Renewable Energy seems to be one of the big winners in the U.S. Stimulus package. The American Recovery & Reinvestment Act of 2009, an economic stimulus package with tax and spending provisions totaling nearly $800 billion, was signed into law on February 17. The act contains a number of tax provisions that provide significant value to companies and individuals that are focused on producing renewable energy or reducing energy use through efficiency. By extending, modifying and enhancing several renewable energy and energy efficiency incentives, the stimulus package creates many opportunities for taxpayers to get paid for going green according to an article in Greener Buildings.

In Washington, The U.S. Interior Department said it has created a special task force to speed the development of renewable energy projects on federal lands. “More so than ever, with job losses continuing to mount, we need to steer the country onto a new energy path,” said Interior Secretary Ken Salazar.

The government is on the right path from the point of view of creating employment. According to a study, Defining, Estimating and Forecasting the Renewable and Energy Efficiency Industries in the U.S and Colorado by The American Solar Energy Society, Boulder, Colorado, and published on Climatebiz it found that,

“U.S. RE and EE in 2007, generated $1,045 billion in sales and created over 9 million jobs – including $10.3 billion in sales and over 91,000 jobs in Colorado. The U.S. RE and EE revenues represent substantially more than the combined 2007 sales of the three largest U.S. corporations - WalMart, ExxonMobil, and GM ($905 billion) before the melt-down. RE and EE are growing faster than the U.S. average and contain some of the most rapidly growing industries in the world, such as wind, photo-voltaics, fuel cells, recycling/re-manufacturing, and bio-fuels. The study further noted the importance of policy settings to the industry and said that, with appropriate federal and state government policies, RE and EE could by 2030 generate over 37 million jobs per year in the U.S. – including over 600,000 jobs in Colorado. The study goes onto report that the stronger the policy settings the stronger the job creation potential from RE and EE”.

Mr Salazar has said that, “We will assign a high priority to identifying renewable energy zones and completing the permitting and appropriate environmental review of transmission rights-of-way applications that are necessary to deliver renewable energy generation to consumers. We have to connect the sun of the deserts and the wind of the plains with the places where people live.” Furthermore, “the task force will identify specific zones on public lands where the department can act rapidly to create large-scale production of solar, wind, geothermal and biomass energy”.

I have a concern about this approach, which is that although creating large-scale renewable energy projects on government land, maybe more administratively easier, it may lead to local opposition to fields of solar collectors and wind farms. I think the application of this policy should be integrated into communities in a more subtle way.

I have suggested that rather than create renewable energy parks, the better concept is take an integrated approach and create entirely sustainable communities, which I described on this blog - “Convert the suburbs to Sustainable Communities and Bank the Credits”  - In this post I was also suggesting that energy efficiency, sustainable water and waste management be included in the mix of energy solutions such that whole communities could become entirely sustainable. Put another way it involves a move away from the monoculture approach to development and requires the adoption of strategies that mimic nature, based on bio-diversity.

On another blog on Multiple Crises, which concerns sustainable agriculture, I have drawn on the work of Dr Lietaer who takes up the notion of bio-diversity for the banking system. I am applying it to renewable energy systems and I believe that that the more diverse the renewable energy systems are the more resilient the community will be.

The conceptual breakthrough, which applies to all systems whether they be energy, financial or agricultural systems identified by Bernard Lietaer and his colleagues, “takes its evidence from balanced, structurally sound, and highly functioning eco-systems is that that all complex systems, including our energy, monetary and financial ones, become structurally unstable whenever efficiency is overemphasized at the expense of diversity, inter-connectivity and the crucial resilience they provide. The surprising systemic ‘a-ha’ insight is that sustainable vitality involves diversifying systems”.

The interior department is in a good position to do this as it manages one-fifth of the U.S. landmass and over 1.7 billion offshore acres. It needs to create diversity at the core of the sustainable communities it wishes to create and not make the same mistakes with the new renewable energy solutions that we made with the old ones.

I first came across David Mills from the University of Sydney, during the Sydney Olympics. I was looking for world class solar  technologies for the greening of the Sydney Olympics. David was working on solar-thermal at that time. From the early 1990 till very recently funding in Australia was not forthcoming on the scale required.

However, success has come and I am very please for David. US investors have raised $40 million for the first factory for the “mass production of “solar parks”, which will open in Las Vegas later this month”. (Ben Cubby, Environment Reporter, June 16, 2008).

Solar-thermal reflects sunlight with mirrors to boil water and use the steam to spin turbines, generating electricity for a price not much higher than that of a coal-burning power station. But, unlike some solar power systems, they can function when the sun isn’t shining by storing heat in insulated chambers for a rainy day, and continue steadily feeding power into the grid.

Dr David Mills moved the headquarters of Ausra, www.ausra.com the solar company he founded, to the US last year and he “believes his technology will be competitive with coal-fired electricity, especially when it has the extra cost of having carbon capture and storage fitted,” and “Added to that, we obviously we have no fuel costs.”

This is a technology to watch!