Advocates for renewable energy hail net-metering as a key policy so that electricity from solar and wind is generated at the same place where it is consumed.

Supporters refer to it as the policy that lets the electric meter spin backwards. It allows people who own solar power systems, for example, export electricity to the grid and earn credits — at retail prices — on their utility bill.

In a new report called “Freeing the Grid,” advocates with several groups grade each state on their net-metering policies.

Environmental trendsetter California tied for fifth, but Colorado got the top spot.

Delaware, Maryland and New Jersey followed Colorado in the ranking, while California, Oregon and Pennsylvania tied for fifth.

Seven states flunked by default. Those states  — Alabama, Alaska, Mississippi, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee and Texas — have no statewide net-metering policy.

The report also looked at how states fare on another key policy: interconnection standards, which determine how a generator on a customer’s site plugs into the electricity grid.

The study named Virginia, Illinois, Oregon, Washington, DC and Maryland as the top winners, respectively, in that realm. California came in at number 12, with a B.

(Photo Credit: Cheryl Ravelo / Reuters)

Utilities across the United States are rushing to a federal stimulus program that is doling out money to create a “smart grid” — systems that will upgrade the electricity grid.

In this story, Reuters correspondent Eileen O’Grady looks at the tough job facing the U.S. Department of Energy: They have to divvy up $4.5 billion in smart-grid money among some 565 applications.

Smart grid technology measures and modifies power usage in homes and businesses and improves grid reliability. Experts envision that it will open the door to a new era with “smart” appliances that turn themselves on and off, electric cars, more renewable energy and more efficiency on power lines.

San Diego Gas & Electric is one of the utilities hoping to launch a smart grid through the federal program and has applied for $100 million in stimulus funds.

Their plan would build micro smart grids at the University of California, San Diego and a residential community in San Diego County. They would work with companies like IBM, Cisco and Itron on the system technologies, software and hardware.

“They not only have to talk with each other but we have to make sure the entire network is secure. So from an intellectual security standpoint, we’ll ensure that we have that set-up, that we have the ability to communicate from one device and we make it seamless for the customer,” said Michael Niggli, chief operations officer at San Diego Gas & Electric.

Another major issue the utility hopes to solve is what happens when energy from renewable resources is intermittent, with its power generated fading or spiking.

“If the wind stops blowing or if the sun has clouds that intervene, so you can be in a situation where the power supply is affected,” Niggli said in a phone interview with Reuters.

“That’s a lot different than what we have today … where it’s like driving a car. If you want to go faster, you push the accelerator.”

Niggli envisions a system where customers can control their home energy use remotely, turning on the air-conditioning from a computer through the Internet or even on  their handset.

Some companies that are partnering with utilities are not putting all their eggs in one basket in the race for the smart-grid stimulus funds.

IBM is working as a vendor with a dozen utilities that have applied for money.

If the smart grid is done right, then customers won’t even notice a difference, said IBM’s Stephen Callahan, who leads the company’s Intelligent Utility Network unit for the Americas.

“Those customers shouldn’t see anything but improvement in cost, reliability, all those things,” Callahan said.

We wanted to know what readers think about the federal program to jump-start smart grid projects. What should the DOE prioritize? What kind of projects would you like to see?

(Photo: The sun is shown as it rises between power transmission lines in Burbank, California. Photo credit: Fred Prouser/Reuters)

Okay, so it's August in Washington. It's hot. Congress has gone home. Even the summer interns are packing up and getting out of town. So it's not surprising that top members of the Obama administration might be ready for a road trip.

That's basically what the White House announced in a statement headlined: "Obama Administration Officials Travel America, Talk Clean Energy Economy." President Obama went to Indiana to announce $2.4 billion in funding for advanced battery and electric drive projects; Energy Secretary Steven Chu headed for Minnesota to look at renewable energy projects and North Carolina to announce a big grant to a lithium battery firm, finishing up the week in Massachusetts to talk about clean energy jobs at Harvard; Interior Secretary Ken Salazar went to a solar panel company in Colorado; EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson was in Florida and Commerce Secretary Gary Locke traveled to Missouri.

Probably only a crank would wonder just how much greenhouse gas all this official travel spewed into the atmosphere. There's no hybrid Air Force One, after all. But it does seem like an exquisite irony that, with the best of environmental intentions, the Obama team may have stomped all over the United States with a heavy-duty carbon footprint.

Is it fair to ask that when they talk the talk, they walk the walk -- or offset emissions by funding windmills or other projects that supply renewable energy? Let us know what you think.

For more Reuters political news, click here.

Photo credits: REUTERS/Jason Reed (President Obama speaks in Wakarusa, Indiana, August 5, 2009); REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst (Windmill turbines on Backbone Mountain in West Virginia, August 28, 2006)

Shares in the suffering utility Pacific Ethanol shot up over 8 percent on Tuesday, reaping the rewards of cheaper ethanol prices, thanks largely to what is expected to be a bumper crop year for U.S. corn. Units of Pacific Ethanol that owned four ethanol plants filed for Chapter 11 protection last month, stung by volatile prices for corn, low fuel demand and the credit crisis.

A senior company official at India’s Suzlon Energy said the wind power company was looking at selling assets and shares to lower its debt, dealing a major blow to its shares, falling 11.44 percent in Tuesday trading.

Turns out birds aren’t the only ones with a reason to steer clear of wind farms.

This past weekend, a wind turbine spinning out of control forced California police to shut down a stretch of highway because of concerns that it could break into large, heavy, and very fast-moving pieces.

California Highway Patrol officers late on Sunday morning noticed that a roughly 125-foot tall turbine on a ridge near the desert town of Tehachapi was spinning much faster than any of the others at the Tehachapi farm.

“It looked like a propellor on an aircraft… and it was giving off a loud racket as it failed,” Officer Ed Smith said.

Officials contacted AES, the power company that owns the wind farm, and Smith said “it was determined that if it failed it could cast large pieces of steel and debris up to a mile from where the turbine was.”

Given that the state’s Highway 58 is less than half a mile from the location of the crazy turbine, which could not be stopped, officials resolved to shut down the road. It was closed for about 10 hours, Smith said, at which point the winds had died down enough to reopen it.

AES spokeswoman Meghan Dotter said the turbine was made in the mid-1980s by Denmark’s Vestas and was smaller than more modern models. The turbine’s brake failed, Dotter added, causing it to spin out of control in high winds of more 50 mph. The site is being monitored now, she said.

Turns out this sort of thing has happened before. In upstate New York, a General Electric-made turbine caught fire and collapsed in March after a wiring malfunction at Noble Environmental Power’s Altona Wind Park. No one was hurt, but debris from the turbine was flung a quarter of a mile away.

To see just how dramatic a wind turbine failure can be, check out the video of a separate incident below:

(Additional reporting by Bernie Woodall)

Photocredit: Reuters/Fred Prouser (A large wind turbine is pictured near Palmdale, California)

We knew things were going badly in the renewable energy industry, but this week we got a grim view of just how ugly it looks out there.

Today, research group New Energy Finance said first-quarter investment in so-called clean energy fell 44 percent from the fourth quarter of last year, which in the immediate aftermath of the credit crisis wasn’t exactly stellar itself.

The $13.3 billion of investment in the most recent quarter was 53 percent below the same quarter of last year, the group said.

Things are particularly bad in the United States, where financing of new renewable energy projects was only $500 million in the first quarter compared with $2 billion in the fourth quarter of last year and $5 billion in the first quarter of 2008, according to New Energy Finance.

That report came a day after several other groups, including Deloitte and the Cleantech Group, gave their own views of first-quarter activity in clean tech. Though they had different authors, all the studies sent the same message: green investment is way down, and it’s unlikely to bounce back any time soon.

“The sector has been hit by an oncoming train,” New Energy Finance CEO Michael Lebreich said in a statement. “The industry has to get through some very difficult quarters until the stimulus funds start to flow.”

Companies including solar panel makers, wind turbine manufacturers and biofuels producers are all hoping that the U.S. government’s energy-focused economic stimulus plan will unlock lending for new projects such as wind farms and solar power plants.  Many analysts, however, say those funds may not materialize until the end of this year.

Billionaire T. Boone Pickens is spending $2 billion on a bunch of windmills and so far has no way to get the electricity they will produce to market. Last December he said he was a touch anxious, but on Wednesday he didn’t seem worried at all.

Pickens is pretty sure President Barack Obama will get some new power lines built to those plains in the Texas panhandle, but if need be, the oil-man-turned-renewable-energy-advocate will take his toys elsewhere.

“I’m not going to end up with 687 turbines in my garage. They are going to be sticking up spinning someplace,” he said at a San Francisco stop on his latest tour to drum up support for his plan to use wind power and natural gas-fueled vehicles to wean the Unites States from imported oil.

Pickens expects the price of a barrel of oil to hit $75 by the end of the year as OPEC cuts production, and between that and the desire for energy independence he sees Obama finding a way to get transmission lines built from Texas to markets that need electricity – like California.

One person at the event asked him if he could end up being the “czar” of transmission, production, and more. “Yeah, I’d love it,” the old independent “wildcat” oilman said.

But Pickens is not planning to build transmission lines himself, in part because of financing. “If you’re gonna be the czar of all those things you mentioned there, you’ve got to have a hell of a lot more money than Boone Pickens has got,” he said.

When Al Gore challenged the U.S. to produce all of its electricity from renewable sources in 10 years, his aggressive plan to combat climate change was pitted against another recently-unveiled proposal, from Texas billionaire T. Boone Pickens, to reduce the nation’s dependence on foreign oil.

 Gore, a former Democratic vice president and Nobel Prize-winning crusader on climate change, announced his plan last week and has since promoted it on U.S. television. Expected to cost between $1.5 trillion and $3 trillion,  Gore advocates investment in wind, solar and geothermal energy, energy efficiency and a national power grid. He also wants to retain energy production from nuclear and hydroelectric power plants, and invest in technology to store and capture carbon dioxide from coal and gas.

Inevitably, though, Gore’s plan has been compared to the so-called “Pickens Plan,” which calls for a massive switch to natural gas as a transportation fuel and a dramatic increase in wind power (Pickens, a legendary oil man, is currently spending $10 billion to build the world’s biggest wind farm — a project he expects will be a big moneymaker). Pickens says his $300 billion plan will reduce the amount of imported oil by more than a third in the next decade.

 With a media campaign funded by Pickens’ vast personal fortune, the “Pickens Plan” has its own commercials running on TV. Gore’s plan is backed by his “We Campaign,” a $300 million effort launched earlier this year to mobilize Americans on climate change.

On NBC’s “Meet the Press” this weekend, Gore said he disagrees with Pickens that natural gas should be the dominant transportation fuel, advocating for electric cars instead.  Pickens, however, has said Gore’s plan doesn’t do enough address the nation’s dependence on oil imports.

So who’s right? It’s clear that there is much that the men agree on, and both plans stand in stark opposition to President Bush’s recent move to increase domestic oil production by lifting the ban on oil drilling along most U.S. coastal states. 

But with a new president on the way who is expected to be kinder to the kinds of plans Gore and Pickens are proposing, which man do you think has the right plan for increasing renewables in the United States and reducing our oil consumption?

Renewable power sources like wind and solar are some of the fastest growing sectors in the energy business.

But this graph forecasts that coal, the dirtiest power source in terms of carbon dioxide and other pollutants, will still dominate global power generation growth for decades into the future.

The forecast, released by the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the statistics branch of the Department of Energy, shows that global power generated from coal will grow 115 percent to 15.36 trillion kilowatt hours from 2005 to 2030.  It assumes no changes in emissions laws or policy.

Global power generation from renewables including hydropower, meanwhile, will grow 58 percent to 5 trillion kilowatt hours over the same time period.

The world is trying to come to an agreement on a new greenhouse gas regulation pact at a U.N. meeting in Copenhagen late next year. Would a new pact eventually make this coal forecast overcooked?