Wednesday, November 19, 2008
ELPC Senior Attorney John Moore recently sat down with Ethanol Producer Magazine to discuss the Biomass Crop Assistance Program. This new program, which ELPC supported in the 2008 Farm Bill, will help farmers located near biomass facilities to grow and process sustainably-grown energy crops. ELPC is working to jump-start this new program as quickly as possible.
Monday, October 13, 2008
Let’s face it. America’s economy is bad shape. Some will seize upon the troubled times to argue that we should cut back on investing in clean energy and environmental protection. But that’s the wrong direction both for today and for the future.
For today, energy efficiency makes even more sense in tight financial times. Businesses can’t afford to waste energy and drain their bottom lines from high energy bills, while causing more pollution to our environment. Improving energy efficiency is an investment that can achieve a healthy return. Smart businesses view their energy efficiency investments as a profit-center.
ELPC’s colleagues at the Alliance to Save Energy explain this well. “Industry accounts for one-third of all energy use in the U.S. Energy-intensive industrial plants typically have enormous energy bills, sometimes running into the millions of dollars annually. Energy efficiency improvements offer the potential for a significant return on investment for the industrial energy consumer in the form of lower utility bills, as well as for the public in the form of reduced pollution and energy prices.”
The same is true for improving energy efficiency in our homes. “Investing in a home on your street could be more profitable than investing on Wall Street,” says the energy team at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. These days — no kidding! Energy efficiency lightens the load on our energy bills and bank accounts. It’s a safe and sound investment.
The U.S. is beginning to invest more heavily in clean renewable energy technologies and cleaner, more fuel efficient cars of the future. Let’s invest in the clean wind power and solar technologies of the future and not cede the next generation’s global leadership to other countries. Let’s produce the innovative clean cars here that can get 50 miles per gallon or better and reduce America’s dependence on foreign oil. Let’s gain the green jobs of the future in a carbon-constrained economy, and not cling only to the declining jobs of old-technology cars and trucks with declining sales.
We should invest more in upgrading energy efficiency because it saves us money, creates jobs and avoids pollution today and over the next twenty years. America should invest in achieving technological breakthroughs with solar energy, greater utilization of wind energy, and gaining advances in new, more efficient battery technologies. America should invest in getting more domestically manufactured plug-in electric hybrids and other clean cars on the road as soon as possible. In today’s challenging economic times, these investments are even smarter, more sensible and more necessary going forward.
Monday, October 6, 2008
ELPC Executive Director Howard Learner argues at the Chicago Huffington Post that the recent economic downturn should be pushing us to invest in clean energy. Investing in energy efficiency cuts wasteful spending on high energy bills and prevents added pollution.
“For today, energy efficiency makes even more sense in tight financial times. Businesses can’t afford to waste energy and drain their bottom lines from high energy bills, while causing more pollution to our environment. Improving energy efficiency is an investment that can achieve a healthy return. Smart businesses view their energy efficiency investments as a profit-center.”
Monday, October 6, 2008
Argus Leader reporter Thom Gabrukiewicz pointed to rising energy concerns around, “biofuels, wind, coal, solar technology and the prospect of the first new oil refinery to be built in the United States in more than 30 years” as attracting national and regional groups like ELPC to work in the state.
“South Dakota has a tremendous opportunity to create clean energy on its farms and ranches that is good for the environment,” said Howard Learner, president and executive director with the Environmental Law & Policy Center, which has an office in Sioux Falls. “We’re here to help make a difference in South Dakota.”
Learner said the attention his group is placing on South Dakota is not fleeting. “We’re not dropping in for a year, then dropping out,” he said. “We’re here for the long term.”
Sunday, September 21, 2008
ELPC Celebrates 15 Years of Successful Environmental Advocacy
On November 12th, nearly 500 supporters and friends of ELPC gathered to celebrate our 15th anniversary at Chicago’s Fairmont Hotel. ELPC has led the Midwest in the fight to develop clean energy, solve global warming and protect natural places since 1993.
A highlight of the celebration was a panel discussion on the future of clean energy moderated by documentary producer Bill Kurtis, with an all-star panel of major players in the clean energy field.
Thursday, September 11, 2008
The naysayers keep arguing that reducing global warming pollution is too expensive, too hard, will cost too much money and will irreparably harm our economy. We’ve heard this refrain before. Seat belts supposedly will dramatically increase the costs of cars, make no safety difference and Americans won’t use them. Catalytic converters supposedly won’t really reduce pollution and will make cars unaffordable. Reducing sulfur dioxide that causes acid rain supposedly will cost electric utilities $2,000 - $3,000 per ton, cause electric rates to skyrocket and not help the environment very much.
Well, look what happened: Seat belts are an incidental car cost component, have saved many, many, many lives, and all of us have gotten used to snapping on our seat belts because it’s sensible, as well as legally required. Catalytic converters have, indeed, reduced a lot of air pollution from cars, and there aren’t many complaints today. Both have avoided added health costs and insurance costs.
The federal Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990, which set up the cap-and-trade program to reduce sulfur dioxide pollution from coal plants, triggered a wave of technological advances, as well as simple at-the-coal-plant engineering tweaks and fixes, that have reduced acid rain, leading to demonstrable environmental improvements in our rivers, lakes and forests, as well as less public health harms. Sulfur dioxide pollution credits are trading today around $150 per ton, instead of the utilities’ inflated arguments that they would cost 15-20 times more. (Yes, Indiana would be better off if more utilities had installed scrubbers on their coal plants, rather than switching to lower-sulfur western coal.)
So when you hear that economic disaster will somehow befall the United States if we step up and act to help solve our global warming problems, think about the facts, the above history, and Americans’ capacity for technological innovation, especially when given the right mix of regulatory and financial market incentives.
No, it won’t be easy. And, it won’t always be cheap, and it may be painful for some of the more polluting industries and their workers. But it won’t always be difficult and costly. Let’s look at one good example.
The Indianapolis Zoo is right on target with its My Carbon Pledge goal of engaging people to “change one million incandescent bulbs to compact fluorescent light (CFL) bulbs in the state of Indiana in 2008.” Here’s happens when Americans convert their old incandescent bulbs to CFLs.
First of all, you know the basic numbers. CFLs use 75% less electricity than incandescent bulbs to produce the same amount of illumination (thereby saving you money on your electricity bills), avoid CO2 and other pollution from coal plants (thereby improving our health and environment), and last 7-10 times longer than incandescent bulbs (thereby sparing us time and energy to reach up to keep changing those ceiling bulbs).
Second, because of various state and proposed federal laws, as well as market factors, incandescent bulbs are likely to be largely phased out over the next five years. When you go to shop at Loew’s (the My Carbon Pledge co-sponsor), most of what you’ll being seeing on the shelves are modern CFLs, not incandescent bulbs.
Third, here are the numbers that might knock your socks off. Residential consumers account for about 40% of the electricity demand in many communities, and lighting accounts for about 20%-25% of their electricity use. That means around 8% of overall electricity demand is due to residential lighting. Replacing incandescent bulbs with CFLs, which use 75% less electricity, will thereby reduce overall electricity demand by about 6%. Since coal plants are responsible for about 40% of the region’s global warming pollution, this one residential sector change alone – which saves people money – will reduce overall CO2 pollution by about 2.5%
That doesn’t even take into account what business, city halls, hospitals, schools, park facilities, religious houses of worship, and sports stadiums can do with more efficient lighting. A quiet market revolution is taking place through sophisticated lighting technologies and more efficient appliances, computers, motors and controls. We’re at a tipping point, as higher energy prices and technological advances kick in.
As I mentioned in my blog last month, commercial lighting technologies today are much more energy efficient, with high-tech control systems and ballasts. The paybacks are robust, and financing is widely available for building improvements. It is practically property management malpractice to ignore these opportunities in downtown office buildings. Constructing new buildings without state-of-the-art energy efficiency makes little economic sense.
What’s more: Super-efficient light-emitting diodes (LEDs) are coming into the market. They are far more efficient than incandescent bulbs, last longer than CFLs and can produce light in any color. LEDs are now marketed as a high-end product, but prices will soon be falling.
Of course, CFLs, LEDs and other lighting efficiencies, alone, won’t be nearly enough progress to solve our global warming problems. But they are a good start, and this is indicative of additional opportunities and technological innovations that can advance global warming solutions that are good for the economy, can create new green jobs and are good for the environment.
What’s next? Keep an eye on what’s happening with Detroit automakers pivoting to market plug-in electric hybrids and other clean cars sooner than previously advertised, technological breakthroughs with solar energy, and advancements in new, more efficient battery technologies. It won’t be easy, but we can get going faster and further on global warming solutions than the naysayers are arguing.
Tuesday, June 3, 2008
The Midwest needs a strategic clean energy development plan that implements smart policies and practices to capture readily achievable environmental, public health and economic development benefits. This sustainable development strategy is good for the environment and the economy.
The Clean Energy Development Plan proposes policies to implement underutilized energy efficiency technologies and to aggressively develop renewable energy resources. By diversifying a power supply that has relied on old, highly-polluting coal and nuclear plants, the Midwest will reduce pollution, improve electricity reliability, create new “green” manufacturing and installation jobs, and provide renewable energy “cash crops” for farmers. The Clean Energy Development Plan provides the strategies to achieve these goals. Please visit Repowering the Midwest to learn more.
Implementing the Repowering the Midwest Clean Energy Development Plan would create more than 200,000 new jobs across the 10-state Midwest region by 2020, up to $5.5 billion in additional worker income, and up to $20 billion in increased economic activity. Read the report, Job Jolt: The Economic Impacts of Repowering the Midwest for more information.
Wind energy is the fastest growing source of electricity generation in the United States. According to a recent ELPC report, South Dakota’s available wind resources are among the best in the country. South Dakota officials have expressed strong interest in promoting wind energy, but, thus far, little of this potential has been realized. As of January 2008, there are about 4,000 megawatts of wind power under development in South Dakota, but only 188 megawatts of wind energy have been installed. ELPC’s report explains that South Dakota can become a renewable energy powerhouse and identifies important policy drivers that can help to more fully tap these clean energy resources. Download the report here [large pdf file].
ELPC is working on many fronts to increase the use of less-polluting, energy efficient, and renewable electricity generation. One goal is to reduce reliance on old, dirty, centralized power plants and advance “distributed generation” – literally shifting some generation of electricity to wind turbines, photovoltaic panels, combined heat & power (CHP) systems, and other clean and efficient resources that are distributed across the electric grid and are often sited at a customer’s home or small business.
In order to accomplish this structural shift, state policies must be reformed. Statewide interconnection standards streamline the process of connecting distributed resources to the utility grid. The fees, delays, and seemingly arbitrary requirements that often predominate in the absence of standardized rules are one of the most serious barriers to widespread investment in clean energy. Net metering is a special metering and billing agreement between utilities and their customers which allows customers to sell excess electricity back to the grid and gives customers a financial incentive to invest in renewable sources of energy.
Read more about our interconnection standards initiatives here.
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