Clean technology investors see bumpy road ahead in U.S.
Climatewire, 5 April 2011, Nathanial Gronewold
http://www.eenews.net/climatewire/2011/04/05/3/
NEW YORK -- Investors want a more efficient, more flexible and less bureaucratic Department of Energy if they are to partner with the agency to move domestic clean energy innovation, complaints that the government says it's responding to.
Griping over red tape, time lags and lack of flexibility and nimbleness found in various DOE schemes colored the start of a renewable energy industry gathering that opened yesterday.
Industry insiders are also pondering whether the new attitude toward government austerity in Europe and increasingly the United States will see an end of various subsidies that have sustained clean technology during the global recession.
DOE's first full-time technology transfer officer kicked things off with an introduction to new initiatives her department is spreading the word about. Highlighted were incentives to commercialize unlicensed DOE technology and a more focused effort at nurturing startups.
"Part of the goal at the Department of Energy is to innovate," said DOE Technology Transfer Coordinator Karina Edmonds. "Clearly, we need you guys on board," she told the hundreds of participants assembled for the annual summit hosted by Bloomberg New Energy Finance, the event's first foray into the United States.
But as Edmonds attempted to entice the audience with offers of DOE assistance, she mostly heard negative feedback from delegates, some of whom said that the current systems are inadequate and inefficient.
They mostly complained of a "crushing bureaucracy" faced by private-sector actors looking to commercialize technology developed at one of the many DOE labs in operation.
Foreign companies partnering with U.S. firms can't switch partners if they find the existing arrangement unworkable, one participant said. Another found it curious that firms were actively seeking out deals with American Indian tribes when they could develop clean energy projects independently, apparently because it simplifies things for them. Others saw gridlock plaguing DOE's loan guarantee program, one of the agency's most popular.
Edmonds, who was only added to the new full-time tech transfer position a year ago, said she's still trying to figure out what is holding back more DOE technologies from transforming the mainstream marketplace. But she acknowledged that problems with red tape and inflexible rules are concerns that DOE hopes to fix in the near term.
"It's something that we're working through," Edmonds said. As for the loan guarantee system, "they are working to restructure that program," possibly even moving it out of DOE altogether, she added.
Improvements and reforms can't come a moment too soon, clean-tech boosters agreed.
"It's certainly a critical year," said Michael Liebreich, CEO of Bloomberg New Energy Finance, at the opening of four days of discussion on what 2011 will look like for renewable energy and clean technology finance and investment. The fiscal stress faced by most developed nation governments means the subsidy-dependent renewable power market "is coming under scrutiny as never before," he said.
Wanted: bipartisan support and 'technological literacy'
But Greg Barker, minister for energy and climate change in the United Kingdom, tried to reassure investors and project developers that at least his government understood the importance of maintaining support, and that other governments are likely to follow.
He cited plans in the United Kingdom to build the world's largest offshore wind farm as one example of that. The project isn't only being designed as another state subsidy to wind companies, but in ways that will foster the industry to become eventually independent of state support. That boost to jobs and export earnings will eventually make the public investment worthwhile, he said.
"We look at this much more holistically," said Barker. He cited "strong bipartisan support" for clean tech in London as reason to believe government penny-pinching won't crimp the growing renewable energy market all that much.
Just as important, officials said, is maintaining public support for alternative energy, energy efficiency, smart grids, electric vehicles and a host of other sectors. This is especially true as projects and developments become more visible and prominent, increasing the risk of the "not in my backyard" response.
"It really has a lot to do with public attitude and public opinion," said Dan Arvizu, director of the U.S. National Renewable Energy Laboratory.
Arvizu urged clean-tech industry experts to work just as hard on the "technological literacy" of the public, and Congress, as they do on pressing federal agencies to reduce obstacles to the deployment of next-generation energy technologies.
House GOP blueprint promises overhaul of energy, environmental goals
Greenwire, 5 April 2011, Elana Schor
http://www.eenews.net/Greenwire/2011/04/05/1/
House Republicans rolled out a 2012 budget today that aims to vastly reshape federal policy on a number of fronts, cutting energy research, agriculture subsidies and the government workforce while lifting current "moratoriums and bans" on domestic fossil-fuel exploration.
The budget blueprint released by House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) marks a raising of the stakes for a 2011 spending battle that continues to leave the capital braced for a potential Friday shutdown. But even as Ryan's plan generates national attention for its approach to entitlements and corporate taxes, his budget also promises to be a potent vehicle for advancing domestic production and regulatory easing proposals that Republicans have dubbed the "American Energy Initiative."
Ryan's rundown of the House GOP budget, which his committee is set to begin marking up tomorrow, blasts the Obama administration for creating "a heavy-handed compliance culture in the energy sector" through regulations and spending, particularly the 2009 stimulus law.
"The results are plain to see: Gas prices have more than doubled since the President took office," the House GOP budget summary states. "Burdensome and ineffective regulations on businesses in the service of dubious environmental goals have driven up the prices of many products and services, while creating barriers for needed capital investment and job creation."
That blistering critique mirrors much of the rhetoric that Energy and Commerce Chairman Fred Upton (R-Mich.), and Natural Resources Chairman Doc Hastings (R-Wash.) have employed all year long in bidding to remake White House energy and environmental efforts. The series of energy-related legislation that Republicans are advancing as part of their "initiative," given a plug in Ryan's budget, include plans to speed up oil and gas permitting in the Gulf of Mexico and expand offshore leasing (Greenwire, March 29).
The Ryan budget vows to remove "bureaucratic barriers" to domestic energy production, in part by lifting "moratoriums on safe, responsible energy exploration in the United States." While promoting an end to current de facto bans on offshore drilling in the Atlantic, Alaska and the eastern Gulf of Mexico, the budget also promises to promote "nuclear, wind, solar, and more" low-carbon energy sources.
The budget's top-line plan for $5.8 trillion in cuts to projected spending over the next 10 years did not include more granular estimates of where federal environmental and energy funding would be most deeply pared. But U.S. EPA is likely to face further austerity under the GOP's 2012 plan, particularly in light of the $3 billion in cuts for the rest of 2011 that the House passed as part of its February continuing resolution (CR).
After noting that EPA "received a 36 percent budget increase in just two short years," the Ryan plan vows to cut "government bureaucracies seeking to impose a job-destroying national energy tax" -- an apparent reference to the agency's greenhouse gas emissions regulations.
Democrats joined clean-energy advocates in gearing up to parry Ryan's budgetary priorities almost as soon as he left the stage today.
The former camp focused on tax benefits for major oil companies that would continue under the GOP budget, and the latter took on the budget chief's plan to slice federal spending on "applied and commercial [energy] research or development projects best left to the private sector."
The House budget "protects existing regulated markets and guts innovation -- particularly applied research and development that are parts of the valley of death for too many companies -- while pulling the rug out from under clean energy deployment," Josh Freed, director of the energy program at the centrist think tank Third Way, said in a statement.
"As troubling, it continues business as usual on fossil fuels under the guise of reducing regulation and increasing energy independence."
The budget panel's top Democrat, Rep. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, rapped Ryan and his party for "trying to focus on a very, very narrow piece of the budget" by slashing domestic discretionary spending to 2008 levels and freezing them for five years.
"They don't want to talk about cuts to things like subsidies for the oil companies," Van Hollen said of the Republicans on CNN, invoking a favorite line of attack for Democrats (E&E Daily, April 5). "And so, if we're really going to have a conversation about reducing the deficit, you need everything on the table."
In addition to the expansion of domestic fuel exploration and cuts to energy research, Ryan's budget also aims to shrink the size of the federal workforce by requiring that only one new worker be hired for every three who retire.
That mandate, according to the House budget, would amount to 10 percent cut to the federal workforce over the next three years. Federal workers' pay, meanwhile, would be frozen until 2015.
The House budget also seeks to overhaul the current farm-subsidy structure by slicing "the fixed payments that go to farmers irrespective of price levels" and ending what Ryan's team referred to as "open-ended" agriculture supports.
Cutting those agriculture benefits is a longstanding goal of fiscal hawks who hotly anticipated today's GOP budget. But the ultimate reshaping of farm payments rests with the Agriculture Committee, as Ryan's plan notes, and is not expected to begin until the next farm bill takes effect -- giving industry interests ample time to lobby for the current system to remain in place.
Briefing reporters today alongside Senate Budget Chairman Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), Ryan did not back down from his past predictions that the GOP budget could become a cudgel for Democrats who are already lambasting its major shakeups to Medicare and Medicaid.
Asked if his fellow Republicans had expressed concern that the budget could put them in a political bind, Ryan quipped: "You know, none of them say that -- just kidding."
New stopgap CR nixed?
Even as Ryan moved the Capitol Hill spending dialogue toward 2012, maneuvering over the 2011 budget cycle remained intense today. Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) and other leaders left a White House meeting this morning emphasizing that no deal had been reached ahead of Friday's deadline to keep the government open.
Moreover, Republicans criticized the White House for ruling out a seventh stopgap funding plan -- released by House appropriators in the witching hour today -- that pays for Pentagon operations until fiscal 2012 while cutting $12 billion over the next week in other federal programs (E&E Daily, April 5).
"[W]hat really it looks like is the White House now has increased the likelihood of a shutdown in just dismissing out of hand a vehicle that we have put forward that says look, we don't want a shutdown," House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) told reporters today.
In a summary of the White House meeting released to reporters, Boehner's office underscored that it has not given ground on the multiple policy riders that were attached to its February funding plan -- more than a dozen of which restrict administration environmental policies.
Click here to read the House GOP budget blueprint.
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