I also like the concept of natural gas fed fuel cell cogeneration systems for much the same reason. They have the potential for highly efficient energy conversion without adding power lines.

Is surely easier to build into new construction than to retrofit on a 100+ year old house, however.

Amen to that. Every form of energy has enviromental impacts and costs. While wind and solar are more costly than coal, I’d rather pay more for my power and leave a cleaner planet for my kids… that we can agree on KenG_CA

The Chinese are selling solar panels for $1/watt, which is pretty cheap (and the reason why manufacturing solar panels in the US can not create jobs – we can’t compete on that price). You cannot pay for a gas or coal fired plant, and the fuel it requires for less than that.

A viable wind energy system in the US requires investment in a modern (late 20th century) grid, as we need an efficient means to distribute power (the best wind is where people don’t live). Insuring a continuous supply of carbon fuels also requires continuous investment in developing the sources, building transportation channels from those new locations, and then dealing with the by-products. This ignores the externalized costs of destroying natural resources that don’t have a well-paid lobby to protect.

The best thing the federal government could do for clean energy is to eliminate indirect subsidies for the carbon industries, and let those prices rise. If mountain top removal coal extraction wasn’t allowed, the price of coal would also increase. The destruction that process causes to water and land resources that don’t belong to the mining companies is never included as part of the cost, and should be.

I’m not claiming that clean energy is our job salvation, but that it will lead to the creation of new jobs, and displace some that are lost. The US has a standard of living that makes building anything here in high volume economically unviable. This means we need to constantly create new industries to replace the ones that migrate to countries with lower standards of living. We missed that window for building solar panels, but there is still a huge opportunity for other energy technology, as there will always be room for improvement. Unlike the technology industry, where companies usually have products in development that will obsolete the ones they just introduced, the energy industry has no competition based on delivering a better product. That industry relies on locking in customers to the same product, and blocking the development of competition. The oil industry was behind the demonization of biofuels, as they did such a masterful job of making ethanol the villain in the recent food shortage (there were so many other factors), that the environmentalists forgot that producing and burning ethanol is still far less toxic to the planet than extracting, transporting, refining, and burning oil, and took up the anti-biofuels battle themselves (fyi, one of the biggest investors in ethanol was Khosla).

@y2kurtus, ok, fair enough, not enough solar plants in operation to draw an accurate conclusion, but if they aren’t built, you will never be able to make a determination based on actual operations. I think they are close enough to justify building more.

The cost of building a wind farm is viable in many locations, but not everywhere, and it’s not 5x coal. The biggest problem, which I alluded to earlier, is that the best places for wind farms is far from where the electricity is consumed. However, if you factor in the externalized costs of extracting and burning coal and gas, wind and a new grid (which we need anyway) is cheaper.

Solar PV is not 10x the cost of coal in the southwest deserts. I’m not suggesting putting solar or wind anywhere, just where it makes sense. Which is why we need an upgrade to the grid. It’s an investment that will pay dividends to the entire nation over the next three decades, if not more.

I don’t understand the objection to wind turbines. I think they are works of art, and better looking than the giant transmission towers and lines that people accept without complaint. I guess they might be noisy, but I would rather have noise than acid rain, mercury in my rivers and lakes, and coal dust covering my home. And I don’t even have to mention the chaotic climate that many people refuse to accept is related to burning carbon fuels.

Utterly laughable… wind done very very well is 2-3x the cost of gas and 5x the cost of Coal (unless you are adding a cost for carbon which is currently unpriced in the US.)

Solar thermal is a great technology and I see it doing great things in the next 10 years but it’s a MINIMUM of 5X the cost of coal. There are so few plants up and running that it’s hard to even get average prices because there aren’t enough datapoints to average.

Solar PV STARTS at 10x the price of coal fired power, I have no idea why you would want centralized generation from PV. The only place it makes any financial sence is where the transmission grid is fully saturated and putting it on rooftops will prevent the need for new powerplants and transmission lines.

I’m a huge beliver of and proponent for greener power, I agree that it is the only way forward. To say that they have reached price parody today is simply untrue… wind is the closest. We should be putting up wind turbines as fast as we can build them. I can tell you in my state they are not too popular with the locals though. If they are on your property you love them because you get big lease payments from the utility. If they are on your neighboors property you hate them because you get nothing and you still have to look at them. I think they are beautiful myself, but I’m in the minority on that view.

As for your argument that fossil fuel is only successful because it receives “constant political support,” I would say the political support is needed for sourcing and keeping the competition under wraps. But the bottom line is that carbon based fuels are cost effective, whereas nothing else is.

As Chris Rock puts it, “Nobody has to sell drugs, drugs sell themselves.” Similarly, nobody has to sell carbon, it sells itself.

I will concede that a federal support system could be effective for promoting clean tech, most effectively in partnership with private engineering/VC firms like Khosla’s. Private groups might receive a share of profits if they put up some capital; they would offer critical market-driven corrective to the highly politicized start up field.

As it stands, however, states and feds dish out money almost haphazardly to those who are connected and bray the loudest. There is no system to speak of. And every prominent failure sours the public on ALL subsidies for clean tech.

I guess you’d have to say I am in the sypathetic-neutral camp on public support for clean tech right now. You’ll have to do more to convince me, but it is doable.

It took about 15 years for the Internet to create any significant number of jobs, but when it did start, well, you can see the rest. There is a lot of inertia to overcome from incumbent energy industries, whose indirect subsidies are formidable. There hasn’t been seven years of significant subsidies or even major investment in cleantech yet (and let’s not give these statemtnets by Khosla the same weight as Moore’s law, which was proven), so maybe you’re a little premature in declaring failure.

No technology will stay deployed for over a century without constant political support, and that is what the fossil fuel industries have been most adept at securing year after year. At some point, bribery, I mean lobbying, won’t be enough to suppress clearly superior solutions. Like I said above, you need patience.

1) if it doesn’t scale, it doesn’t matter
2) radical innovation, not incremental improvement, is the key
3) if a technology can’t be weaned off subsidies in 7 years, it will never fly
4) “One of the problems is that environmentalists have been very, very good about identifying the problems we need to solve. They have been horrible at picking the answers.”

Ken_G, you have to understand that defending Greentech in the face of evidence that is failing (failing to provide sustainable technologies, failing to provide jobs) won’t get you very far. We’ve been overpromised and the backlash is now coming.

Khosla’s vision for market- and science-driven tech is the only way forward.

The mini-computer industry is a good example (one that I started my career in) – its heyday lasted about 20-25 years, but it did lead to personal computers. The semiconductor industry itself didn’t directly create many long term jobs in the US, but without it, there wouldn’t have been so many jobs in the electronics industries here, jobs that have remained until recently, when a lot of the semi design jobs moved overseas. Without the personal computer indsutry centered in the US, I doubt if the web and all those dotcoms become ubiquitious.

I think a similar case can be made for greentech. Jobs for manufacturing solar panels are leaving the US, but not the ones for installing them, or wind turbines (a big component of the cost of a wind farm is the cost of insatlling the turbines, much of which is labor). And if any federal government can ever get its act together with regards to a new power grid, that would create a lot of jobs here, not to mention a more efficient power grid (efficiency = more $$ available for other spending or investment). If we shift more transportation to electric power, it will create jobs for building out the infrastructure required to support it. Investing in biofuels (another greentech initiative that was slowed down by the temporary crash in oil prices and an incredibly successful and subtle PR campaign by the incumbent energy producers to make it look bad for the world) will shift jobs (and revenue) from overseas oil exporters to American ethanol/biodiesel producers.

Criticism of greentech’s return so far reminds me of the response to the overbuilding of fiber for communications networks in the late 90s – many people said it was unnecessary. It wasn’t unnecessary, it’s just that the fiber buildout wasn’t in sync with the consumption of the capacity it created, but it eventually proved to be a good investment. It is very difficult to synchronize supply and demand in mass consumer products that are transitioning from one technology to another, patience and confidence (I don’t want to use the word faith) are required.

I think a big problem with greentech is that it is poorly sold. There are many clean energy products that pay for themselves in less than 10 years, if not 5, and people and businesses should be flocking to them – where else can you earn a guaranteed 8%+ return on an investment these days?

The only surprising thing is that it’s taken this long. There is no possible way for green to make up for the millions of auto jobs lost; it simply isn’t nearly as labor intensive. The article above compares green manufacturing to semiconductor, where most fabs employ only a few hundred people.

I didn’t mean to say Inmelt was the best choice, just that he isn’t horrible and there is some justification for it (it is mostly symbolic, anyway). Would a successful entrepreneur or leader of a growth company have been better? Yes, but those people do not like politics, and probably aren’t interested in being part of that mess. Anybody who has risen through the ranks of a mature, giant multinational knows how to play political games, because that’s the only way they get to the top.

Also, I haven’t seen the greentech folks repudiating the meme about job creation, any repudiation being promoted now is a PR campaign against greentech by incumbents with no stake in progress.

ErnieD, I didn’t say he was perfect. I don’t like the military aspect of GE, nor their nuclear power business (at least not until they come up with a solution for dealing with waste), and I think their financial unit played a part in the collapse. But it’s politics, and unless you are a dictator or have both houses under the control of your own personal hammer, you have to compromise. Inmelt is a compromise, and Obama is going to be doing a lot of compromising, if he wants to get anything fixed, instead of just getting re-elected.

You also kind of implied that GE’s only involvement in clean tech is in turbines. They also are a leader in wind energy, and are getting involved in solar. They are committed to selling products that consume less energy, and being a leader, that gets the sheep among the corporate world to do the same thing.

Is Inmelt’s selection an A? No, but it’s not an F. You all need to lower your expectations, we’re still recovering from 8 years of bad decisions.

I will take Gates’ opinion anyday over a salesman’s and the local Congressional delegation.

GE makes lots of medical equipment. That’s nice, but one of numerous reasons for the US’s astronomical healthcare costs is too many unnecessary and expensive medical devices.

On the clean-tech front, GE has always done a great job with things like turbines. Ultimately, energy independence and sustainability will need to be fought in a house-to-house battle with things like smaller cars, better suburban garden designs etc. The vast majority of the solution is in small changes of how we live day-to-day, similar to the solutions to better retirement savings etc. Unfortunately, that is unpopular politically since everybody wants the solution to be somebody else’s problem.

As far as I can tell, Immelt has spent a fair amount of time lobbying for the US government to purchase things that are a waste of money as part of the military-industrial and helath-care-industrial complexes. We need people in these positions who are focused on making government spending more efficient while creating good jobs inside the US. Is Immelt the man for this or is he just another fox being put in the hen house?