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The Fiscal Times

Charge! Electric Cars Fueled by Higher Gas Prices | The Fiscal Times

Turmoil in the Middle East, uncertainty about oil prices, and gasoline still flirting with the nerve-rattling level of $4 per gallon in some parts of the country are making consumers nervous. Even after prices slipped in response to concerns about reduced demand from the crisis in Japan, oil is now trading at about $100 a barrel. Prices are likely to stay high in the near term, or even rise further, given recovering economies in much of the world,  unrest in the Arab world, and the coming summer travel season.

We’ve been there before, only worse. In 2008, when oil peaked near $150 a barrel, car buyers stampeded away from big, gas-guzzling vehicles and overall auto sales collapsed. Just as Hummers were practically being given away, automakers responded with fleets of smaller hybrid vehicles, and the path to sustainable energy consumption was set.

The good news today is that the U.S. is better prepared to cope with an oil crisis with the advent of the electric car. All but written off in the 1990s, following GM’s decision to junk its EV1, dozens of highly efficient electric vehicles (EVs) are headed for U.S. roads this year and next.

“It’s not just improved car technology,” says Jack Hidary, Global EV Leader at Hertz, which is rolling out electric vehicles at rental sites in the U.S. and overseas. Beyond carmakers, other big players “see a roadmap of business models to make EVs a commercial success,” says Hidary, a technology entrepreneur who was a co-architect of the federal Cash for Clunkers program…

More here: http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Articles/2011/03/17/Electric-Cars-Gas-Prices.aspx

 

The Fiscal Times

Housing Crisis Stalls Energy Efficient Home Loans — The Collapse of PACE Loans | The Fiscal Times

When Charlie Yarbrough, a Santa Rosa, Calif., software engineer, decided to put solar panels on the roof of his newly purchased home, he took advantage of a novel funding program known as PACE, short for property assessed clean energy. Working with local installers, he was able to borrow the $25,000 cost at the equivalent of 7.25 percent annually from the Sonoma County Energy Independence Program, a pool of public money, to be paid back over 20 years with his property taxes.

Yarbrough estimates the solar panels have cut annual power costs for his three-bedroom, 1,800-square-foot home by $1,000, while boosting by $40,000 the value of the home he bought for $300,000 in 2009. As energy costs rise in coming years, he expects his savings will grow. “Back of the envelope, this is like a 4 percent loan for an improvement which is the right thing to do,” he says, factoring in the energy savings and property appreciation.

Now, it looks like Yarborough and thousands like him got in just under the wire. PACE all but ground to a halt last July in the wake of the housing bust and mortgage crisis. The Federal Housing Financing Agency (FHFA) — which oversees Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — characterized PACE as a threat to existing mortgages. It was a signal to banks that the housing finance giants, which together buy and resell the majority of U.S. mortgages, would refuse to buy any mortgages with PACE financing attached. Simultaneously, the Office of the Comptroller of Currency issued similar guidance, further chilling lending activity…

More here: http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Articles/2011/01/13/Housing-Crisis-Stalls-Energy-Efficient-Home-Loans.aspx

The Fiscal Times

Investing in Clean Energy: A Sputnik moment for America? | The Fiscal Times

In balmy Cancun, at a U.N. conference on climate change, China and the U.S. remain the elephants-in-the-room of all discussions. Both are more focused on the commercial potential of climate-related technology than on any environmental goals that could impair economic growth. Such a focus should sell better in Washington, but it’s an area where the U.S. is lagging, and China’s lead is growing.

U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu, speaking at the National Press Club earlier last week called China’s mounting successes in clean energy a “Sputnik moment” for the U.S.

In 1957, a refrigerator-sized sphere transmitting a steady radio signal was lofted into orbit by the Soviet Union, sparking a generation of U.S. technical and scientific discovery. But it took decades for satellite technology to become a commercial market.

Now, in clean technologies, China is racing into well-established, fast-growing markets U.S. players are eyeing hungrily. Chu named the most vulnerable areas, where the U.S. must innovate quickly, or risk falling behind…

The Fiscal Times

Climate Change: Hotter, Wetter, Windier and Costlier — Insurers Tally the Potential Toll | The Fiscal Times

It’s not your imagination. The weather in lots of places is getting hotter, windier, and weirder. In September, New York City was hit by its third tornado in the past five years, unprecedented in more than a century of weather records.

For a few minutes on Sept. 16, a macro-burst carved a swath of tree-felling, roof-lifting destruction through Brooklyn and Queens. Remarkably, the storm killed only one bystander. Estimates put the cost of damage from the storm at over $27 million, not including the loss of thousands of city trees.

An unprecedented heat wave and severe drought conditions this summer fueled wild fires in Russia, causing hundreds of deaths and some $15 billion in property loss. Later in the summer, Pakistan experienced cataclysmic flooding, displacing millions and doing some $9.5 billion in damage to housing, infrastructure and farm fields.

Some say these events are part of a normal weather cycle, others say it’s a sign of permanent climate change. Either way, it’s a multi-billion dollar problem. Globally, insured losses from weather events have jumped to an average $27 billion annually from $5 billion over the past 40 years, adjusted for inflation. While rising property values account for part of the increase, a growing share is driven by the intensification and rising frequency of weather disasters, according to an assessment of insured property damage by SwissRe, a Zurich-based reinsurance provider…

More here: http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Articles/2010/11/16/Climate-Change-Hotter-Wetter-Windier-and-Costlier.aspx

 

The Fiscal Times

Offshore wind for Cleveland? Wind Energy Can Create Jobs, Reduce Carbon Footprint | The Fiscal Times

Cape Wind, the planned $2.7 billion wind farm off the coast of Cape Cod, Mass., in Nantucket Sound, got the green light in April from the Interior Dept., the most important approval so far in the project’s nine-year odyssey. Even so, there’s still plenty of reason to doubt it will ever be built.

Despite the environmental merits of replacing a dirty local power plant, and a steady parade of local, state and federal approvals, the project has been besieged by a series of legal challenges backed in part by well-heeled opponents with homes in the area, such as billionaire industrialist Bill Koch.

Cape Wind has also pitted green against green, renewable energy supporters against conservationists. Some have argued the project threatens the area’s shore views, birds and sea life, most famously Robert F. Kennedy Jr., senior attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council, from whose family compound the turbines would be visible. In the wake of the April approval, opponents immediately vowed to file new suits.

Meanwhile, there’s little opposition to a proposal to put wind turbines in Lake Erie, near Cleveland. Developers there have been careful to focus on the potential to salvage the region’s beleaguered manufacturing sector. Ohio’s plan is smaller than Cape Wind — initially five turbines compared with 130 planned in Massachusetts — and slated to be a fraction of the cost, at about $100 million…

More here: http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Articles/2010/09/25/Wind-Energy-Can-Create-Jobs-Reduce-Carbon-Footprint.aspx

 

The Fiscal Times

Clean Energy Funding Issues May Attract Investment from China | The Fiscal Times

President Obama is touting alternatives to foreign oil, research funds are flowing into renewable energy and venture capital is again surging into the clean technology sector. But the shift to clean energy is still a long way off. As established startups move towards building their first commercial facilities, some are struggling to find the funding to scale up. They’ve exhausted much of their venture capital and can’t yet satisfy the strict risk terms of traditional lenders.

The struggle to find funds to commercialize innovative clean technologies is turning into what industry insiders call the “valley of death,” delaying implementation of wind, solar power, low-carbon fuels, and systems that make energy use more efficient. To build their first full-scale facilities, clean technology startups can require up to 100 times more capital than new software or biotech companies. “Instead of dying for lack of $5 million, clean tech startups can stall and die for the lack of $50 million or $500 million,” says Greg Neichin, vice president of Cleantech Group, which tracks market trends. It may be easier to invent green technologies than to finance their commercial production.

Consider GreatPoint Energy. The Cambridge, Mass., company has raised $150 million in venture capital and strategic investor funding since 2005 to develop a process that converts coal into cleaner burning natural gas and that can capture and store its carbon dioxide emissions. Big companies, including AES Corp., Dow Chemical, Peabody Energy and Suncor Energy, lined up early to invest and team up with GreatPoint. Now that the process has been proven on a pilot scale, GreatPoint needs another $200 million to $400 million to build a plant big enough to prove the technology will work at commercial scale. That’s more than many venture capitalists are willing to risk. And because the technology is still evolving and GreatPoint’s business model is untested, project financiers and private equity investors lack the experience to assess the project’s risks…

More here: http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Articles/2010/08/02/Clean-Energy-Funding-Issues-May-Attract-China-Investment.aspx

The Fiscal Times

Canada’s tar sands: Oil from Sand: High Risks, High Costs | The Fiscal Times

As oil continues to gush into the Gulf of Mexico from BP’s sunken Deepwater Horizon rig, half a continent away a major new pipeline is delivering the first supplies of crude to refineries in Illinois. With the consistency of heavy molasses, the raw oil took about three months to travel some 1,073 miles.

The pipeline is the first step in a $12 billion TransCanada Corp. project that aims to more than double the capacity of oil that can be piped into the U.S from Canada, just as Americans are looking for alternatives to offshore drilling and oil from the Middle East. Oil extracted from Alberta’s tar sands — deposits of dense, sticky sand, saturated with a viscous form of petroleum — account for about 20 percent of U.S. crude imports. The newly opened pipeline, known as Keystone I, is part of a network that, when completed, will wind 3,800 miles underground through three provinces and eight Great Plains states before terminating in Texas.

http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Articles/2010/07/08/Oil-from-Sand-High-Risks-High-Costs.aspx