Climate Climate & Energy

California and New Jersey have high numbers of PV installations

The following essay is a guest post by Earl Killian.

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Cooler Planet looked at the solar photovoltaic (PV) installation data from the California Energy Commission and made it visual to show just how it is growing. A static view of their data is at the right, but go to the site and move the slider to see the growth from only 1,675 grid-connected photovoltaic installations in 2002 to 29,628 installations in 2008. According to SolarBuzz:

In 2006, 112 megawatts of solar photovoltaics were installed in the US Grid Connect market, up from 80 megawatts in 2005. Demand was led once again by California, which accounted for 63% of the national market. Notwithstanding funding program bottlenecks, New Jersey saw very strong growth in 2006, representing 17% of the national market.

Why would California and New Jersey, with only 12 percent and 2.9 percent of U.S. population respectively, account for such a large fraction of PV installations? Perhaps incentive programs (most recently the California Solar Initiative and the New Jersey Clean Energy Rebate Program) and other policies are working.

Internationally, Germany (8.8 x U.S. in 2006 MW installed) and Japan (2.6 x U.S.) (PDF) are the leaders in PV installations, with California a "distant third" (PDF) according to Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Most places where PV is economic have some combination of the following (but usually not all):

Grandfathering is Robin Hood’s evil twin

Climate change is regressive. Its effects punish the least fortunate the most -- those who've contributed little to and gained little from polluting economies. But the solutions to climate change can be progressive. Done right, they can share fairly the burdens and opportunities of preventing climate disruption.

I said "can."

If poorly designed, climate policy can also be viciously regressive -- a vacuum cleaner sucking up working families' earning. That's why it's so important to get climate policy right. It's the single most important economic fairness issue facing us right now: more important than reforming payday lending, more important even than reforming health insurance. It's what every advocate for economic opportunity should be losing sleep over -- and jumping to action to help shape the solution.

The most needed measure for minimizing climate disruption is a firm cap on emissions of greenhouse gases and a mechanism for putting a price on those emissions. In short, climate pricing. We need to make prices tell the truth about the climate.

Notable quotable

“I do think we’re in a position where we don’t foresee the need for new coal-fired generation in the Carolinas anytime in the foreseeable future. It’s probably premature to say we will never build a coal plant in the Carolinas again, but today we do not foresee the need to do that based on the […]

Duke Energy will build likely its last coal plant in North Carolina

Well, we’ve got good news and bad news: North Carolina air-quality officials have granted Duke Energy a permit for a new coal plant (boo) in what Duke Carolinas President Ellen Ruff says is “very likely the last coal plant you’ll see coming from Duke” in the Carolinas (rah!). The permit stipulates that four older Duke […]

The electrification of transportation will also help green the grid

I promised more on the impact of Project Better Place's electric car plans -- and I deliver with an article here.

Public works and investment must be part of the solution to global warming

As I've said before, certain types of goods -- public goods -- simply cannot be allocated efficiently through market mechanisms alone, even if we get prices right. Now this is not a "government good/private sector bad" post. It is a suggestion, as was my original post on this subject, that a market system requires not only regulation but large-scale public investment, and that one of the places we are making way too few public investments is energy infrastructure.

Again, this is not to say that public investment is the way to run everything; just as there are public goods, there are private goods. But we are trying to meet needs that are clearly public goods via private means. Full social pricing, though needed, will not change that.

Before focusing on energy, consider health insurance. The U.S. spends more on healthcare than any other nation, and gets worse results. There are various reasons for this, but one is that a competitive market in health insurance tends to provide more insurance and less healthcare than public insurance mechanisms. (When I gave this example back in October, biodiversivist argued that our healthcare system "does not resemble any free market I know of." That does not change the fact that our healthcare system is less regulated than healthcare systems in any other rich nation.)

Every intervention that can be cited as possible government over-involvement in our medical system can be found in other systems that spend much less on healthcare and get far better results. If I have to, I'll do a whole post on healthcare -- but the bottom line is that moving a large part of the health insurance system from private to public spending would improve efficiency. Note that we are talking health insurance, not health care.

A major part of fighting global warming will consist of switching from polluting to clean energy. That is largely a matter of major infrastructure, and infrastructure, at least since the fall of feudalism, has always required large public investment, not just regulation.

Sheryl Crow chats about TP, Rove, and the price of oil

In an interview with the New York Times Magazine, Sheryl Crow talks about the One-Square Scandal: Last spring, you were held up as a parody of environmental correctness when you proposed restricting the use of toilet paper to one square per bathroom visit. What was that about? I think it’s a fantastic and eye-opening example […]

Battlefield earth

In a piece in Foreign Policy, Jamais Cascio goes straight at one of the things that scares me most about "geoengineering" — the potential, should such techniques be developed, that they will be used for less-than-benign ends. Nuclear war scares the hell out of us, right? Why would it not scare us to think that […]

Breaking: Dept. of Energy pulls support for FutureGen

Whoa! The Dept. of Energy just announced that it’s yanking its support for FutureGen, the much-ballyhooed and much-delayed “clean coal” demonstration plant that greens refer to, never more appropriately, as NeverGen. What’s behind the decision? “Ballooning costs.” But wait … I thought coal was cheap!? UPDATE: Note that Senator Dick Durbin expresses great outrage and […]

Conservation work will potentially be undone by climate change

Habitat preservation is a noble cause — so it’s really too bad that many conservation efforts may end up rendered moot by climate change. For example, restoration of Pacific Northwest salmon runs won’t do much good if warming makes streams unlivable; restoring fresh water flow in the Everglades will be somewhat pointless if sea-level rise […]