Think California and its Governator aren’t dead serious about renewables? DOE’s weekly newsletter, “EERE Network News,” has this story: California Accelerates its Pursuit of Clean Energy. A new executive order requires the Golden State’s utilities to get a third of their electricity from renewable energy sources by 2020. This is in addition to robust energy efficiency programs that make California consistently one of the leaders, worldwide, in creating negawatts.
Who else is on it? Some of the world’s biggest construction firms, like Bechtel. See Engineering giants follow the money to green power from Reuters. There’s new construction in play here and retrofits. This is being partly driven by exactly the sort of Renewable Portfolio Standards that California and others have mandated – and the US Congress may enact. As one CEO is quoted in the Reuters article, “We don’t see the onslaught of environmental regulation as necessarily a negative.”
Further evidence that the smart money is on clean tech, is that Pacific Gas and Electric and Exelon have quit the US Chamber of Commerce and Duke Energy has left the National Association of Manufacturers. (See The Business Community is Speaking Out – Loud and Clear.) It’s “a major reframing of the climate narrative” according to consultant David Brodwin.
How about the VC folks? (Smart money, I’d say.) Clean-tech VC investments overtake IT and biotech is the story from the good folks at “Environmental Finance.” “‘The billions in government funding being allocated globally in clean-tech have begun emboldening private capital, which has in turn helped propel clean-tech to the leading venture investment sector, now eclipsing biotech and IT,’ said Dallas Kachan, managing director of the Cleantech Group.”
Take one sector, offshore wind. Outlook for US Offshore Wind Projects: Favorable with High Gusts reports RenewableEnergyWorld.com. “Now that the Cape Wind project is considered more likely than not to proceed and with the favorable political climate towards renewables, it is not a question of whether U.S. offshore wind farms will get built but how many.” (See my review of the excellent book, Cape Wind.)
Growth in renewables have been consistently blowing nuclear power and fossil fuels out of the water. See this from Grist. This echoes what I heard Amory Lovins say recently: “The Renewable Revolution has been won. Sorry, if you missed it.” Hyperbole? Perhaps. I’ve said this before here, but I’ll say it again: I’ve been around this stuff for nearly 40 years and I never thought I’d live to see the day when a massive, global, seemingly inexorable push to Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency would be everywhere so much in evidence.
