A Plan for the Solar Revolution
(Page 3 of 8)
April/May 2009
By Denis Hayes
Today, more clearly than even in 1941, a fully engaged United States is essential to global success in the effort to avoid damaging the world’s climate irreparably. Without American engagement, climate catastrophe is inevitable. With America mobilized, nothing is impossible.
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Moreover, just as World War II catapulted America out of the Depression, this moral equivalent of war would offer a wonderful tonic for an economy plagued by recession, inflation, skyrocketing debt and a growing negative balance of trade.
Navigant Consulting, an international business consulting firm, calculates that the recent eight-year extension of the federal solar tax credit will, by itself, create 440,000 permanent jobs. In an economy in which the federal government has given gigantic tax breaks to conventional fuels for the past century, that solar tax break is a sound conservative policy — but it falls far, far short of a policy targeting 100 percent carbon-free electricity by 2020. The latter would employ countless millions.
The private sector is starting to gear up. Former oil tycoon T. Boone Pickens is planning to build the world’s largest wind farm. General Electric, having built one of the world’s largest wind turbine businesses, is jumping into solar energy. Thousands of startups aim to become the Google of renewable energy. So does Google itself!
In fact, one of the most hopeful portents is that the entrepreneurs and venture funds that defeated the monopolies at Ma Bell and IBM are turning their sights on Exxon and Peabody Coal. We’ve come a long way since 1980, when über-conflicted oil companies dominated big solar and brilliant scientists with limited business skills dominated small solar. This time the solar industry is populated by seasoned entrepreneurs who seek to take over the energy business. With more than 150 solar manufacturing companies around the world — many of them backed by high-tech titans — the oil industry will not be able to buy them all and shut them down as it did in the 1980s.
Real Energy Solutions
Government has a tradition of helping emerging industries supplant their well-entrenched predecessors. Canals were encouraged as more efficient than horses. Railroads were viewed as a better way to open the West. The interstate highway system replaced many of the functions performed by railroads.
Some renewable energy sources (e.g., photoelectrochemistry) and storage devices (e.g., nano-enabled ultracapacitors) would benefit greatly from mini-Manhattan Project commitments to R&D. Others are poised to ride learning curves to lower prices through mass production — but they require guaranteed markets to elicit the necessary investment. Here are a series of federal policies that, combined with a carbon trading system, can usher in the solar revolution.
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