell phones, energy efficiency, and renewable energy have in common? One, they are dynamic areas of technology development and market competition, which makes straight-line projections pretty useless. And two, they are distributed, with millions of loosely networked people and organizations working on them in parallel. Distributed, human-scale technologies come in small increments. They replicate quickly, so there’s more variation and competitive selection, and thus more evolution.

Nuclear power, in contrast, comes in gigantic increments only (at least for now). There’s a limited number of people doing the R&D, a limited number of entities capable of building or financing the power plants. It’s a little easier to know the potential.

When it comes to complex, parallel, loosely linked networks, the dynamics are more fluid and nonlinear changes more likely. They’re harder to quantify and predict. And so we consistently underestimate them. Something to keep in mind when pondering what today’s projections are going to look like in 2020.

Speaking of keeping things in mind, it seems to me that when projections are consistently wrong in the same direction, it bespeaks a need to update the models and techniques used to project — or at least update our expectations.

For example: Every time there’s a new air or water regulation proposed, industry predicts a level-10 economic apocalypse. EPA counters by saying it will only be a level-5 economic apocalypse. Invariably, it’s a level-0 economic apocalypse — low costs, lots of lives saved. Yet the political class approaches each new regulation with a peculiar Zen-like no-mind, as though it is the first such argument and all perspectives are equally supported by past experience. Same with projections of energy efficiency and renewables.

So why aren’t projections being updated to match what’s been observed? It’s a complicated question, but at least part of the answer is that projections are not ideologically neutral. There are assumptions and value judgments obscured behind the spreadsheets. Is efficiency a cost or an investment? What externalities are counted and for how much? To what extent is political economy taken into account? What value is placed on the welfare of our descendents (i.e., what is our “discount rate”)?

There’s no way to do projections without value judgements and assumptions, of course. But it’s good to be clear about them and, when they come into friction with experience, to be willing to rethink them. Otherwise we get stuck in a status quo sustaining feedback loop, where fossil-friendly assumptions produce fossil-friendly projections which are then used to justify fossil-friendly policies and investment decisions.

For visions of a clean energy future, brothers and sisters, look not to the soothsaying of thine “experts,” but to history, and to hope. Amen.

If the Internet has taught us anything, it is that everything is better when it is smaller. Kittens are better than cats. Cake pops are better than cakes. LEGO models of anything are pretty great, even if the full-sized version is pretty iffy (say, a meth lab).

Thus: Solar panels? Good. Teeny tiny solar cells? BETTER. Solar cells so tiny they can be sprayed onto windows? SO COOL.

A company called New Energy Technologies has developed the thinnest of thin-film solar panels, a film of itty-bitty solar panels that’s basically transparent and can be applied to your windows in layers smaller than a micrometer. These tiny panels, each a quarter the size of a grain of rice, can harvest energy even in low-light conditions and from artificial light, so you might as well spray the stuff on the inside of your windows as well as the outside.

The only part of this technology we don’t like is that it doesn’t come in a spray-can so you can go hog wild all over your house. The company does the spraying itself. But one day? Maybe we’ll all just be picking up a can of this stuff at the hardware store to re-do our energy-collecting windows.

Swedish designer Eddi Tornberg has turned the plight of modern workers — sitting like lazy larvae in front of computer screens all day — into a form of renewable energy. He uses the heat of our rear ends to create electricity. You’ll still die from sitting, but at least your energy bills will be lower!

The bottom of Tornberg’s office seat collects body warmth on the top while keeping cool on the bottom. The chair generates power from that heat differential. But this amazing office suite does not stop with harnessing butt energy, Atlantic Cities reports. The chair also sits on a piezoelectric pad that takes the pressure of every twitch and fidget of the worker and turns it into laptop juice. Tornberg steals energy from an office plant as well.

How long can your butt heat and your fidgeting keep your computer running? Tornberg doesn’t say. He does reveal his inspiration, though — a quote from the estimable Harriet Beecher Stowe: “Human nature is above all things lazy.”

He’s wrong.

Lane bases his arguments largely on a report released earlier this month by Brookings. “Clean Energy: Revisiting the Challenges of Industrial Policy” assesses the value of subsidies in bolstering a clean energy economy.

What Brookings found probably won’t come as much of a surprise: Subsidizing clean energy initiatives is not always effective and is not the ideal way to bolster the sector. Instead of subsidies, the most market-efficient way to support clean energy is to internalize the costs of fossil fuel-based energy production. In other words, to build a system that — among other things — ends the ability of coal power producers to emit carbon dioxide and other pollutants into the atmosphere where they will produce long-term costs in global warming and negative health impacts.

We tried this one way; it was called cap-and-trade. It was proposed by Republicans, then killed when Democrats began to champion it. Politically, it’s a non-starter.

There’s another way to do it: regulation. The EPA has issued several rules that would lower the allowable baseline for fossil fuel pollution. This is the sort of reception such efforts receive.

Which is why the fossil fuel industry and its allies focus on subsidies as a target. Subsidies are the primary support the government provides to clean energy. If you remove subsidies for clean energy projects, it’s almost impossible for them to get a foothold in a crowded marketplace — even if, over the long run, the technology will obviously be dominant and more cost-effective. If you came up with a new retail system, one that held real promise to vastly improve the consumer experience, how do you think you’d do if Walmart wanted to take you out?

But, as yesterday’s Twitterstorm noted, subsidies don’t only go to clean energy companies. Here’s a graphic from the Brookings report that shows where subsidies for research and development have gone over the past 40 years.

Click to embiggen. (Image courtesy of Brookings.)

See that spike in the second small graph? Fossil fuels received far more research and development subsidies during the second big spike than did clean energy projects. Imagine if your little store was trying to compete with Walmart and the government was giving Walmart far more money than you.

Subsidies for clean energy may not be the most efficient. But if we want to position the United States as a leader in the emerging clean energy sector, we can’t let existing energy systems both kill research and development for clean energy and block attempts to internalize their own costs. Or, at the very least, we should maybe give them less money to do so.

The Post’s Lane doesn’t broach the subject of fossil fuel subsidies; presumably, in his eyes, throwing government money at the feet of some of the world’s wealthiest companies to do research is a perfectly sensible investment. As for cleantech?

Having China or someone else develop clean-energy technology might be to U.S. advantage; let them pay the inevitable start-up costs; then we can adapt the discoveries to our own needs.

Lane suggests we just play catch-up.

Now that’s a smart investment strategy.

Bad news, coal. A massive study from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) modeled the impacts of a national energy grid with renewable power comprising between 30 and 90 percent of the mix — including the requisite generation, transmission, and storage. In short:

The central conclusion of the analysis is that renewable electricity generation from technologies that are commercially available today, in combination with a more flexible electric system, is more than adequate to supply 80% of total U.S. electricity generation in 2050 while meeting electricity demand on an hourly basis in every region of the United States.

That quote scratches the surface of the NREL’s findings, which follow collaboration with 110 contributors from 35 organizations inside and outside the government. (The list of abbreviations used in the report itself runs two-and-a-half pages.) Another study released in 2010 found that Europe could similarly make a transition to a renewable-heavy energy infrastructure.

The United States currently generates 3.6 percent of our energy from renewable, non-hydroelectric sources, meaning that a target of 80 percent renewable generation by 2050 seems, well, optimistic. Even if the political will for such a transition existed — which it very much does not, as reinforced by those turnpike billboards — such a shift would require a massive investment and shift in energy economics. But it’s by no means impossible.

While this analysis suggests such a high renewable generation future is possible, a transformation of the electricity system would need to occur to make this future a reality. This transformation, involving every element of the grid, from system planning through operation, would need to ensure adequate planning and operating reserves, increased flexibility of the electric system, and expanded multi-state transmission infrastructure, and would likely rely on the development and adoption of technology advances, new operating procedures, evolved business models, and new market rules.

In short: daunting.

We’d be remiss if we didn’t note the most broadly engaging aspect of the NREL’s findings: the projection maps.

The animation above is an inelegant representation of the NREL report’s animated map of possible growth of renewable energy over the next 38 years. More amazing: an hour-by-hour look at energy flow in the year 2050. Watching these provides more than a little sense of living in a world of science fiction. But the more important point is what they demonstrate. We can build the renewable energy we need and even project how it will work in a national grid.

Even in 2050, the NREL projection indicates, coal has a role. But it’s unlikely our self-driving cars will pass any billboards touting it.

Other findings from the full report [PDF]:

• Electricity supply and demand can be balanced in every hour of the year in each region with nearly 80 percent electricity from renewable resources, including nearly 50 percent from variable renewable generation, according to simulations of 2050 power system operations.

• High renewable electricity futures can result in deep reductions in electric sector greenhouse gas emissions and water use.

• The direct incremental cost associated with high renewable generation is comparable to published cost estimates of other clean energy scenarios. Improvement in the cost and performance of renewable technologies is the most impactful lever for reducing this incremental cost.

• With higher demand growth, high levels of renewable generation present increased resource and grid integration challenges.

Last year, global investment in renewable energy passed the quarter-trillion-dollar mark, hitting $257 billion, according to the United Nations Environment Program.

In other words, investors spent about $38 for every human being on Earth. Someone needs to tell these job creators that they’re ruining a lot of people’s arguments about the green economy.

Much of the growth came in solar. Between 2010 and 2011, investment in solar firms grew 52 percent to $147 billion, though wind investments dropped 12 percent globally. The United States, which had been getting outpaced in recent years, moved back into second place — spurred in part by fears that tax incentives for renewables would expire and not be renewed.

Perhaps the most optimistic finding from the report:

Renewable power, excluding large hydro-electric, accounted for 44% of all new generating capacity added worldwide in 2011 (up from 34% in 2010). This accounted for 31% of actual new power generated, due to lower capacity factors for solar and wind capacity.

In other words, nearly half of the new power generation in the world in 2011 came from renewable sources. That’s still a small fraction of the electricity generated, but moving in the right direction.

Job creators. Is there anything they can’t do?

The idea of categorizing green jobs is a new one, historically speaking. There were obviously green jobs a century ago, but people didn’t look at them as being jobs that focused on sustainability or renewable energy production. The person who collected scrap metal and the person that built windmills just had regular old jobs. Green jobs only became a category tracked by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) in the past few years, meaning that it was applied retroactively to a number of jobs that clearly fit the definition. I mean, if the person that drives a low-emission mass transit vehicle doesn’t have a green job, then who does?

But that’s the point. Issa and his allies aren’t in the business of accurately defining what a green job is, they’re in the business of making the number of green jobs as small as possible. For Issa, this is a political point: The president spent a lot of time talking about green jobs, and it will be one yardstick against which he is measured in November. For Issa’s allies — the good people of the oil and gas industries — minimizing the number of green jobs is a way of bolstering their dominance in the marketplace. If Chevron and BP had their way, a person who built, installed, maintained, and spun a wind turbine wouldn’t count.

Not that they’re necessarily experts at counting jobs. The oil and gas industry is represented on Capitol Hill by the the American Petroleum Institute (API), an organization that spent $8.6 million lobbying in 2011. The API also counts the jobs it creates, posting the information at a happy little website that sports a sprouting plant as its icon, EnergyTomorrow.org. According to Energy Tomorrow, the oil and natural gas industry supports 9.2 million men and women across the United States. 9.2 million! Some 3 percent of the population!

Which is obviously high. Notice the language, though: “supports.” Which implies that this includes both direct employees and indirect employment — for example, nearby businesses that depend on oil field workers, suppliers, etc. In other words, the sorts of ancillary and extended definitions that the BLS uses in assessing green jobs.

There’s one difference: The jobs cited by the government are cataloged and defined. This lets opponents cherry-pick examples to mock (see yesterday’s article about BP), but also adds accountability. The API’s numbers aren’t public. I looked. That’s not an accident. We have only the oil and gas industry’s word on their job creation; we have only their contested word on jobs they’re likely to create. The government’s numbers are detailed — and have been largely backed up by analysis from the Brookings Institution. (For more on how these calculations were made and validated, see this report from Headwaters Economics.)

So yes, it’s funny to consider a kid that works at a record store as having a green job. But disparaging an industry that employs millions of people by identifying one contentious example is better than shunting millions of dollars in tax subsidies to an industry which is accountable only to itself.