By Bryan Walsh
via time.com

The solar panels sparkle on the rooftop of HelioVolt’s 12,000 sq m manufacturing facility. Inside, an elaborate line of printing machines, lasers, chemical baths and ovens — with help from the occasional white-coated human being — transforms a sheet of glass less than a centimeter thick into a solar module in just over two and a half hours. The sheets are a far cry from the thick, polysilicon-based photovoltaic panels that still dominate the solar market. HelioVolt manufactures thin-film solar panels, so called because the modules are made by depositing an ultra-thin — a few micrometers at most — layer of the photovoltaic chemicals copper, indium, gallium and selenide directly onto a glass backing. Compared with conventional modules, the engineering and manufacturing processes are more complex, and thin-film panels are less efficient at converting sunlight to electricity. But their lower cost has many in the solar world — like HelioVolt CEO Jim Flanary — convinced that thin-film panels are the way to go as the industry matures. “If you can do this really cheaply and really quickly, you’ve got a winner,” says Flanary as he leads a walkthrough of HelioVolt’s pilot plant. “We want to scale up as soon as we can.”

It’s not just the how of HelioVolt that makes it unusual in the solar space; it’s also the where. The company isn’t based in southern San Francisco or Boulder, Colo., or the Boston area — the bright green regions that tend to lead the national conversation on clean tech. HelioVolt calls the Texas state capital of Austin home. B.J. Stanbery, the solar veteran who founded HelioVolt in 2001, is a native Texan who got his bachelor’s degree at the University of Texas just down the road from the company’s factory, but he kept his business in Austin for more practical reasons. “The manufacturing skills that workers have here are directly transferable to a thin-film solar company like us,” he says. “And the business culture is attractive here because people are used to taking risks in the energy space.”

Of course, when people think about the energy space in Texas — home to wildcatters and J.R. Ewing of television’s Dallas fame — they probably picture oil rigs and natural gas wells. The current governor of Texas, after all, is the far-right-leaning Rick Perry, who made it known early in his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination that he was a climate-change skeptic. “I do believe that the issue of global warming has been politicized,” Perry told voters in New Hampshire in August. “I think there are a substantial number of scientists who have manipulated data so that they will have dollars rolling into their projects.”

But as politically conservative as Texas tends to be, it’s kept an open mind on renewable energy, which is one reason more wind power has been installed in the state than anywhere else. And within Texas, Austin has always been an outlier: a fairly liberal college town that has managed to marry high tech with hipster culture. Now that’s paying off in the renewable-energy sector, as Austin contends with Silicon Valley as a top clean-tech hub. The city is home to dozens of green start-ups like HelioVolt, many funded by homegrown venture capitalists. Some 15,000 Austin residents are employed in the broader green economy, and the municipal utility, Austin Energy, has pledged to get 35% of its electricity from renewable sources by 2020. Over the past eight years, the number of clean-tech jobs has grown more than twice as fast in the Austin metro area as it has in San Francisco. With its background in information technology, Austin is set to take the lead in one of the most exciting areas in clean tech: the marriage of new energy technology with the Internet. “Austin is already a high-tech city,” says Jose Beceiro, the director of clean energy at the Greater Austin Chamber of Commerce. “Now it’s becoming a clean-tech city.”

Keeping It Weird

For Austin, high tech had to come before clean tech. The city has long been a science-and-technology hub, thanks to the presence of the sprawling main campus of the University of Texas, with a student body of 50,000. In the mid-1980s one of those students was Michael Dell, who founded his eponymous computer company in a University of Texas dorm room before moving Dell to a sprawling campus north of Austin. Around the same time, the federal government and U.S. semi-conductor manufacturers launched a research consortium — based in Austin — called Sematech, pooling public and private investment to compete with Japan, which was threatening to dominate the semiconductor industry.

Sematech and Dell helped create a high-tech boom in Austin through the 1990s, luring tens of thousands of talented engineers who came for the jobs and stayed for the Austin lifestyle — best exemplified by the metastasizing South by Southwest festival, an annual pilgrimage of the hip that brings together music, film and interactive media. “It’s a great place to live, and that matters in this industry,” says Brewster McCracken, the executive director of Pecan Street, a smart-grid research project in Austin.

So as clean tech began to heat up in the early part of the past decade, Austin was a logical place for start-ups and entrepreneurs to set up shop. An experienced technical workforce was already available, ready to shift from manufacturing computer chips to building solar panels. SolarBridge Technologies, which makes microinverters that improve the efficiency of solar modules, spun off from the University of Illinois, but when it came time to scale up, the company picked Austin over other clean-tech hubs like the Bay Area and Boston. “We like the entrepreneurial ecosystem, and there’s just a ton of talent here that you can’t get in Illinois,” says Joe Scarci, SolarBridge’s vice president of marketing. “It’s a great place to recruit.”

This is how industry clusters build: companies come for the employees, and they in turn attract more capital, more workers and more start-ups. That critical mass of innovation is one reason SustainLane Government, a network for green business, has ranked Austin the top city in the U.S. for clean-tech incubation. Austin-based green start-ups can also count on help from the University of Texas and the city government. The Clean Energy Incubator at U.T. supports young green start-ups, providing some initial seed money and holding networking events that can connect entrepreneurs and venture capitalists. The Texas Clean Energy Park — a public-private program in Austin — provides facilities and training for the smallest clean-tech start-ups.

Clean tech, however — much more than information technology — is still dependent on direct government policy, subsidies for renewable power and regulations that mandate energy efficiency and greener buildings. And that’s where Austin’s progressive-leaning politics — Barack Obama received 64% of the vote here in 2008, even as Republican John McCain handily won Texas — pay off. The presence of the university, the slacker subculture of the 1990s and the influential live-music scene has helped make the city, whose unofficial motto is “Keep Austin weird,” far more liberal than most in Texas. Austin has more 100%-green-powered businesses than any other city in the country, and all the municipal government’s electricity comes from renewable sources. Consumers and businesses can receive handsome rebates for installing more energy-efficient appliances and photovoltaic systems — all of which means that clean-tech companies can come to the city knowing there’s a built-in market for their products. “The city here does an excellent job of supporting green tech,” says Bill Sims, CEO of the biofuel company Joule Unlimited, which recently opened a pilot plant in Austin.

But perhaps the single biggest factor behind the greening of Austin is an institution that in most cities stands in the way of clean tech: the utility. Because the city of Austin owns its utility — and because politically progressive Austin residents have shown support for renewable power — Austin Energy has more latitude for experimentation than most of its counterparts around the U.S.

Nowhere is that clearer than in the Pecan Street project, a pioneering smart-grid research and demonstration program based in Austin’s historic Mueller neighborhood. Pecan Street is a collaboration between Austin Energy, the Environmental Defense Fund, the city of Austin and the university, with much of its financing provided by the 2009 federal stimulus bill. The study is detailing energy and water use at the residential level, gathering data that most utilities barely have a handle on. The Pecan Street project, which is also experimenting with residential solar energy and electric vehicles, aims to use that information to create a smarter and more efficient grid, one that is far less wasteful than the rickety power systems throughout the U.S. And it’s something that could have only happened in Texas, where deregulation has forced utilities to compete for profits by investing in technologies that help their customers use less energy. The transition hasn’t been perfect. Some consumers complain about higher costs, and there have been unexpected blackouts. But deregulation does free up utilities to experiment. “Getting this data is the first step to figuring out how to be really efficient,” says Pecan Street’s McCracken. “And Austin is the place where we can get that done.”

With its mix of high tech and clean tech, Austin is well positioned to take advantage of the next major phase in green development: the energy Internet. Ubiquitous digital connection has helped transform the way we communicate and the way we work, but most of us are barely aware of how we use energy. The energy Internet can change that. Green software start-ups like Austin-based Incenergy have developed online energy-management systems that allow building owners to remotely manage smart thermostats, reducing wasted heat and air-conditioning. Companies like Tendril are bringing that capacity to the residential level, creating home energy networks that will enable us to control our energy use as intelligently as we now control our digital video recorders. And the Pecan Street project is the perfect place to test some of these new technologies on a connected and greener-than-average populace. “A lot of my prospective customers are here,” says Jim Balthazar, explaining why he moved his clean-tech start-up Nuventix from Atlanta to Austin. “And he who has the money makes the rules.”

So what could go wrong? Austin faces the same challenges the larger clean-tech sector is confronting: a drying pool of venture capital, the forbidding cost of scaling up and the uncertainties around national climate policy. But the city’s biggest obstacle might be the man who lives in the governor’s mansion in the heart of Austin: Rick Perry. If Perry — or just about any of the other climate-change-doubting Republican candidates on the campaign trail — were to win the White House, it’s hard to see much support for clean tech surviving the budget ax. But even if that happens, Austin may well endure. This is a city that takes pride in going against the grain — and doing things itself. “I’m a native Texan, and I know about the entrepreneurial spirit here,” says HelioVolt’s Stanbery. “People believe that if you want to do well, you need to work hard.” That’s an ethic clean tech will need in the difficult days ahead.

SHELBY CLARK, the founder of a start-up called RelayRides, was honored last week as a rising star in clean technology. But as he took the stage alongside companies creating new kinds of energy, he felt out of place.

RelayRides is a car-sharing start-up. Since when did encouraging people to drive carbon-spewing cars qualify as clean tech?

In Silicon Valley, where venture capital dollars nurture fledgling technology companies, clean tech is getting a makeover. Many investors are shying away from the high risks and costs of creating new forms of energy. Instead, they are doing what they do best — using software to cope with problems, in this case caused by climate change.

RelayRides, which lets car owners rent their vehicles to others, takes cars off the road because people can avoid owning them and the service’s users drive less than other people, Mr. Clark said.

“You can have a major impact on an individual’s carbon footprint by re-creating business models or behaviors without inventing a new energy,” he said.

This strategy has been percolating among some in Silicon Valley for a couple of years. But for many investors, doubts about alternative energy were confirmed last month when Solyndra, which made solar panel arrays and had raised more than $1 billion in venture capital and $528 million in government loans, filed for bankruptcy protection.

“A lot of people see it as a symbol of what they do not like in green investments or government involvement in tech,” said Nathan E. Hultman, director of the environmental policy program at the University of Maryland and a fellow at the Brookings Institution. “If the V.C.’s pull back, then a lot of these companies are going to have to fold, or at least put their plans on hold.

“This is a very familiar stage in the energy industry called the valley of death,” he said.

Green tech investing had been declining even before Solyndra. Venture capitalists invested $891 million in 80 such start-ups in the third quarter, an 11 percent decline from $1 billion in 88 companies in the second quarter, according to the National Venture Capital Association.

Investors, accustomed to financing low-cost Web start-ups, had grown wary of spending the money needed to pay for basic research and build factories to produce energy. Adding to their caution is uncertainty over whether Congress will exact a carbon tax, an increase in natural gas production in the United States and the difficulty of competing with the established energy industry.

But the Solyndra bankruptcy further spooked venture capitalists and particularly the pension funds, endowments and foundations that invest in venture capital, said Mark Heesen, president of the National Venture Capital Association.

Investors, he said, would continue to shift from investing in alternative energy to investing in companies that cope with climate change by, for example, using software to make buildings and cars more efficient.

Venture capitalists are on track to invest $275 million this year in start-ups that make software and other technologies that conserve energy or manage its use, up from $234 million last year and $104 million in 2009.

“Capital-intensive companies that take long cycles to create things, whether they’re solar voltaic cells or giant wind turbines, are not very scalable, so those are really tough businesses to imagine as venture-funded opportunities,” said Bill Maris, managing partner at Google Ventures.

His firm has invested in RelayRides and other start-ups that stretch the definition of clean tech investing. They include the Climate Corporation, for extreme weather insurance; Clean Power Finance, which runs an online marketplace for financing residential solar panels; and Transphorm, which makes tools that reduce power loss when electricity is converted in data centers or industrial motors.

“It’s tech companies that are applying their technology to this industry,” Mr. Maris said. “Those are the kinds of companies we tend to really understand and like.”

At first glance, companies like the Climate Corporation, which insures rural farmers, seem to have nothing to do with either technology or climate change. But David Friedberg, a Google veteran who is the company’s co-founder and chief executive, said its goal was “to help all the world’s business adapt to and understand climate change.”

For farmers, that means analyzing “crazy big data,” Mr. Friedberg said, from weather stations, government data feeds, soil moisture models and Doppler radar images. The Climate Corporation simulates the weather for the next two years and runs a Web site where farmers can enter their location and crop, buy insurance coverage and automatically receive payments for bad weather.

Soybean farmers in the Dakotas were recently paid for delayed planting because of an unusually rainy spring, and wheat farmers in Oklahoma and Texas were covered for a intense drought.

The Climate Corporation this month changed its name from WeatherBill, and Mr. Friedberg said he worried that the connection between his software and climate change was too vague for the new name to make sense.

“We were a little concerned about changing the name for fear of farmers thinking we’re a bunch of hippie Californians,” he said. “But the farmers said, ‘Yeah, it’s the climate that’s totally messing with us. The weather today is not the weather of my pappy or grandpappy.’ ”

FirstFuel Software is another company using computers to cope with climate change. It analyzes a building’s electric use based on data, without visiting the building, and produces an energy-saving plan. It raised $2.4 million from Battery Ventures and Nth Power in September.

Opower, which has raised $66 million from venture firms like Accel and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, gives electric and gas companies tools to communicate with customers, like text-messaging them midmonth if their electric bill is running particularly high.

Despite the interest in these types of companies, some venture capitalists are still betting on big alternative energy experiments.

Khosla Ventures announced this month that it had raised a $1.05 billion fund, one of the biggest this year. About 60 percent will go into clean tech and the rest into Internet and mobile start-ups.

“We’re not changing strategy,” said Vinod Khosla, the firm’s founder. “We’re sticking to our guns.”

The firm has invested in companies that make engines and biofuels and one that is trying to turn carbon emissions and seawater into cement. Mr. Khosla said he believed that start-ups that built efficiency software did not do enough to address climate change.

“They do the 5 to 10 percent improvements here and there,” Mr. Khosla said. “What we need is the 100 percent or 400 percent improvements.”

The problems brought on by climate change will not be solved without venture capital, he said. But what if Silicon Valley continues to recoil from tackling experiments like creating alternative energies?

“It’s the survival-of-the-species question,” said Eric Wesoff, a senior analyst on energy and venture capital at Greentech Media, a research firm. “If the V.C.’s are not willing to take that risk and the innovation slows, who’s going to fill that gap? Is it going to be China?”

Already, the bulk of the innovation is coming from India, China and Europe, Mr. Heesen said.

“We have been behind,” he said, “and we’re just going to get further and further behind in an area that is one of the few that can actually create jobs in the next 10 years.”

via NYTimes

An artist’s rendering of Cornell University’s proposal for a graduate school on Roosevelt Island.

via NYTimes

If Cornell University were to win the city’s competition to build a new science graduate school, it would install on Roosevelt Island almost four acres of solar panels, 500 geothermal wells, and buildings with the rare distinction of generating as much power as they use.

Stanford University’s proposal for the island calls for minimizing energy use, creating a marsh to filter water, and recycling water from storm runoff and sinks, and possibly from toilets as well.

In an expansion under way in West Harlem that would house Columbia’s proposed graduate school, the university is recycling more than 90 percent of the material in buildings it is demolishing, and taking unusual steps to minimize construction pollution.

The Bloomberg administration’s contest to create a school of applied sciences sets high environmental standards, but some competing universities are going much further to out-green one another.

As the Oct. 28 deadline for proposals was approaching, several of the top contenders discussed their environmental plans as part of a public relations war intended to impress city officials who will decide which institution wins up to $400 million in land and infrastructure improvements.

Stanford and Cornell, vying for the same city-owned site on what some involved in the process have begun to call Silicon Island, are widely seen as the universities to beat.

Their plans are far grander — two million square feet of space to be built over a generation with price tags of over $1 billion — and they have proposed more ambitious plans to incorporate innovative environmental measures.

Cornell officials said their campus would generate up to 1.8 megawatts of power, enough to supply 1,400 American homes, with elements like fuel cells and the city’s biggest solar array.

Two major academic buildings, out of 10 planned structures, would meet a “net zero energy” standard, meaning that on average, they would consume no more electricity than they produce. On hot days, when demand is highest, they would actually generate excess power and feed it into the grid.

Very few large structures meet that standard, according to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, a federal agency, and Cornell plans to go a step more: The buildings would be energy-neutral even taking into account all the devices plugged into outlets inside.

“From an architectural and sustainability point of view, we’re entering some pretty novel territory,” said Kent Kleinman, dean of Cornell’s architecture school, who contributed to the plan.

Stanford and Cornell both propose to take advantage of the steady temperature deep underground, using it to cool air in summer and heat it in winter.

Cornell’s geothermal wells, circulating water through pipes, would make up the largest system of its kind in the region, university officials said.

Stanford would use ground-source heat pumps that store and release heat without water.

Cornell, hoping to gain a strategic advantage in the increasingly intense competition, shared far more of its plans than other applicants, including architectural drawings.

Stanford’s renewable energy plans seem less specific: Officials said that the proposal would make extensive use of solar and geothermal power, but that they could not give figures on either, and that other innovations were considered possible but not definite.

Stanford’s stated goal is to use 50 percent less energy, and generate 80 percent less in greenhouse gases, than the efficiency standards set by the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers.

“We’ll look at three or four different combinations of solutions to meet that, and determine how to go,” Laura Goldstein, Stanford’s director of project management, said.

“A new campus is a big opportunity to look at campus-wide systems, to showcase technologies.”

Whatever the approach, she said, the New York project would be greener than anything on Stanford’s California campus, where several buildings have won environmental design awards.

Cornell said that its buildings would use 40 percent less energy than the engineers’ society standard — somewhat higher consumption than Stanford’s goal — but that the campus would generate so much clean energy that its demands on the grid would be 75 percent below the standard.

Both Cornell and Stanford promise to include extensive measures to capture and reuse rainfall, including green roofs — some of Cornell’s structures would be almost entirely hidden under landscaping — as well as recycling “gray water” that usually goes into storm drains.

But Stanford takes the unusual steps of proposing to build a wetland to filter runoff naturally, and to recycle “black water” from toilets, if it is feasible.

The graduate school would also be connected to a Roosevelt Island system that collects garbage by sucking it through tubes at high speed.

Each university also mentions exploring experimental technology, like using the East River for heat exchange, or harnessing tidal energy.

Both universities say their buildings would be aligned to maximize sun exposure and natural ventilation.

Cornell’s drawings show structures of various sizes, with rooflines and other surfaces tilted to catch sunlight.

Both plans would also provide ample open space to the public and gardens for cultivation.

But officials at competing universities cautioned against taking the ambitious plans of Cornell and Stanford at face value, if only because of cost. They spoke on the condition of anonymity, saying it would appear unseemly to criticize a competitor’s plans.

“It’s already so expensive to build in New York City, and this stuff adds more,” one said. “It could all change in negotiations with the city, or as the technology evolves.”

Columbia and a coalition led by New York University want to build in more urban settings, hemmed in by roads, subways and buildings, with less flexibility and space for parks or solar panels.

But Columbia is already going beyond required environmental requirements in an enormous expansion in West Harlem, where construction began a year ago, and where the university proposes to incorporate a new science school.

Using low-sulfur fuel and particulate filters, the cranes and trucks working on the project do not belch visible exhaust. Each vehicle leaving the site is sprayed from below by water jets, to keep it from trailing dirt and dust. The school is splitting a major wastewater pipe under the site into a separate sewer and a storm drain, to reduce the risk of sewage overflows.

N.Y.U. wants to acquire the old New York City Transit headquarters in Downtown Brooklyn and overhaul it inside and out. John H. Beckman, a university vice president, said such renovation could be environmentally preferable to demolition and new construction.

Introducing the Pecan Street Project


via the Texas Tribune By KATE GALBRAITH

One morning this week, several dozen residents of northeast Austin gathered to inspect three plug-in Volt cars. They peered at the electric and gasoline engine components beneath the hood and took turns sitting behind the wheel.

“I really hate buying gas,” said one of them, Joan Neuberger, a history professor at the University of Texas, who is among more than 140 local residents who have expressed interest in buying or leasing a heavily discounted Volt next year.

The plug-in cars will be part of the continuing roll-out of an Austin smart-grid study called Pecan Street, which on Friday is announcing partnerships with a handful of major companies, including Whirlpool, Best Buy and Chevrolet, the Volt’s manufacturer. The companies will test how people use New Age products and systems, including solar panels and “smart appliances” as well as plug-in cars, and how it all affects the electric grid.

There are about 200 residential participants so far in Pecan Street, which is financed partly by a 2009 federal stimulus award of $10.4 million. Besides monitoring how participants use electricity, researchers are also measuring water and natural gas use.

Early results from just a few houses are already showing interesting trends. For example, in the spring, electricity use dips lowest on Thursdays (the reason is a mystery). In the winter, natural gas use is highest in the hour after 7 a.m.

The project is also looking into whether south-facing or west-facing solar panels work better for the grid. One hundred Volts will be offered to participants with a special rebate of either $7,500 (in addition to a federal tax credit of the same amount) for those who buy or $3,000 for those who lease, both courtesy of federal stimulus money. Researchers intend to measure how car charging can be integrated with solar panels.

Pecan Street, which is affiliated with the University of Texas, is one of several smart-grid projects in the state. Another, by the Center for the Commercialization of Electric Technologies and also financed partly with federal stimulus money, will include studies on a new Houston neighborhood that people are still moving into. Texas is a good place to conduct smart-grid research, experts say, because the deregulation of the electricity market roughly a decade ago means that electric companies are motivated to offer consumers different ways to monitor and pay for their power.

“Texas is really leading the nation with respect to promoting a well-balanced approach to smart-grid,” said Jerry Jackson, a former Texas A&M professor who now leads a national smart-grid research consortium based in Orlando, Fla.

More than four million “smart meters” are already installed in deregulated parts of Texas, according to the Public Utility Commission, and many more should be installed by the end of next year, said Donna Nelson, the commission’s chairwoman.

The installation of smart meters has been slightly contentious in Texas, but not nearly as controversial as it has been in California, the other major smart-meter state. Smart meters allow many Texans to monitor their electric use on a Web site in 15-minute intervals, if they choose. This information allows people to know when they are using more electricity than expected.

For Pecan Street researchers, one of the surprising findings to date is that there is little difference in energy use between homes in Mueller, a new, green-built Austin neighborhood, and older homes outside that neighborhood.

What that suggests, said Brewster McCracken, the project’s executive director, is that personal behavior appears, so far, “to be much more important than the green-building rating of the home.”

kgalbraith@texastribune.org

Now, more than ever, prospects for “green jobs” are being treated as a red flag in partisan debate.

Media Matters, a nonprofit watchdog group, has documented a Fox News report proclaiming that the costs of green jobs exceed the benefits. A recent New York Times article, pointing to lackluster programs in California, concluded that “public efforts to stimulate creation of green jobs have largely failed.” A column by David Brooks in The New York Times was pointedly titled “Where the Jobs Aren’t.”

In reaching for bipartisan support in his jobs speech on Thursday, President Obama avoided the word “green” altogether, though his proposed increase in infrastructure spending could involve investments in improved energy efficiency.

But green jobs still hold considerable promise. While it’s not hard to find examples of programs that haven’t lived up to expectations, considerable evidence demonstrates the actual and potential employment impact of efforts to improve environmental sustainability.
Not that green jobs are easy to define. The Bureau of Labor Statistics is currently in the process of developing an official measure, but employment that either saves energy or increases use of energy generated from renewable sources clearly falls into the category.

In February, the Economic Policy Institute and the Blue-Green Alliance released a comprehensive analysis of the employment impact of American Recovery and Reinvestment Act expenditures aimed in this direction, dominated by efforts to improve energy efficiency in buildings and to promote low-carbon transportation.

The study estimates an increase in direct employment of about 367,000 jobs, while indirect employment effects came to about one million – not a cure-all for an economy with more than 14 million unemployed, but a significant contribution.

The cost per job created varied considerably, and not all programs have moved forward as quickly as they should have. But as a report from Think Progress carefully documents, sensationalized assertions of a million dollars or more spent per job are misleading. Overall, the costs of green jobs creation, whether funded with public or private dollars, are lower than those in most other sectors of the economy, at an average of about $60,000 each. These jobs are likely to last for years, generating private cost-savings and important public benefits.

Retrofits to improve the energy efficiency of our existing building stock offer a particularly high rate of return.

A recent Brookings Institution report calls for broader attention to “clean jobs,” defined as those in establishments that produce or add value to goods and services with an environmental benefit, such as reducing pollution or natural resource depletion.

By this definition, the clean economy is a pretty small slice of the United States economy, accounting for only about 2 percent of all jobs. But it’s now bigger than the dirtiest slice, related to production of fossil-fuel based energy.

The analysis by Brookings of employment trends on the county level between 2003 and 2010 shows that jobs in wind energy and solar photovoltaics represent a small but rapidly expanding part of the larger clean economy.

The report also points to a growing share of private venture capital moving in this direction: 16 percent in 2010, from 2 percent in 1995.

So why not rely entirely on the private sector? The biggest gains from investments in new renewable-energy technologies are not easily captured in private transactions, because they produce environmental services that are largely unpriced. Companies can sell consumers with a conscience a “share” in global greenhouse gas reduction – that’s what the growing business of carbon offsets is all about. But consumers who don’t pay also get the benefits, creating a strong temptation to free ride.

Companies can’t market to the consumers likely to benefit most, because they haven’t yet been born. Conventional fossil fuels are cost-effective now only because the environmental costs are dumped into a global commons that imposes costs on other people and future generations.

Public policies could remedy this problem, by imposing a tax on carbon emissions so that their market price better approximates their social cost. Adopting clean-energy standards would also increase demand for clean and green production, giving private companies greater incentive to invest.

The Brookings report explains that Germany, carrying out such policies, attracted investments from major American corporations including Google, First Solar and Good Energies. Between 2004 and 2009, German employment in renewable energy increased to more than 300,000 from 160,000.

Globally, the green jobs numbers look pretty strong. Unfortunately, in the United States, the possibilities for bipartisan collaboration still look very weak. Flag-waving is so much easier.

via NYTimes
By NANCY FOLBRE
Nancy Folbre is an economics professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

More than half the energy produced in the U.S. isn’t put to use. Much of it is lost, released as heat when we burn fuels to power vehicles or generate electricity. Entrepreneurs want to harvest wasted energy and identify new sources of power.

This graphic shows the sources and uses of U.S. energy, including where power is lost. It is based on flow charts from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory using data from the Energy Information Administration.

Click on the graphic to access the online data visualization. Roll over an energy stream to see where it goes, or a sector to see its power source and its efficiency. Roll over the orange dots for more detail and examples of how some entrepreneurs are trying to transform the energy landscape.

By John Tozzi and David Yanofsky – July 7, 2011
via Bloomberg.com