My Thoughts on US DOE Renewable Energy Collaboration with Latin America

April 30, 2009 in International Development, cleantech, finance by mmiller | No comments

President Obama proposed a “Clean Energy and Climate Partnership of the Americas” during his time at the Summit of the Americas.  Typical Barack MO: big, broad, ambitious.  The existing Latin America approach in the US Department of Energy is on country-by-country proposals and grants.  This is fine, but  the office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE) could be providing other, more overarching support to this worthy goal of international RE partnership.  A couple of proposals:

**On the finance front, EERE should consider launching a collaboration with the Interamerican Development Bank to begin ‘greening’ the IDB project finance arm. See this link for good background.   There is some indication that the IDB is just beginning [pdf] to consider this type of change in the biofuels sector.   EERE should advise the IDB in finance concerns re solar, wind, and energy efficiency, too. Such a collaboration would help break the project finance logjam, and would also ensure scale, duration, and breadth of impact, far beyond EERE acting on its own.  (See also the “Green Bank” legislation just introduced in the US.)

**Since we’re trying to seriously achieve Market Transformation in Latin America, we want to get big, robust, private RE markets going within 3-5 years, no?  As far as I can tell, in any country where private markets have actually taken off, significant subsidies (PTC + ITC, Feed-in Tariffs) and “policy certainty” have been critical.  Do we expect the LatAm experience to be different?  If we’re realistic, then, we should acknowledge that public subsidies are important in spurring private $$ and the US should be trying to leverage aid dollars (from its own aid budgets and those of the IDB, IMF, WB, etc) to help LatAm countries put these policy measures in place.  EERE c/should be advocating for and supporting green development to take an increasingly larger share of the international aid budget.

**Promoting early and sustained partnerships with established utilities & infrastructure companies seems to be important. See PG&E, Xcel, FPL, if ye doubt the role of utilities.   EERE should be promoting these types of partnerships via any and all RFPs it issues in the international sphere.

**Let’s get EERE/NREL involved in supporting high-level R&D / business / policy partnerships.  Why don’t we have serious renewable energy scientific researcher exchanges with Latin America?  Sustainable RE growth comes through technical excellence and entrepreneurship.  EERE could help coordinate relevant and useful technical exchanges, R&D partnerships, etc.
My 2cents.

Tom Konrad Breaks it Down

April 20, 2009 in Uncategorized by mmiller | No comments

From the Altenergystocks blog, Tom Konrad puts the costs in real-world terms:

FUEL /   Price/Terawatt

  • 1 TW Coal   =  1 planet+ $0.7 trillion
  • 1 TW N. Gas =  1 ecosystem + $1 trillion
  • 1 TW Nuclear  = $3 Trillion + 25% chance of 1 planet
  • 1 TW “Clean Coal” = 2 ecosystems + $4 Trillion
  • 1 TW Solar PV  = $4 Trillion
  • 1 TW Wind =  $1 Trillion
  • 1 TW CSP =  $3 Trillion

This simplifies the cost calculations.  Try not to spend any planets; you’ve only got one.”

Sharpening the Knife: Can Open Source Hardware Scale Up?

March 19, 2009 in Economics, International Development, cleantech by mmiller | No comments

First of all, I’m a big fan of the _idea_ of open source hardware (OSH).  (For reference, an excellent compendium of the idea has been growing here at the P2P Foundation wiki.) The notion of a global OS design database, a distributed network of fablabs, and a market driven not by the price signal but by collaborative communication, is very alluring — especially to nerds.

But I have lingering doubts…Certainly the movement is increasingly technologically feasible, and likely to create some sort of fringe guild ecology over the next 10 years.  But from an economic and social viewpoint, much remains to be sorted out in any rigorous way.   I should clarify here that my goal is to critique the OSH movement’s ability to have a meaningful impact for the welfare of the world’s poorest, or to meaningfully change the ecological footprint of the global economy.  Key to this dual goal are speed and scale: the OSH economy must grow at least as fast as the ‘traditional’ economy, and preferably should outpace it by an order of magnitude.   In other words, how can the OSH community lay plans to grow revenues by 25% per year for the next 10 years?

And in sorting out whether OSH has legs, we need to think about whether it will be able to harness the three forces that drive successful product/service growth: a business model that keeps investment dollars coming in, keeps producers gainfully employed, and keeps consumers happy.  I’ll look into possible business models for OSH in a later post.

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