When the Stars Align

Brad Collins believes that two of the major challenges we are currently facing across the globe – global warming and the recession – can be tackled with the same weapon. The solution, he says, is the broad deployment of energy efficiency. “This is the low-hanging fruit in terms of reduction of carbon, and the replacement of energy sources with less carbon energy sources. Almost exclusively we would endorse renewable energy technology – including wind power, solar power, hydropower, wave power, biomass and biofuels.”

“Our studies show that 57 percent of carbon reductions in the US by 2030 will come from energy efficiency, and 43 percent will come from renewables.”
-

It makes sense that Collins would say that. As Executive Director of the American Solar Energy Society, he oversees 13,000 professionals in the science and research area of renewable energy technologies, energy efficiency and green buildings. In pursuit of its mission to help transition the US to a sustainable energy future using a broad range of renewable energy sources - not just the sun - the society provides advice to everyone from members of the public to the new administration in Washington.

"Since before the election, with all of the presidential candidates, and after the election as well with the transition team, we have been providing some of the public documents that we have prepared over the last several years that are policy related to this mission," Collins explains.

"We have documents that deal with the interconnection between climate change and the solutions, which we consider to be broad deployments of energy efficiency and renewable energy technologies. We provided the transition team with information about the breadth and scope and forecast potential of green-collar jobs. And we consider the largest threat currently facing the world population is global climate change. The second largest threat is the economic downturn, and the need to transition to a more sustainable economy.

"We are not necessarily the spokespeople or the people who are advocating publicly for these policies, but when you look deeply into their positions, what you discover is that they cite our work, or they base their policy recommendations on work that we have accomplished over the last numbers of years."

Going green

One of the big questions currently circulating in the energy sector relates to President Obama's proposal to create five million green-collar jobs as part of his environment initiative. There are those who have said that such a proposal is not feasible, but Collins disagrees.

"We would strongly endorse the potential that this is feasible," he says. "The stimulus package and the budget that President Obama released are moving precisely in the right direction, and that direction is to create incentives for workforce development in the green collar arena."

Collins goes on to describe a case in point. "One of the administration's goals is to increase weatherization: taking buildings that are not as efficient when they were constructed and bringing them up to a higher energy standard. For example, this would involve the replacement of windows, increasing insulation, preparing areas that have air infiltration for caulking and then caulking them, and putting in more efficient furnaces air-conditioning.

"Weatherization will create massive amounts of jobs. It will raise the building stock performance in the United States, which will lower our carbon footprint because it will use less energy. The time frame for how long this energy efficiency upgrade or weatherization will last is decades.

"Buildings tend to last 50-plus years. If you improve the performance of a building built in, say, 1980, and it now has another 30 years of expected life, you have 30 more years of lower carbon for that one building than you would if you did nothing. You have also created an employment opportunity that's not outsourcable, and it's an employment opportunity that generally exists in the urban centers of our cities, where we have the highest unemployment.

"So it's a whole variety of winning solutions all accomplished with the same targeted goal: let's create jobs in the weatherization industry. Like many of the other stimulus package and budget targets that have been proposed by the administration and signed into law, these are going to help us solve those twin challenges - global warming and a need to rejump or reboot the economy, but reboot the economy with a new vision as to what we want it to look like. What we want it to look like is more efficient, more sustainable and preparing the workforce for the 21st century."

The society's work has shown that there are currently nine million people in the United States employed in the green-collar economy, creating revenue of more than $1 trillion in 2007. This is more than ExxonMobil, GM and Wal-Mart combined. But as Collins points out, we have to be careful that we are comparing apples to apples. "One of our biggest challenges was to become very explicit and transparent in what we define as a green-collar job, and fundamentally those are energy-efficiency and renewable energy jobs. Energy-efficiency jobs are defined as jobs that are in recycle/reuse/remanufacturing; jobs that are in the energy services sector, which would be weatherization; and jobs that are producing or manufacturing products that are at least 30 percent more efficient than the standard.

"So an automobile that gets 30 percent better gas mileage than the fleet average is an energy-efficient automobile by our definition, and all of the jobs related to that automobile are part of the green economy. Likewise, if you have building windows, for instance, that are 30 percent more efficient than the standard window, then that whole production process is a green-collar job.

"As the average efficiencies improve, how many people in that green-collar part of the economy and what companies qualify go up too because the bar is raised."

Single solution

The society's forecasts predict that if aggressive deployment of tax-supported, job-creating incentives in the green-collar arena becomes a national priority, then by 2030 the United States could have more than 37 million people working in the green economy. This would equal between 17 and 18 percent of the total employment of the country, creating $4.5 trillion in annual revenue.

According to Collins, those statistics help support the notion that the solution to our global warming challenge and to rebuilding our economy are the same. He believes that now the challenge is to support those in public office with data and well thought-out strategies on how to get there.

"We've discovered from work we did on green-collar employment in various states that there are three necessary requirements that must be in place in order to motivate the markets and create the solution. The first of these is to create a local market through, in some cases, incentive programs. The market has to be outside the manufacturers' door. You can't create a manufacturing entity in one state and sell it easily 10 states away or overseas. To jumpstart the green economy, you have to create a ready market in the same area.

"The second thing you have to do is put in place incentives for the establishment of the manufacturing distribution and servicing industries for those technologies; whether it's weatherization, recycling, deployment of solar on buildings or wind farms. You have to create the incentives that are going to attract capital into that part of the economy.

"And third and foremost, the difference between success and failure, comparing one state versus another, is executive leadership. The executive has to take a role in promoting the vision of a new energy economy based upon renewable and energy efficiency. And what we see in the Obama administration is clearly economy leadership."

Collins is convinced that we already have some of the ingredients in place to have a ready market here in the United States. He points out that there is talk of a federal renewable portfolio standard, and incentives are being put in place to attract and maintain and grow businesses in the renewable, energy efficiency sector. Combine this with executive leadership from the President and from Congress on moving swiftly toward a more sustainable energy economy, and it seems the society's time has finally come.

"In one sense, for 55 years we've been waiting for the stars to align," Collins says. "Then all of the sudden, lo and behold, we are scrambling to try to manage the alignment of these stars and what it means - what the implications are for us to be proactive in helping the country to meet our mission and therefore to help us reduce atmosphere carbon and to help us jumpstart our economy.

"It's very gratifying, and more so to the member who comes to me and says, 'I've been in this society for 40 years and this is finally happening. And now that I'm 85 years old, we've got to make this happen, and I want you to be even more aggressive tomorrow than you were today.' In other words, for the first time we are able to respond to the earnest interest of our long-standing members to be more and more aggressive in our advocacy, and that's great. That's terrific."

New or old?

There has been comment from quarters that many so-called green jobs are not new jobs, but just existing jobs given a shiny new name - taking jobs from one industry and group and moving them to another. Collins says the answer to this criticism is complicated.

"There are two things need to be understood. One is in the green economy, many of the jobs are not, per se, specifically green jobs. If you have a manufacturing plant that builds wind machines, in that plant you have people who are highly trained and have expertise in wind engineering and in the design and fabrication of fiberglass. But most of the jobs in that factory are your accountant, your secretary, your truck driver, your warehouse manager, your facilities manager, your attorney.

"These are jobs that could be in any industry. The fact that they happen to be in the green economy is only an artifact of the fact that the end product is a green product. But the job training and the job description is the same, whether you're building widgets or windmills.

"And so, in a sense, you will have a lot of people transitioning out of jobs in, for instance, the automobile glass manufacturing world into the flat plate solar collector manufacturing world because some of the skill sets are identical. This means you're going to have a transfer of employment from, quote, 'the automobile industry', into the green economy."

Collins says the question of how many of these are new jobs is a question of how fast we can grow the green economy in order to have additional employment. He sees the green part of the economy expanding over the next dozen years and some of the older parts of the US economy shrinking, although the society does not have, nor does he believe anyone has, a good set of data on how that balance is going to work out. It's difficult to say whether at the end of the day there will be X number more jobs now in the economy than there were when the transition began."

"Our position is that we need to move in this direction regardless of the pain and suffering that might be necessary in the transition," he emphasizes. "Because the threat of global warming is so enormous, and jumpstarting of our economy is so critical, that this is a transition that we must commit to.

"The challenge is going to be to manage it for the least amount of pain - this is the challenge whenever there's an economic transition. There will be dislocations and there will be winners and losers in that transition. It is our perspective that it's the role of government to mitigate that to the best of its ability. In the context of massive government spending, there is greater opportunity for that mitigation than if this was done without it.

More opportunity

"In terms of solving unemployment during the economic recession, the opportunity for entrepreneurial businesses to grow in a green economy is substantially greater than in traditional energy economies. Our studies show, for instance, that in the state of Colorado, we produce two-and-a-half times as many jobs per dollar if those jobs are in the green economy than if they're in the oil and gas industry.

"This is because the human resource fraction of the business is greater in renewable energy than it is in oil and gas. Oil and gas has a very high employment per dollar spent in the drilling part of an operation - establishing the field part of an operation, determining if it's an oil field or a natural gas field. But once that's been established, it runs with very few employees. The interesting part of that, at least to me, is that if the goal of a government is more employment, this becomes a no-brainer. You put your dollars into expanding utility-scale renewable energy technologies as opposed to trying to build more coal plants or more natural gas electric plants or producing oil.

"So will there be more employment in the new green economy? The short answer is apparently yes, and substantially more employment in some sectors."

Collins also points out that many states are resource exporters, meaning that they take a resource from, for instance, the state of Colorado, and much of the benefit of that operation inures to another state so that the revenue goes to the home office, which isn't necessarily in the state of Colorado.

"If you're a government official, what you would say is, 'If I were to build wind farms in Colorado where we have a wind manufacturing plant, not only is the employment and the related tax revenue for that employment and the spending multiplier for our economy related to employment here in Colorado and will stay in Colorado, but the net corporate revenues stay in Colorado and are used to help grow the economy.' As opposed to an oil and gas industry where you have less people employed, and therefore less tax revenue from income tax, property tax, and state and local taxes to help local governments.

"So from a strictly fiscal view, you get a bigger bang for your buck if you support the establishment of incentives and markets for renewable energy in your state than you do if you continue to support business as usual with such things as natural gas development."

Sourcing renewables

President Obama's plan also talks about generating 10 percent of our electricity from renewable sources by 2012, which Collins believes is doable, although he acknowledges that it will be an enormous manufacturing challenge, made even more difficult by the tight credit markets.

The state of the credit markets affects the ability of manufacturers to ramp up their production scale to meet this sort of target -to go to the financial markets and say, 'I need to borrow $2 billion to build three plants. One will produce windmills, one's going to produce solar for houses, and one's going to produce utility-scale solar plants.'

On the other end of that equation, Collins says, the purchasers of those technologies also have difficulty going to the financial markets and saying, 'I want to borrow $500,000 because I want to put a megawatt of solar panels on top of my manufacturing building.'

"It is indeed doable, but there are some very serious challenges that have to be overcome. Resolving the credit markets is one, probably first and foremost. It will help free up the revenue needed in order to upgrade the manufacturing quantity for these types of technologies and allow homeowners and the business owners to borrow the money to purchase these technologies. This has to be understood within the context of the purchaser of those technologies - their payback is many, many years, but their cost is all upfront.

"Some of the ways that these targets can become more likely to occur is if the leaders of this country can come up with reasonable solutions to overcome that credit crisis. One of them, for instance, that we have proposed for years, is that there be a special mortgage mechanism or borrowing mechanism where the borrowing is used for green technology.

"A case in point might be if a person wants to buy a house and as part of their mortgage they want to put solar on that house. The calculation that is normally used to allow them to qualify for the principal, interest, taxes and insurance should also include utilities because their utility bill, for the life of their house and for the life of their mortgage, certainly, will be substantially less than that of the house across the street.

"So the qualification should be different because the calculation incentive must be included - for instance, if the amount of their mortgage should be no greater than 32 percent of their take-home pay, this is different if you don't have to save the other 78 percent of your take-home to pay enormous utility bills."

Collins believes that you can have creative financing that takes into account the long-term value of the establishment of these technologies for the homeowner or for the utility or for the business owner. "That creative financing should be an honest evaluation of the reality of how the purchase of this long-term power plant, that somebody's putting on their building, can help free up the market mechanisms which can help drive this market in order to ramp up to 10 percent of our electricity by 2012. It is doable. It is a very steep hill. It would be a very steep hill even if there was no credit crisis.

"Here's an example. At the beginning of World War II, the United States did not build heavy trucks or jeeps. In Detroit, it took them less than a year to take the manufacturing processes of the US auto industry and revise it to produce nothing but heavy trucks, tanks and jeeps. If you have as a national goal to do something, and it is a shared vision of the country and it is a commitment that the public and private sectors are willing to make, enormous changes can occur.

"We hope - desperately hope - that the driver for this sort of change in this country comes not from increasingly dire projections as to what's happening to our climate, but from a more and more enlightened vision about the prudence of a solution of the deployment of energy efficiency and renewable energy. Then we'll all be happy."

Reliability

One of the questions frequently raised about a greater dependence on renewable sources of energy is reliability. According to Collins, this is at one level the Holy Grail - the, 'How can we be totally independent of fossil fuel?' question. He says the answer is we can be there, although it would require a number of interrelated uses of renewable energy and the transmission of that energy.

For example, if the best wind resources in the United States are in the Midwest, then how do you get the energy from the middle of the country to where the load centers or the population are, which is on both coasts? Collins' answer is to have the commitment to build a very robust green transmission system that takes the wind power from the middle of the country and move it to where it's needed.

"And likewise, if the best resource for utility-scale solar energy deployment is the Southwest, how do you get that energy from Arizona to Chicago, or from the Southwest to New England or to New York? It all requires a very smart green transmission system that is able to manage the flows of energy from one part of the country where the resource may be active at this hour to another part of the country where the resource may be active next hour.

"It creates a smart grid with green transmission that's able to anticipate and transfer those green electrons from where they're produced to where they're needed. It is very possible to do this using two things, a very smart green transmission grid that is robust, that is intelligent, and that is predictable, so that you know what the weather's going to be an hour from now for wind resources, for hydropower or for solar power.

"And then you have to deal with the whole issue of storage. Storage is the key. In our existing energy distribution system, we have several types of generation. We have what's called base load generation that runs 24 hours a day. This produces the same amount of electricity all the time. It could be a coal plant or a nuclear plant, producing the same amount of energy day in, day out.

"Then we have plants that are what we call peakers, and these are turned on during the time of the day when you need more energy than the base load produces. In the summer, it might be an air-conditioning load. So at noon or thereabouts, the peakers turn on and provide this extra energy to run all the air-conditioning for the next eight hours, and then the peakers turn off and you go back to the base load. And then you have standby spinning reserves that are used if you have something that the base load and the peakers can't accomplish.

"It's a fairly complicated system. The solution, from our perspective, is to correlate the loads with the resource. In other words, if the load is air-conditioning - you need air-conditioning when it is hot. Ands when it's hot, the sun is shining. In those areas where the load is going to peak because of air-conditioning, you install a lot of solar energy because they're going to be in parallel. The load for the air-conditioning will follow the sunshine.

"And if you have an area that has a need for heating, then generally when it's cold, you can mitigate the need for the load by doing even more energy efficiency measures. For example, by installing variable speed air handlers, more insulation, better windows, better window coverings, better air lock systems and the like."

It's obviously a complicated mix of both reducing the demand and applying the right renewable technology to meet the profile of the need. But Collins says that fundamental to all of this is the need for storage, and the storage will come in terms of molten salts for utility scale solar, where you heat up thermal oil to a high temperature, about 600 or 800 degrees, and run it through a very large container that heats up a salt that turns into a heat source.

As the piping goes through it, even if there's no sunshine, it allows enough energy to be put back in that oil that it can produce steam. You have somewhere in the neighborhood of half an hour just in the piping in a solar field, so that if a cloud goes over a solar field, it doesn't lose its energy, even if it has no storage.

"You can also pump air into caverns," Collins explains, "and have what is called pumped air storage, and later you can use that air to turn a turbine to create electricity. You can use hydropower, when it's not used, to pump water back into a higher dam somewhere that you can then recycle the water by having pumped storage."

Smart load

In Collins' view, we have the ability to solve the base load challenge by using three measures: a smart transmission grid, storage systems, and being smart about when we use electricity. If you need to use electricity to wash and dry clothes, if you wash and dry clothes at 10 o'clock at night when you don't have the air-conditioning load going on, it makes a lot of sense. And you need to have market signals to change consumer behavior in order to help us become more energy literate consumers.

"If everybody comes home from work and the first thing they do is turn up the air-conditioning, turn on the TV, run the dishwasher, get ready to run the laundry, you put this demand on the system and the system has to turn on expensive and, in many cases, dirty plants in order to meet that demand for electricity.

"But if you're a smart consumer, when you get up in the morning, you plan out when things are going to happen, and what we will see in the course of the next several years is cost signals becoming large behavior modifiers for the public. This will come through a system of smart grids, where your home will have a little device on it that will tell you how much energy you're using.

"We will become more and more energy literate as we become more and more in tune with how our behaviors are affecting our utility bills and our carbon footprints. In our business, it's called the Prius effect, where someone who drives a Prius, like I do, is always conscious of how many miles per gallon they're getting. It modifies the way you drive. It's an instant feedback. And so you don't do jackrabbit starts. You turn on the battery charger when you're going down long hills. You try to maximize your miles per gallon.

"The same is true when people purchase and install solar on their houses. It was intuitive for years that people would first and foremost work to make their home energy efficient before they would go out and spend money to put solar electricity systems on their house. What's happened, in fact, is that many people have gone out and purchased solar electric systems for their house. First they see how much energy they're producing, then they see how much energy they're using. And then they say, 'I wonder if I could use less energy.'"

Collins says that the Prius effect has to be synonymous with those who are energy producers in their own houses or their own buildings. They take a closer look at their buildings and say, 'What if I replace my windows?' Or they buy devices that calculate how much energy their refrigerator, freezer or hot water heater is using. They calculate the best next step they can take to reduce the amount of energy they use.

It then becomes a self-fulfilling and supportive environment for people to become more and more and more energy efficient in their activities, and Collins emphasizes that if you multiply that by the entire building stock, or by a large fraction of the building stock, that's how solar energy, renewable energy technologies and energy efficiency can become a reliable source, because we're doing the most important part and that's reducing our demand.

The society's studies show that 57 percent of carbon reductions in the United States by 2030 will come from energy efficiency, and 43 percent will come from renewables.

What Collins has found most fascinating is that we've always thought that energy efficiency is the first step and deployment of renewables is the second step. Instead, what the society has found is that people are buying solar systems and then discovering what the next step for them is to replace their air conditioners or buy only Energy Star appliances or replace their furnaces with ones that are more efficient.

"They see the results and then they get the Prius effect. And the beauty of all of that is the technologies continually advance, so as they make these energy efficiency upgrades, they're getting better and better and better products each and every iteration."

Brad Collins is Executive Director of the American Solar Energy Society.

American Solar Energy Society

The American Solar Energy Society was founded in 1954 by professionals in the science and research area of renewable energy technologies, energy efficiency and green buildings. Its core professional members are architects, designers, scientists, engineers and researchers.

The society currently has just over 13,000 members, of which a significant fraction are now non-professional members, including homeowners or business people who have an interest in advancing solar energy technologies.

Solar energy in 1954 had a different meaning than it does today, as borne out by the society's founding documents, which encompass all forms of energy directly related to the sun, including energy from wind power, wave power and biomass. This means the society has a broadly cast mission to help transition the United States to a sustainable energy economy.