I wrote this article for the Huffington Post. It can be found in its original context here.

Ask most people about the benefits of residential renewable energy—geothermal, rooftop solar photovoltaic and solar thermal, and backyard wind turbines, primarily–and the response is usually the same: they are good for the environment, raise property value and lower or eliminate utility bills.  While undoubtedly true, these responses present an incomplete picture of the benefits of distributed renewable energy.  In certain instances, such as last week when a single ice storm left over 1 million homes and businesses in New England without power, a residential energy system can mean the difference between seeking shelter and being able to shelter others.  Other times, particularly during peak demand, renewables stabilize the grid and lower costs for all utility customers.

The Grid Can Fail, and It’s Expensive When It Does

America’s electricity grid is an engineering marvel, but it is also old, outdated, overstrained and susceptible to failure from storms, terrorism, accidents and high energy demand.  And when the grid fails, not only is the loss of power inconvenient, it is also dangerous and costly.  For example, the 2003 blackout that stretched from Canada to New York was estimated to have an economic cost of “between $7 and $10 billion. . .due to food spoilage, lost production and overtime wages” as well as the cost of repairing and upgrading the affected parts of the grid.  While the 2003 grid failure was one of the most extraordinary outages to hit the United States, smaller scale blackouts, particularly from storms and natural disasters, are rather common.

I wrote this article for the Huffington Post.  It can be seen in its original context here.



We already know the numerous reasons why bottled water is bad, including the energy and water it takes to manufacture, ship and discard the product, as well as the fact that tap water must meet more stringent water quality standards.  But here’s the interesting thing: fossil fuels are essentially bottled energy.  And just as the green alternative to bottled water is tap water, the logical alternative to fossil fuels is renewable energy.  Why?  Well, here are just a few reasons (hint: both depend on current flows and are locally available):

1) Like bottled water, fossil fuels are mined from countries around the world, processed, shipped and then, finally, consumed.  This process is wasteful and contributes to environmental degradation, to be sure, but perhaps the greatest downside of a global energy supply chain is that it makes for unstable geopolitics. This may sound like an argument against globalization, but it is nothing of the kind; rather, it is an argument against the globalization of energy. Think about it this way: Thomas Friedman has argued that no two countries that have a McDonalds–that is, two countries that have opened themselves up to global markets–will go to war with one another, because they stand to lose more than they gain.  That theory more or less holds up as long as we are talking about consumer products, fast food chains, and the like, but it falls apart when we start talking about natural resources.  Simply put, energy and water are not Barbie dolls and McDonalds; nations cannot do without them, and therefore the countries rich in fossil fuels hold too much sway on the global stage.

I wrote this article for the Huffington Post.  It can be seen in its original context here



The thing about fossil fuels is that they enable utilities, planners and policy-makers to, in effect, be dumb.  Because fossil fuel is essentially stored solar energy, the fuel can simply be pulled out of the ground, transported to a large power plant and burned.  No attention needs to be paid to wind speeds, cloud cover or tides.  Of course, we know that the entire supply chain of conventional energy–from extraction, to processing, to transportation and on to burning the fossil fuel–lead to social, political and environmental degradation, the costs of which are getting higher and higher. 

Moving to renewable energy sources helps mitigate those costs, yet it also forces societies to be smart about energy.  To put it simply, that’s because renewable energy sources are variable, and different regions can posses vastly different renewable resources.  This variability can be a problem for utilities, because they need to constantly supply enough power to meet demand.  According to a recent study by the Rocky Mountain Insitute (RMI), “In the past, utilities believed that they had to compensate for this variability by installing more traditional, fossil-fueled power plants. The more wind or solar power on the grid, the thinking went, the greater the need for backup generating facilities to be there when the wind or sun wasn’t.”

I wrote this article for the Huffington Post.  It can be read in its original context here

We Don’t Need Better Panels but Rather Better Politicians and Bankers

One of the key aspects of Gore’s challenge to produce 100% of America’s energy from renewable sources within a decade is his belief that we already have the requisite technology to do so.  And in fact, most experts will tell you that while meeting his challenge will require a lot of innovation, (we need to develop better grid control and energy storage systems, for instance) the main challenge is not technological but rather political and financial.  In other words, we’ve got the engineers and designers, but we lack the right kind of politicians and bankers.

The political challenge is best exemplified by the fact that the Congress left for its summer recess without having extended crucial tax credits for wind, solar and energy efficiency.  As Thomas Friedman pointed out, “both the wind and solar industries depend on these credits—which expire in December—to scale their businesses and become competitive with coal, oil and natural gas.” As a result of political infighting, dozens of renewable energy projects slated to begin next year have been put on hold.