For all of the excitement about using solar power to bring electricity to the more than 1 billion rural poor worldwide living without it, big picture trends provide a sobering reality check. In spite of innovative off-grid technology and business plans and high profile initiatives aiming to power remote villages in subsaharan Africa, for example, electrification there is still falling behind population growth. In 2009 there were 585 million people in sub-Saharan Africa without power, and five years later that figure had risen to 632 million, according to the latest International Energy Agency (IEA) statistics. A deep-dive analysis of capital flows, released today by the UN’s Sustainable Energy for All program, shows that off-grid systems simply are not getting the support they deserve. “This research shows that only 1 percent of financing for electrification is going into this very promising and dynamic energy solution,” says SEforALL CEO Rachel Kyte, who calls the findings “a wake up call” for the international community. Continue reading “Electrification Finance Is Failing”
Category: Energy Economics & Policy
Palmetto State’s $9-bn Nuclear Boondoggle
“Public trust is at stake here, folks.” That’s how South Carolina’s top power industry regulator described the gravity of local utilities’ decision to walk away from a pair of partially-built nuclear reactors, according to Charleston’s Post and Courier. Public Service Commission chairman Swain Whitfield added that the reactors’ cancellation after $9 billion of investment — more than the state’s annual budget — “is going to shatter lives, hopes and dreams” in South Carolina. South Carolina-based Santee Cooper and SCANA’s abandonment of their pair of new reactors, announced on Monday, also have broader ramifications for the nuclear industry’s self-declared “nuclear renaissance.” The cost overruns and delays afflicting this project and a sister project in Georgia drove the reactor designer and builder Westinghouse Electric Co. into bankruptcy. Cost overruns and political concerns are also squeezing nuclear suppliers from France, South Korea, and Russia. Continue reading “Palmetto State’s $9-bn Nuclear Boondoggle”
Commentary: Photo Ops with Miners No Substitute for Climate Policy
President Donald Trump surrounded himself with coal miners at the EPA yesterday as he signed an executive order calling for a clean sweep of federal policies hindering development of fossil fuel production in the United States. The order instructs EPA to kill Obama’s Clean Power Plan and thus, according to Trump’s rhetoric, revive coal-fired power generation and the miners who fuel it. The electric power sector, however, responded with polite dismissal. What separates President Trump and some of his top officials from power engineers and utilities? The latter operate in a world governed by science and other measurable forces. Unlike President Trump, scientists, engineers, and executives suffer reputational and financial losses when they invent new forms of logic that are unsupported by evidence. And a world of fallacies underlies the President and his administration’s rejection of climate action. Continue reading “Commentary: Photo Ops with Miners No Substitute for Climate Policy”
Carbon Tax Split on the Northern Border
The victory of climate change-denying Republican candidate Donald Trump was one of two big setbacks for U.S. climate policy earlier this month. The other was the resounding defeat of Washington State’s Initiative 732, which sought to prove that using fees on carbon emissions to cut existing taxes could provide bipartisan appeal for what economists consider to be the most efficient mechanism to cut greenhouse gas emissions: carbon taxes. Washington State rejected the carbon tax by 59 percent to 41. In sharp contrast, just across the world’s longest border, carbon taxes are attracting politically diverse support. Four-fifths of Canadians will live in provinces with such taxes in 2017, and in 2018 all Canadians could be paying a carbon tax. Read on at MIT Technology Review…
Bark Versus Bite on Trump and Clean Energy
President-elect Donald Trump is a self-declared climate-change denier who, on the campaign trail, criticized solar power as “very, very expensive” and said wind power was bad for the environment because it was “killing all the eagles.” He also vowed to eliminate federal action on climate change, including the Clean Power Plan, President Obama’s emissions reduction program for the power sector. Trump’s rhetoric has had renewable-energy stocks gyrating since the election. But the impact on renewable-energy businesses could be far less drastic than many worst-case scenarios. “At the end of the day what Trump says and what is actually implemented are two completely different things,” says Yuan-Sheng Yu, an energy analyst with Lux Research. Read on at MIT Technology Review …
Does Electrification Really Cause Economic Growth?
Electrification is credited with delivering a seemingly endless list of social and economic goods. Nations that use more power tend to have increased income levels and educational attainment and lower risk of infant mortality, to name but a few. So I was baffled to stumble across a pair of economic analyses on electrification in India and Kenya, posted last month, that cast serious doubt on what has long assumed to be a causal link between the glow of electricity and rural development. “It is difficult to find evidence in the data that electrification is dramatically transforming rural India,” concludes Fiona Burlig, a fourth-year UC Berkeley doctoral student in agricultural and resource economics who coauthored the India study. “In the medium term, rural electrification just doesn’t appear to be a silver bullet for development.” Continue reading “Does Electrification Really Cause Economic Growth?”
Could Europe’s New Grid Algorithm Black-out Belgium?
Two of the big European power grid stories from 2014 were the software-enabled enlargement of the European Union’s common electricity market and a spate of nuclear reactor shutdowns that left Belgium bracing for blackouts. Those developments have now collided with revelations that the optimization algorithm that integrates Europe’s power markets could potentially trigger blackouts.
The flaw resides, ironically, in a long-anticipated upgrade to Europe’s market algorithm. This promises to boost cross-border electricity flows across Europe, expanding supplies available to ailing systems such as Belgium’s. Earlier this month market news site ICIS reported that the upgrade, in the works since the launch of market coupling in 2010, has been delayed once again Continue reading “Could Europe’s New Grid Algorithm Black-out Belgium?”
Peter Fairley 