Renewable Energy and Regulation

My colleagues at 2GreenEnergy are constantly reminding me that the greatest potential for renewable energy lies outside of US borders, and that this is largely due to regulation. So let’s discuss this.

Most of us think of regulation as something bad -- perhaps even sinister. Oh, those nasty, corrupt politicians are at it again. ::continue::

And certainly, part of this reputation is richly deserved. I’m reminded of Verdant Power, a company that has developed underwater turbines that look and function like the familiar three-vane wind turbines. Recently, the company completed a pilot project, installing a turbine in the East River. Because the project was funded in part by NYSERDA, the project had to take place in the state of New York (even though the East River provides far from optimum conditions). Due to a combination of governmental over-regulation and corruption, it took Verdant six years to get a permit to make this happen – and in order to get the permit approved, they had to pay Consolidated Edison for the power that the utility was unable to sell.

So here you have developers of exciting, new, clean technology who have put second mortgages on their houses to finance their work, and it takes them six years to get a piece of paper signed. That’s garbage – and it doesn't create too much incentive for people looking on.

And if you think over-regulation is bad in New York, try visiting us out here in California.

Having said that, we all lived through the GW Bush administration, in which the Bureau of Land Management within our Department of the Interior essentially took an eight-year vacation from its responsibility to regulate the use of federal lands with respect to oil and gas companies. The result, of course, was ecological disaster in proportions that the US had never seen before.

And now, here comes renewable energy. Just because it’s clean, should it be developed without regard for its ecological consequences? Of course not. To me, the most interesting thing about renewables is that there is no free lunch. Until we develop something like cold fusion -- which, as I've written often, does hold promise -- we need to understand that each form of clean energy comes at an environmental cost -- whether it's wind farms wiping out bat populations, hydrokinetics driving out aquatic life with underwater sound, or the issues resulting from any of the other dozens of forms of alternative energy.

There is no doubt in my mind that those costs need to be openly and comprehensively reviewed and sane regulations put into place. But we cannot go into paralysis simply because something good comes at a certain ecological cost. Wind is a good example of this. There is a bat problem, and the industry is working hard and spending a fortune to deal with it. But I hope that doesn’t impede progress until the problem is 100% eliminated (and the next issue comes to the surface).

Do you know that there is a mountain in West Virginia which regulators chose to actually destroy to produce coal, rather than put a wind turbine on it? I don't understand that.  I hope you'll join me in pressuring our leaders for regulation that’s fair-minded and efficient.