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The transition to renewable s – American’s energy revolution under way

America’s renewables revolution, Climate Spectator , 24 May 2012 John Kemp  “……Speaking in his state of the union address to Congress in January, the president claimed, “We’ve subsidised oil companies for a century. That’s long enough. It’s time to end the taxpayer giveaways to an industry that rarely has been more profitable and double-down on a clean energy industry that never has been more promising.”

But the rhetoric obscures an unprecedented push to cut energy consumption  and increase the share of renewable energy generation underway at all levels of government as well as in the private sector.
Federal, state and local governments, coupled with local power and gas utilities, are pouring billions of dollars a year into a vast range of initiatives to boost efficiency and renewables.
Support for efficiency and renewables is split across thousands of
different programs, which has tended to hide the scale of the overall effort. As a result, many energy analysts fail to appreciate the scale of the shift underway. However, the sheer amount of support being given to clean technology and energy efficiency programs suggests a revolutionary transformation of the energy system will likely occur in the next two decades.
In 2010/11, the US government alone had 679 separate renewable energy
initiatives spread across 23 departments and agencies, according to a
report prepared for Congress by the Government Accountability Office
(GAO) (“Renewable Energy: Federal Agencies Implement Hundreds of
Initiatives”, February 2012).
Four agencies and their subcomponents were responsible for almost 60
per cent of renewable energy initiatives: the Department of Defense
and its service components (116), Agriculture (105), Energy (92) and
Interior (82).
But renewables were also being promoted in such unlikely places as the
Department of Labor (via Green Capacity Building Grants offered by the
Employment and Training Administration), the State Department
(Greening Diplomacy and the Global Bioenergy Partnership), Justice
(FBI Alternative Fuel Infrastructure) and the Bureau of Prisons (Solar
Panel Manufacturing and Training).
And these are just the initiatives designed to support renewables. The
inventory does not include initiatives to improve efficiency.
At lower levels, there are now almost 1100 programs to support
renewables offered by state and local governments, or power and gas
utilities, according to the Database of State Incentives for
Renewables and Efficiency (DSIRE) compiled by the North Carolina Solar
Center and the Interstate Renewable Energy Council with funding from
the Department of Energy.
Of these, more than half are rebates on power and gas bills offered by
the utilities themselves in conjunction with local regulators.
In addition, there are over 1400 separate programs across the country
to promote efficiency, with more than three quarters of them being
offered in the form of rebates on utility bills to support
conservation measures……..
Not every program will succeed. Some will fail or prove a waste of
money, at least in narrow terms. ….
But $10 billion or more per year buys a lot of research, trial and
error, innovation, learning by doing and deployment…..
energy efficiency and renewables programs have the potential to
transform the profile of energy production and consumption.
The amount of money being invested on these programs, in aggregate,
strongly suggests an accelerated evolution that could start to produce
meaningful effects on power, gas and even oil consumption within the
next ten years.

http://www.climatespectator.com.au/commentary/americas-renewables-revolution

May 24, 2012 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | renewable, USA