18 Nov 2010: Report
Green Tech Sector Advances
Despite Failure of Climate Bill
While the collapse of climate legislation in Congress was a setback for some green businesses, many others are moving ahead with projects to develop renewable energy. One major reason: The clean-tech sector is rapidly growing worldwide, and U.S. companies don’t want to be left behind.
With the death of climate legislation in the U.S. Congress, Frank Alix’s job has become a lot tougher. Alix is co-founder and CEO of Powerspan, a New Hampshire-based company that says it has developed a technology for snaring carbon dioxide from power plants. Earlier this year, Alix had been optimistic that Congress would pass a climate bill, offering incentives for carbon capture and storage (CCS) and putting a price tag on emitting carbon. That would have caused a dozen utilities to install Powerspan’s equipment, he figured.
“We as a company and as a group of investors bet that the U.S. might provide leadership,” he says.
That didn’t happen under a Congress controlled by Democrats, and now that the Republican Party has taken control of the House of Representatives, it appears to be a virtual impossibility. There’s widespread agreement in Washington that climate legislation is completely off the table until at least the 2012 election, if then. And Alix’s projected market in the U.S. has evaporated. “Without a price on carbon, these projects will cost hundreds of millions of dollars and no one will do them,” he says.
Yet this isn’t a simple story of a company or an industry defeated by Washington’s inaction. Alix’s Plan A — a booming U.S. market — may be quashed. But he’s got a Plan B and a Plan C: Europe and China. “There are more opportunities there than you would think,” he says. “We’ll figure it out. I just feel this technology is too important to the
The idea that the demise of climate legislation has crippled the U.S. clean-tech sector is a myth.industry and to the world.”
This mix of disappointment and hope is a common refrain among the business supporters of a climate bill. “The lack of legislation is important, but companies are probably not changing the direction they’re headed in,” explains Linda Fisher, chief sustainability officer at Dupont, which sees growing markets for lightweight plastics for cars, solar panel materials, biofuels, and other Dupont products. “We are not pausing on our growth opportunities.”
The opportunities aren’t as great as they would have been with a bill, of course. For utilities, the lack of a sure price on carbon emissions is slowing plans to build big solar arrays and nuclear power plants, and is accelerating a race to natural gas, as some coal plants are being shut due to coming stricter pollution rules.
“We will be making a huge bet on one fuel [natural gas], which is never a good idea,” says Michael Morris, CEO of giant Ohio-based American Electric Power. And the U.S. economy could suffer as hundreds of companies like Powerspan look elsewhere for investment and markets — and as innovation shifts to other countries.
“This is not just about the price on carbon, this is about who will own the industries of the future,” warns Ron Pernick, co-founder and managing director of Clean Edge, a clean-tech research firm.
But the idea that the demise of climate legislation has crippled the U.S. clean-tech industry is a myth. Venture capital investment in clean energy hit a post-financial crisis high in the second quarter of 2010, reports Bloomberg New Energy Finance. And the percentage of all venture capital flowing into clean-tech in the U.S. hit a new record of 12.5 percent, according to Clean Edge.
“I think people have convinced the media that clean-tech is delayed or tied to the price of carbon,” says Jigar Shah, founder of solar pioneer SunEdison and now CEO of the Carbon War Room. “It’s not. I don’t think the pace is changing.”
Silicon Valley-based ENXSuite, for example, has discovered demand for its energy- and carbon-tracking software has increased since the legislation
‘People are bullish, and the lack of a carbon price looks like just another barrier to leap over,’ says one entrepreneur.died. The reason: Companies were holding back because of uncertainty over whether or not the bill would pass, says founder and CTO Michael Meehan. A price on carbon was part of his original business plan, Meehan adds, but carbon is now such a politically charged word in the U.S. that the company changed its business model and even its name — from Carbonnetworks to ENXSuite.
And Fremont, Calif.-based GlassPoint Solar has successfully raised money for a demonstration of its solar steam generators for use in enhanced oil recovery. The company knows that the system must be able to compete with natural gas-generated steam without a price on carbon, says John O’Donnell, GlassPoint’s vice president of business development. “Right now, none of our customers is making investment decisions that include carbon risks,” he says.
How has clean-tech been able to survive, or even thrive? One reason is the faith and passion of individual entrepreneurs, says Shah: “What people don’t understand is that to bet your family’s entire net worth to start a company takes extraordinary optimism. Even after Copenhagen and the climate bill, people are just bullish about their ideas — and something like the lack of a carbon price looks like just another barrier to leap over.”
Powerspan
At Powerspan, in New Hampshire, scientists are developing carbon capture technology for power plants.
Or drop in on ALTe in Auburn Hills, Mich., which has been quietly developing a plug-in gas-electric powertrain for shuttle buses, pickup trucks, and other vehicles. The vehicles are propelled by an electric motor, and an on-board gasoline engine kicks in to recharge the batteries after 40 to 50 miles. While the company has already snared its first order, for 3,000 powertrains, it expects major boosts from a U.S. Energy Department loan and from government procurement rules that mandate purchases of a certain percentage of “green” vehicles. It expects to ramp up to 90,000 units a year, providing a key market for the advanced battery factories also springing up in Michigan.
“We would love climate legislation, but we feel we can sell out our factory for years,” says CEO John Thomas, a veteran of Ford, GM, and Tesla Motors.
Federal and state support also underlies plans by Abengoa Solar to build 280-megawatt solar thermal plants in Arizona and California. Effects of the death of the climate bill? Because the company has already signed a power purchase agreement for the electricity from the plants, there are no effects on these projects “except for feeling a little glum about politics,” says Abengoa senior advisor Fred Morse. And the mere fact that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is requiring carbon emissions to be reported is speeding companies’ efforts to reduce those emissions, says Dupont’s Fisher.
The final reason is that the business world generally believes that limits on carbon, or other policies to promote energy efficiency and renewable power, are inevitable. The EPA is moving ahead with plans to regulate carbon dioxide emissions under the Clean Air Act, for instance.
“We will also see legislation in the new Congress,” predicts John Cohen, vice president of government affairs at Alstom, a French-based
Executives say that the longer the U.S. dithers, the farther it will fall behind.multinational that makes everything from more efficient coal boilers and steam turbines to carbon capture equipment. “It won’t be economy-wide cap and trade, but it will have energy provisions that will continue the inexorable advance to a clean energy economy,” he says. That’s why Alstom is sticking to its long-term strategy of betting on lower-carbon technologies.
But even as companies remain bullish on clean-tech, there’s a powerful sense of regret among environmentally-oriented companies over the additional progress that could have been made if only Washington had passed a climate bill. With a rising price per ton of CO2, far more big solar plants would have begun to be built, says Abengoa’s Morse. “You’d see a shift out of fossil fuel into renewables,” he says.
Dupont’s Fisher argues that what’s really needed is a transformation of the economy, a complete change in how we produce and use energy. EPA regulations might make a dent in carbon emissions, she says, but they won’t stimulate the innovation needed for such a transformation. A price on fossil fuels would. “I reflect on how fast the market started to change when gasoline hit $5 per gallon,” she says.
And executives say that the longer the U.S. dithers, the farther behind it will fall.
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So while clean-tech isn’t going to wither away because of inaction in Washington, a huge opportunity to stimulate more innovation and growth is being lost, executives believe. Says Alstom’s Cohen: “Our message is: This is urgent. We need to get on with it now.”
POSTED ON 18 Nov 2010 IN Climate Pollution & Health Science & Technology Asia
ABOUT THE AUTHORJohn Carey is a freelance writer covering the environment, energy, science, technology and medicine. Until this year, he was senior correspondent at BusinessWeek, where during 21 years he wrote about a range of issues, from sequencing the human genome and global warming to tobacco regulation, election technology, cholesterol-lowering drugs and renewable energy. He is a former editor of The Scientist, and spent six years at Newsweek, where he covered science, technology, and health.
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COMMENTS
Just because the Repubs are back in the House doesn't mean you back down from the legislation. You push it, and push it, and you push it. That is one problem with Dems, seemingly our only link to some sort of progressive movement in this nation. The other is, how they sell it.
The right is so good at selling their message. They speak the easy-flow, everyday-joe lingo so well and wrap it all up in gift wrap so people will automatically recognize it as something special and worth tearing into. The left on the other hand (and this in and of itself isn't a bad thing) is far too cerebral and technical. They aren't talking to the people so much as talking at them like a boring professor droning on and on through a never ending lecture about stimulus packages and reform and the need for bipartisanship.
Stop holding hands with people who beat you (because the right is the abusive one, the left the abused). Obama's a nice guy, probably too nice for what he's up against. He should stay nice, but play hard. Any master of the martial arts will tell you, or even any master athlete, it's about being intense without looking intense. You make it look easy. Right now, the Dems have no masters of the craft, and it looks so very painful.
It's heartening to know that the famed Amercian spirit of invention and innovation is intact even in the midst of political lethargy and myopia. We in India and Asia are waiting with baited breath for the oldest democracy and the largest economy's politicians to provide the leadership their renewable industry is all set to take forward.
We invest in sustainable projects across the world - renewable energy, water etc - with a
focus on emerging markets. In this sector, the U.S. is considered one, being so far behind Europe and even some of the emerging economies.
Our investments in the U.S. were only made possible with government tax breaks and grants
under the ARRA. However, that's running out. Unless the government can support the sector
over the long term then the US will indeed fall further behind.
All because U.S. corporate agenda ultimately controls U.S. policy and too many 'little people' are just too ignorant to know it.
Considering the many historic and current dis-economies and intractable problems with atomic fission in our "market economy," the inclusion of nuclear power in an article on clean-tech by this former writer for Business Week is interesting. The author apparently knows little about sustainable energy economics. It has little to do with sustainable atomic reactions. The US has already experienced that failed concept as an economic bomb (along with resultant electric utility restructuring in the 1990s).
Mr. Izzo's disappointment with the climate bill probably had something to due with the failure of the proposed one hundred percent taxpayer backed loan guarantees for atomic fission as well. Nuclear is not by definition renewable, safe or "clean," and is certainly not economical in the current market, like wind or end-use efficiency upgrades.
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