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Biden Takes Action To Increase Renewable Energy Production

Biden Takes Action To Increase Renewable Energy Production

President Joe Biden announced on Monday that he is authorizing initiatives under the Defense Production Act to increase the domestic manufacture of clean energy technologies, especially of components used for solar panel construction.

"While President Biden continues pushing Congress to pass clean energy investments and tax cuts, he is taking bold action to rapidly build on this progress and create a bridge to this American-made clean energy future,” the White House said in a statement.

The Defense Production Act was passed by Congress in 1950 and can be invoked by the president to order private businesses to prioritize the production of materials that have been deemed necessary for the national defense.

The White House statement said:

Specifically, the President is authorizing the Department of Energy to use the DPA to rapidly expand American manufacturing of five critical clean energy technologies:

Solar panel parts like photovoltaic modules and module components;

Building insulation;

Heat pumps, which heat and cool buildings super efficiently;

Equipment for making and using clean electricity-generated fuels, including electrolyzers, fuel cells, and related platinum group metals; andCritical power grid infrastructure like transformers.

Also on Monday, Reuters reported that Biden will declare 24-month exemptions from tariffs on solar panels imported to the U.S. from Cambodia, Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam. The Commerce Department had halted the importation of panels from those countries, which comprise more than half the panel supply in the United States, as it investigates whether the products brought in from those countries are evading tariffs on goods imported from China.

The Solar Energy Industries Association, a trade group of over 1,000 companies and organizations advocating for the increased use of solar power, praised Biden's actions.

"Today's actions protect existing solar jobs, will lead to increased employment in the solar industry and foster a robust solar manufacturing base here at home," Abigail Ross Hopper, the president and CEO of the group, said in a statement on Monday.

Biden has invoked the Defense Production Act three times before, to increase the availability of baby formula, to manufacture COVID-19 vaccines, and to manufacture firehoses to combat wildfires. By comparison, former President Donald Trump was criticized for delaying the use of the act to boost production of medical equipment needed during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The executive actions come after the Biden administration in May launched an initiative to connect more sources of clean energy to the national power grid. The Department of Energy said the Interconnection Innovation e-Xchange, or i2X, will bring together "grid operators, utilities, state and tribal governments, clean energy developers, energy justice organizations, and other stakeholders to connect more clean energy to America’s power grid."

The exchange is financed by the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which Biden signed into law on Nov. 15, 2021.

A Stanford University study published in December 2021 found that electricity blackouts such as the one that hit Texas in 2020, which killed over 200 people and caused $24 billion in damage, could be prevented with more widespread usage of clean energy. The study showed that shifting to renewable energy would decrease energy demand by 57 percent and household energy costs by 63 percewnt.

The Biden administration has promoted the use of clean energy in multiple ways. In February, the administration set revenue records with the auction of offshore wind lease rights in the region known as the New York Bight. In May, the Department of Interior announced that wind lease rights off the coast of California would be auctioned for the first time.

In his first State of the Union speech, in May, Biden called for clean energy tax credits that would spur clean energy production and lower the price of electric vehicles.

Reprinted with permission from American Independent.

California Climate Plan Has Inland Condemning Coastal Elitism

California Climate Plan Has Inland Condemning Coastal Elitism

By Esme E. Deprez and James Nash, Bloomberg News (TNS)

The way inland California lawmakers see it, the only benefit to their constituents from Gov. Jerry Brown’s expansion of carbon pollution laws will be cleaner air to breathe as they wait at the unemployment office.

Brown and other Democrats are pushing legislation to reduce greenhouse gases caused by burning fossil fuels to a fraction of what they were a quarter-century ago. The state would make utilities get a greater share of electricity from low-pollution sources, compel industries to cut smokestack emissions further and encourage cleaner cars on roads.

In a state of 39 million dominated by Democrats, politics falls along regional lines rather than partisan ones. Just as California’s north and south fight over water amid a record drought, the climate legislation has widened longstanding rifts between more affluent, Democratic-leaning cities along the coast and poorer, more conservative towns in the interior.

“Families losing their jobs cannot afford solar panels on their homes when they can no longer afford their homes because they have no job,” state Sen. Jeff Stone, a Republican from Riverside County, told colleagues during a debate on Senate Bill 350 this month. He called it “coastal elitism at the worst, an act that will cut jobs in Central Valley communities and benefit rich urban areas that already have more jobs and economic diversity.”

Opponents such as Stone praise the goals of climate-change regulations but say private-sector innovation should drive clean technology, not government mandates.

They warn that tightening California’s rules, already the nation’s toughest, will increase gas and electricity costs for companies, farmers and the poor, eliminating jobs and driving business to less-expensive states. Rural residents traveling long distances to work, school and medical care will be disproportionately hurt, they say.

Proponents says the rules could bolster California’s $2.3 trillion economy — already the world’s seventh largest — by stabilizing energy costs, creating jobs that can’t be outsourced and lowering emissions from oil refineries, automobiles, power plants and factories. Absent action, they warn, the effects of climate change — long droughts, hotter temperatures and rising seas — would overwhelm it.

The bills call for California to get at least half its electricity from renewable sources such as solar and wind by 2030 and to lower carbon air pollution to 80 percent below 1990 levels within 35 years. New rules would seek to halve the petroleum Californians burn and require a 50 percent increase in energy efficiency in buildings.

The bills have passed the Senate and await hearings in the Assembly, where they also are expected to win approval. Democrats control both houses.

“The world is watching what California does,” Senate President Pro Tem Kevin de Leon, a Democrat from Los Angeles, said in an interview. “If we can prove that we can move forward with far-reaching carbon-reduction policies while at the same time reducing harmful pollutants that our children breathe into their lungs and grow the economy, then we know that the Chinese, the Mexicans, the Canadians, the Indians will follow.”

Jobs created to install solar panels or retrofit buildings for energy efficiency don’t require advanced degrees, de Leon said. Subsidized solar panels for low-income families in Fresno lower electricity bills, and more fuel-efficient hybrids in East Sacramento cost less at the pump.

That’s scant consolation to Chad Hathaway, who owns a 27-person oil-drilling operation in Kern County, about 110 miles northeast of Los Angeles. That’s where more than 70 percent of oil is drilled in California, which trails only Texas and North Dakota in production, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

Hathaway said the governor and his allies don’t appreciate the harm their campaign would cause Central Valley farming counties, which have been ravaged by unemployment rates as high as 11.1 percent, a four-year drought and declining oil prices that sent drilling to a record low.

“They live in a utopian society,” Hathaway said. “People who are truly struggling in the San Joaquin Valley are poor Hispanic people or poor people in general. They can’t afford to turn on the air conditioning or drive their cars.”

Manufacturers in California already pay more for electricity. In March, such users paid an average of 10.63 cents per kilowatt-hour, 57 percent higher than the national average, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

Past climate-change legislation in California has drawn concern even from Democrats. A June 2014 letter signed by 16 Assembly Democrats warned that an expansion of the state’s cap- and-trade program to cover transportation fuels would hurt the poor the most.

This year’s legislation is backed by a coalition of organizations including the Sierra Club and the Environmental Defense Fund, companies including eBay Inc. and KB Home, and billionaire environmentalist Tom Steyer.

Steyer says mandates for more renewable energy will drive innovation. That will decrease costs in the long run, while the scarcity of some fossil fuels will cause prices to rise.

“The idea that the curves aren’t going to cross in 15 years is not something that I lie awake worrying about,” Steyer, founder of San Francisco-based Farallon Capital Management LLC, said in an interview. “This is going to turn out much better from an innovation standpoint than anyone understands now.”

(c)2015 Bloomberg News. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Photo: Ben Amstutz via Flickr

Several States Have Tons Of Sun But Rules That Prevent Harnessing Its Power

Several States Have Tons Of Sun But Rules That Prevent Harnessing Its Power

By Evan Halper, Tribune Washington Bureau

Few places in the country are as warm and bright as Mary Wilkerson’s property on the beach near St. Petersburg, Fla., a city once noted in the Guinness Book of World Records for a 768-day stretch of sunny days.

But while Florida advertises itself as the Sunshine State, power company executives and regulators have worked successfully to keep most Floridians from using that sunshine to generate their own power.

Wilkerson discovered the paradox when she set out to harness sunlight into electricity for the vintage cottages she rents out at Indian Rocks Beach. She would have had an easier time installing solar panels, she found, if she had put the homes on a flatbed and transported them to chilly Massachusetts.

“My husband and I are looking at each other and saying, ‘This is absurd,’ ” said Wilkerson, whose property is so sunny that a European guest under doctor’s orders to treat sunlight deprivation returns every year. The guest, who has solar panels on his home in Germany, is bewildered by their scarcity in a place with such abundant light.

Florida is one of several states, mostly in the Southeast, that combine copious sunshine with extensive rules designed to block its use by homeowners to generate power.

States like Massachusetts, New Jersey, and New York — not known for clear, blue skies — have outpaced their counterparts to the south in the installation of rooftop solar panels.

While the precise rules vary from state to state, one explanation is the same: opposition from utilities grown nervous by the rapid encroachment of solar firms on their business.

The business models that have made solar systems financially viable for millions of homeowners in California, New England, and elsewhere around the country are largely illegal in Florida, Virginia, South Carolina, and some other Southern states. Companies that pioneered the industry, such as SolarCity Corp. and Sunrun Inc., do not even attempt to do business there.

“We get all kinds of inquiries every day” from the South, said Will Craven, spokesman for SolarCity. “People there want to be our customers.”

Florida, in particular, is known as the “sleeping giant” of his industry, Craven said. “It has a ton of sunshine, a ton of rooftops,” he said. “But there is no rooftop solar industry in Florida.”

In South Carolina and Virginia combined, only a few hundred homes have solar panels, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association. New Jersey has 21,500; California, 234,600.

Under the typical business model for the solar industry, homeowners sign lease agreements with installation companies. The homeowners pay the cost of the panels over time and sell any excess power the systems generate.

Along with tax breaks and other government incentives, the lease agreements have made solar installations increasingly affordable.

States where solar thrives typically pay homeowners attractive rates for the excess power they generate and require utilities to get a considerable share of their power from renewable sources. That gives companies an incentive to promote use of solar.

Southern states, several of which cherish low electricity rates afforded by extensive use of coal, typically have far fewer solar incentives.

Several also have rules that specifically discourage homeowners from going solar. In addition to the bans and restrictions on leasing arrangements, some Southern states assess taxes and fees on solar equipment and generation that do not exist elsewhere.

When Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Va., installed solar panels a few years ago, for example, the local utility, Dominion Virginia Power, threatened legal action. The utility said that only it could sell electricity in its service area. The university and the solar firm it worked with had to change their lease arrangement and forfeit valuable tax credits.

Soon after, in South Carolina, objections from another utility forced the cancellation of about 80 contracts under which a solar firm had planned to provide panels free of charge to churches and school districts.

The resulting backlash forced a change in the state’s law, but a limited one. South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley last week signed a bill that directed regulators to establish rules under which leasing would be permitted.

The details still need to be worked out, however, and solar firms worry the rules will be heavily influenced by electric companies that will insist on provisions to discourage installations.

For now, many homeowners and businesses that want to install panels are in the same predicament as Wilkerson. Finding no viable option to lease a system in Florida, she is exploring paying cash to buy one outright for three of the cottages she owns. The cost: $106,000.

Utility officials say the policies inhibiting solar installations result from more than a mere turf battle. Utilities bear the cost of maintaining the power lines, switches, and extensive computer networks that make up the electrical grid.

AFP Photo/Duane Prokop

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