Extract from EV World Insider -- Basic Edition 7.41/ Insider Commentary by Bill Moore: ... Here's a great story I couldn't help including.
It seems that demand for renewable energy power -- wind and solar especially
-- is starting to exceed supply and that according to a NREL report
by 2010 "clean-energy demand will outpace generation by at least 37%."
A growing list of states with Renewable Energy Portfolios -- now at 25 and
counting -- along with consumer concern over global warming is forcing more
businesses and governments to start buying green power, so much so that demand
is outpacing industry's ability to produce the necessary wind turbines and solar
panels.
By 2015, New England will face a gap of 1,500 megawatts — enough to
power 1.1 million homes — between green-energy resources and what's needed to
meet standards...
As might be expected, all this demand is driving up the price of renewable
energy.
"Partly as a result, renewable-energy prices have doubled the past
couple of years in Northeast, Mid-Atlantic and Plains states and have risen up
to 50% in the West...
In the Mid-Atlantic, wind-price increases bumped the average monthly premium
on utility bills for green-energy consumers to $10.50 from $6.30..."
Which leads to this story out of Florida.
Renewables Competitive with Coal?
Power generation from low-carbon energy sources like wind, solar and
nuclear should soon become competitive with electricity generated by coal, the
cheapest of fossil fuels.
That is a pretty dramatic prediction by Lew Hay,
the chief executive of FPL Group Inc., whose company is the largest wind power
producer in America and is now planning $1.5 billion solar thermal plants in
California and Florida.
So, how does he justify his view? Perhaps not surprisingly, Hay is now
evangelizing the idea that despite its cheap price, coal comes with huge social
and environmental costs.
In an interview with Reuters, he states...
"The thing we've got to make customers understand is that any fossil
fuel has a hidden cost that society is paying every day, and that is the cost of
carbon.
"We need to put a price on carbon, by doing so the illusion that
coal-produced energy is low-cost will go away."
Of course, what Hay is going is working hard to get FPL ahead of the
political curve where carbon taxes will someday in the not-too-distance future
be imposed on utilities and other fossil fuel energy producers, forcing them to
start pricing their fossil fuels more realistically, instead of internalizing
the profits and socializing the costs...
