Advocate seeks new directions on energy

Dec 1 - McClatchy-Tribune Regional News - Leslie Brooks Suzukamo Pioneer Press, St. Paul, Minn.

For renewable energy, these are not the best of times.

Public skepticism about climate change is rising in the United States and other developed nations. Legislation to reverse the output of greenhouse gases got a pasting in Congress. Funding for research and development is uncertain.

Even Daniel Kammen, the keynote speaker at a Tuesday conference on energy and the environment at St. Paul's RiverCentre, acknowledged, "We are at a depressing moment right now, as far as the politics of climate change go."

Kammen is an energy professor at the University of California-Berkeley and was coordinating lead author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007. He told the audience at the E3 2010 Conference that instead of going for comprehensive climate-change legislation, environmentalists should focus on smaller battles using renewable energy projects as a way to win converts.

The conference was sponsored by the University of Minnesota's Initiative for Renewable Energy and the Environment.

"Energy is much more a marketplace or a bazaar than a moon shot," said Kammen, who last month was hired as a renewable energy consultant for the World Bank. "We need an energy victory more than a climate victory."

Against the backdrop of the United Nations conference on climate change under way in Cancun, Mexico, this week, he urged the Minnesota audience to think about pushing for energy legislation, which he saw as more politically doable.

One suggestion: a national renewable energy standard similar to what Minnesota already has enacted. Such a standard could develop a market for wind or solar energy, eliminating the boom-and-bust cycle of renewable energy development that now depends upon year-to-year approval of tax credits, he said.

Another idea would be pushing for so-called feed-in tariffs that encourage investment in renewable energy by paying small clean-energy producers -- such as small solar or wind farms -- a premium for clean-energy generation over a long period of time.

Small projects don't have the sex appeal of large, utility-scale ones, he acknowledged. But the experience of Germany, which developed its solar industry mainly through small rooftop projects, shows how a sustained effort led to dramatic leaps that eclipsed expert predictions, he told the audience.

The sector is still evolving, he said, and he would not take any renewable options off the table for development.

"We just have to get on with the job, watt by watt," he said.

Leslie Brooks Suzukamo can be reached at 651-228-5475.