Grid Rocked

September 01, 2008

This could rock the grid, no gridlock.

As the production tax credit prepares to expire yet again, maybe we should find a way to bring renewables online that disinvolves pesky Congress and the Federal government. The growing grassroots urgency to do something wants action Congress can't provide (even to maintain the status quo by extending the PTC). Let's fire Congress and do the job ourselves.

Okay, here's what we do (spoken as if from the huddle of a street football game):

Communities: develop Community Choice Aggregations (CCA), where cities assume responsibility for sourcing their power. This would allow cities or counties to set their own renewable goals as San Francisco and Marin County are getting ready to do (at 51 and 100% respectively). From this article: "CCA allows a community or region to secede from a local monopoly utility and award long-term contracts to small "merchant" power plants. The utility retains control over poles and wires. The city doesn't buy plants, so it's not wedded to a particular source of juice or means of distribution. And with the purchasing power of an entire population and the stability of a long-term contract, the city can move toward renewables more affordably."  See here a Discovery Channel discussion on how it works in Denmark and Germany, and how it could work in the US.

States: adopt aggressive renewable portfolio standards, which could replace the PTC as the draw for the creation of new wind and other renewable power. Create legislation that facilitates CCA.

Business: develop audacious, creative, high risk-high reward solutions like T. Boone Pickens' $10 billion plan to build electrical transmission across lands he had acquired to transport water.

A nicety of this thinking is that it inclines towards free markets and less government. It could move us towards renewables, even as it moves us away from the federal government subsidizing our energy and away from the whipsaw of the production tax credit.

Photo: Rafael LLano on flickr

Comments

[stomv]

I love it.

Additionally, individuals can often buy green power directly from their utility for a bit more money.

Use caution though: if your state has an RPS, make sure that you're green juice doesn't count against that RPS standard. Otherwise, you're volunteering your money to the utility with no net increase in green power production; they'd have had to use that particular source of green power anyway.

That said, if Barack Obama wins the POTUS election, look for the Dems to sign a multi-year wind production credit in early 2009, which will provide enough certainty in the market to give an even bigger jolt to the construction of mo'bigger wind farms. Of course, they'll still need to get that electricity from farm to user, but the state RPS standards will help "encourage" the power companies to upgrade their lines as necessary, at least to some extent.