37 item(s) were returned.
J.C. Ward Jr. Professor of Nuclear Energy Engineering
Cornell University
“Sustainable future” advocates seem to believe that solar, wind and hydro-electricity will eventually make up close to 100% of our energy generation, but there are benefits to having “central station” power plants in addition to distributed power generation. If the goal is to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions while assuring the health of our economy, the most viable way of generating central station power at present is nuclear fission. Central station power complements distributive power generation in two important ways. Central station power plants are better able produce power on a small area relatively close to where the energy will… [more]
View InsightPrincipal
NorthBridge Energy Partners, LLC
The EPA’s proposed Clean Power Plan, meant to reduce carbon by 30% by 2030, is expected to be accomplished through a combination of improving existing power plants, switching to cleaner generation, boosting renewables, and improving energy efficiency. It is more than likely that the global economy’s ability to innovate and drive economies of scale will significantly ease this transition, providing as yet unknown but superior alternatives. Consider this: the wind and solar industries barely existed five years ago. Today, costs of wind have fallen by 58% in the last five years, and the price of installed solar has plummeted by… [more]
View InsightChief Strategy Officer and SVP for Policy
American Council On Renewable Energy (ACORE)
In lieu of consistent energy policy at the federal level, businesses and power providers are increasingly looking to state legislatures for the right signals to invest in energy. The result? States are stepping up, leading to an increase in renewable energy use, particularly by some of America’s largest companies. A quick scroll through the weekly headlines reminds us that the demand for investing in renewables today is strong – and getting stronger. Google, Walmart, GM, Lockheed Martin, Amazon and Apple all have recently shifted millions in private funding into the clean energy sector. These moves are motivated by increased revenue… [more]
View InsightAssistant Professor
Vanderbilt University
The rooftop solar market in the US, and especially in California, has experienced explosive growth in the last decade. At least in part this growth can be attributed to the government incentive programs, which effectively reduce the system costs. One of the most aggressive incentive programs is the California Solar Initiative (CSI), a rooftop solar subsidy program initiated in 2007 with the goal of creating 1,940 megawatts of solar capacity by 2016. The CSI program has been touted as a great success, and it certainly seems so: over 2,000 megawatts have been installed to date. But how much of this… [more]
View InsightPresident
RENEWPR
The American wind energy industry has grown in spite of the “boom and bust” cycle of wind energy development fostered by the renewal-expiration-renewal cycle of the wind production tax credit (PTC). The PTC is one of the primary tools used to spur wind energy development and expired at the end of 2013. The result was a 92% drop in 2013 installations, compared to 2012. Extension of the PTC will likely be the subject of debate about so-called tax extenders during the upcoming “lame duck” session of Congress as the wind industry seeks an extension of the PTC through 2015. The… [more]
View InsightPresident
Jigar Shah Consulting
SolarWorld, a German-based manufacturer, has introduced a petition with the International Trade Commission and the U.S. Department of Commerce seeking to impose additional antidumping (AD) and countervailing (CVD) duties on imports of solar products from China and Taiwan. Interestingly, the petition aims to relieve U.S. solar panel manufacturing companies from imports that are sold in the U.S. at less than fair value (“dumped”) or allegedly benefit from subsidies in China or Taiwan. However, the petition could increase material costs and have significant impacts on the broader U.S. solar industry. The U.S. solar industry grew ten times faster than national job… [more]
View InsightDistinguished Professor of Energy
University of California, Berkeley
This is the second in a series of discussions led by invited speakers at the upcoming Physics of Sustainable Energy conference to be held March 8-9, 2014 at the University of California, Berkeley. Find more details below. The new Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System located in California’s Mojave Desert is the world’s largest concentrated solar thermal power station. The first of it’s kind at this scale, Ivanpah’s 392 megawatts of capacity (enough to power 140,000 homes) is generated by 360,000 garage-door-sized mirrors concentrating sunlight onto a 40-story boiler tower. The heat from the sunlight boils water in the tower and… [more]
View InsightUniversity Distinguished Professor
Michigan State University, Dept. of Chemical Engineering
It is clear that the Age of Oil is winding down. Worldwide, the rate of discovery of new oil reserves peaked in the 1960s and in the US our peak rate of oil discovery occurred in the early 1930s. In recent years the world has used about three barrels of oil for every barrel of new oil reserves discovered. Thus we are living largely on past oil discoveries. There is still a lot of oil in the world, and we will still be using a lot of oil decades from now. But it will be increasingly expensive both economically and… [more]
View InsightSenior Tax Counsel
United States Senate Committee on Finance
As part of his efforts to comprehensively reform the tax code, Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-MT) released a staff discussion draft on December 18, 2013 that proposed a dramatically simpler set of energy tax incentives that are technology-neutral, more predictable, and promote cleaner energy that is made in the United States. Policymakers have included tax breaks for energy in the tax code for nearly one hundred years. These incentives were created with good intentions to create jobs, promote energy security, and help reduce air pollution and environmental damage. But over the years, the number of provisions has ballooned… [more]
View InsightA recent “60 Minutes” segment essentially called the cleantech industry a failure, eliciting a flurry of criticisms defending the green technology sector. “Hoping to create innovation and jobs, [President Obama] committed north of $100 billion in loans, grants and tax breaks to cleantech. But instead of breakthroughs, the sector suffered a string of expensive tax-funded flops. Suddenly cleantech was a dirty word,” said “60 Minutes’” host, Lesley Stahl. One of the main criticisms against the CBS segment was that it conflated the cleantech venture capital sector of Silicon Valley with the Department of Energy’s loan guarantee program. The critics have… [more]
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