Power Struggle

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Jul 1, 2007, By Andy Opsahl

The fantasy of a renewable energy revolution may be coming true now that government is goosing one forward. States across the nation are implementing ambitious targets for generating power from renewable sources, often as part of efforts to combat global warming. Now the questions are: Can public utilities meet the challenge, and can technology keep pace?

California, for instance, will require its public utilities to generate 20 percent of their power using renewable energy sources by 2010. The state also enforced an auto emissions reduction and is cleaning up its smokestacks. The cumulative effort will push greenhouse gas emissions in California back to 1990 levels by 2020, according to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

The landmark initiative prompted other states to crank up their own efforts to reduce global warming. The Washington Legislature recently passed a law mandating goals similar to California's. And New Hampshire and Minnesota both passed the highest renewable energy usage requirements of public utilities to date -- 25 percent by 2025. But bragging rights may be short-lived because the California Public Utilities Commission announced that it's considering ways to reach 33 percent renewable energy usage by 2020.

In all, more than 20 states require that public utilities generate some portion of their electricity from renewable sources. At the national level, a federal standard of 20 percent by 2020 also is gaining momentum, due to the recent state requirements and party-leadership change in Congress, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS).

Meeting these renewable energy goals won't be easy for public utilities, many of which require drastic infrastructure changes to meet the surging power demands. They already face massive costs as they prepare for an imminent new building cycle. The Energy Information Administration projects that electricity generation in the United States will increase by 40 percent in the next 25 years.

"We need to make decisions today about how to meet that demand, and that is to include the construction of new base-load generation, meaning big power plants that run 24 hours a day, seven days a week, uninterrupted," said Dan Riedinger, spokesman for the Edison Electric Institute (EEI).

Aggressive renewable energy requirements will make that expansion even costlier, he said. Hydropower is currently the most widely used renewable energy source in the United States, producing nearly 7 percent of the nation's electricity, according to the EEI. But it's not as popular as it once was. Many environmentalists now oppose hydropower because it threatens fish and other wildlife.

Other options, such as wind and solar power, have experienced growing activity. But they have their own pricey obstacles.

Rise of Renewable Power
Renewable energy usage standards -- which hovered in the low single digits when originally implemented during the late 1990s -- recently doubled, putting pressure on utilities to generate cleaner power, according to Jeff Deyette, energy analyst with the UCS.

"States with existing standards have increased their requirements," he said. "That's where you see the 15 percent to 20 percent range, which has been the trend over the past two to three years. The new states considering standards are bypassing the lower percentages and just going straight for the 10 percent to 20 percent range."

SustainLane, a San Francisco-based online media company that promotes sustainable energy, released a top 10 list of U.S cities ranked by their use of renewable energy.

Oakland, Calif., hit the top with 17 percent of its electricity produced by solar, wind and geothermal energy. Altamont Pass, a wind-swept mountain pass in Northern California that is home to one of the nation's largest wind-power facilities, provides some of the city's electricity.

"Wind and solar were the two main sources," said Warren Karlenzig, chief strategy officer of SustainLane.

The list skewed heavily toward the Golden State, with Sacramento, San Francisco and San Jose sharing the No. 2 spot, San Diego, clinching the fifth, and Los Angeles,

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Comments

By Anonymous on Oct 15, 2007

After years of incentives to use less gasoline and drive more fuel-efficient vehicles -- the most effective of which may be $3+ per gallon gasoline -- the National Governor's Association and others have come up with a way to reverse the incentives and penalize drivers who use less fuel while traveling the same amount of miles. Actually, that's not the stated intent of the measure, but it's what could happen if "tax by mile driven" measures become law. You see, fuel-efficient vehicles and ethanol are cutting into state tax revenues. So as we get green -- beginning to solve one set of problems -- the tax authorities see another problem looming -- less gas tax revenues. So they are backing a plan to tax for miles driven in addition to gasoline purchased. What this means is that a motorcyclist or hybrid driver who gets 60 miles per gallon of fuel and commutes 60 miles per day, will pay the same amount of mileage tax as a guy driving a Cadillac Escalade or Hummer 60 miles per day and getting 15 miles per gallon. So the two drivers would pay the same amount per gallon of gas, but the mileage tax incentives favor the bigger car. But there's an important question here: If the "miles driven," tax is implemented, will the gas tax disappear? Fat chance. So another way to tax the motorist arrives atop the old way. Perhaps the politicians hope that Prius drivers and Hummer owners will be arguing with each other and miss the fact that another tax has just been levied on transportation. And there's another bad idea that merges into traffic. In order to do the mileage tax, motorists would need to install GPS monitoring equipment in their vehicles to keep tabs of how many miles they travel. Similar location-based systems -- called congestion pricing -- are now being tested in cities around the world. The closer the vehicle goes to the center of the city, the higher the toll paid by the vehicle owner. So instead of anonymous travel, the freedom of the road, and "hey I've got a tiny uncomfortable car so I'm greener than you," you have the government calculating how many miles you drive and sending you a bill. And knowing where you are, and how fast you're driving and where you stopped for the night and what route you take to work, etc. Everyone with a vehicle will effectively be wearing an ankle bracelet just like those guys on parole. Along with the red-light cameras, RFID tags for toll roads and GPS-enabled cell phones, every motorist in America could be located on some Internet map. Sure there would be benefits to the public and to government, but at the bottom of all this beneficial technology is the key question: "How can we extract more cash from the public?" Vehicles do need roads, and somebody has to pay for them. It sounds logical that the more miles you drive, the more you should support the infrastructure. However, a Prius and a motorcycle don't tear up the roads. Heavy trucks do. Escalades with six overweight car pool riders do -- OK, maybe that's going too far. But penalizing green vehicles while building an infrastructure to track and tax every vehicle in the country is a very bad idea.

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