City of Austin Utility Services

In mid-September of 2009, Sharon and I were within 48 hours of finalizing a contract with Celestial Power of Austin to install solar panels on our home. I was eager to get this done. I'd spent two months researching and get the financing together. Then Celestial told us that the City of Austin was retroactively downgrading their residential solar rebate incentive because the city had already run through it's program funds. Anyone who had not already gotten their application in as of Sept. 1 would have to re-apply and would be subject to new rebate figures. Needless to say, the lowered rebate knocked us out of the game.

Our experience with solar, and Celestial Power's as well, was the national story with renewables, writ small. The cheapest electric generation source is and has been coal. Coal is also heavily subsidized by the federal government. Without these subsidies, large wind generation would be less expensive per K/w hour. But, the subsidies remain. And, in the absence of price stability brought about by a Renewable Energy Standard, small green energy businesses have been at the mercy of these state and federal boom and bust cycles for green power, depending on the political winds. It's been murderous to small companies like Celestial, though they're in it for the long haul and the future isn't coals (though it almost certainly isn't going to be fixed flat panel solar's either. The technology is evolving fast).

For the home owner, the upfront capital costs of wind or solar are often prohibitive. For instance, Dad and I looked last month at a wind turbine for his home in rural Central Texas. He could order just the turbine off the internet for about 8.5k and have it delivered to his door, but it takes the expertise and equipment to get the thing up on a tall poll and that is a little less than double the price. At current electric rates, that's not viable. In our case, here in Austin's burbs, wind is out. Solar, however, is not. Celestial offered us three systems ranked in price and efficiency. I wanted the most efficient system, also the most expensive, because it would pay back the quickest in energy savings (we did a spread sheet that showed a payoff period of seven to eight years), and, once paid, would run our meter backwards when the system was at peak. [On another day, I might post the figures]. The Austin Energy rebate was origianlly going to knock roughly 60 percent of the up-font costs. The was a 30 percent federal tax credit, part of the 2009 recovery/stimulus bill, that also brought down the costs, though we would get this back at tax time. Roughly, we were going to get a $35,000 solar rooftop array for 1/3 of the cost.

So, when that project went pooof, I set more modest goals for home efficiency. In the fall of 2009 I replaced all the incandescent lighting in the house that I could with CFLs (The exception is the bank of vanity lighting in the master bathroom which I knew Sharon did not want to replace with the softer more pleasing-to-the-eyes glow of the CFL. Even though you can now get bright white CFLs, not the gas station bathroom vapor lighting which really was an impediment, for some those little coils just aren't aesthetically pleasing in certain old fixtures.) I put the big screen tv, the VCR, the DVD player, and Wii system on a power strip which we turn off when not in use to cut down on the vampire power consumption. We had Green Collar Operations, another Austin native company, test our home for energy efficiency. It passed with flying colors, but they did weatherize our three doors downstairs as well as blow in another 8 inches of insulation into the attic. Here again, there were three energy rebate programs that kicked in (two local and one federal). Green Collar did all the paperwork. Again we were out of pocket something like $350 on a total bill roughly three times our outlay (I'll update the figures when I track down the paperwork, my filing system is shoebox these days). There have been other little changes also that I won't continue to itemize. All this is story and preface to the graphs above.

Has any of this made a difference? With most of the summer months behind us, it looks like the changes are paying off.

The last word, courtesy of Tom Friedman, goes to Jeremy Grantham, investor and $100 billion hedge fund manager, who, in his July letter to investors, noted: “Conspiracy theorists claim to believe that global warming is a carefully constructed hoax driven by scientists desperate for ... what? Being needled by nonscientific newspaper reports, by blogs and by right-wing politicians and think tanks? I have a much simpler but plausible ‘conspiracy theory’: the fossil energy companies, driven by the need to protect hundreds of billions of dollars of profits, encourage obfuscation of the inconvenient scientific results. I, for one, admire them for their P.R. skills, while wondering, as always: “Have they no grandchildren?”

Hedge fund managers like operating in a reality based world. So also the Pentagon. In 2007, the military broke with the Bush administration on climate, issuing a report that climate change threatened military readiness and strategic U. S. security issues. This year, the Pentagon's primary planning document, the Quadrennial Defense Review, "notes that climate change affects the Department of Defense “in two broad ways”: first, global warming impacts and disasters will “act as an accelerant of instability or conflict,” and second, military installations and forces around the globe will have to adapt to rising seas, increased extreme weather, and other effects of global warming."

Folks, climate is not some green feel good thing when these actors are involved. I could add the CIA and the nation's other intelligence gathering services, the nation's insurance companies, and the Saudi Government if I spend the research time. Addendum: The Department of Defense has committed to cutting emissions from its non-combat facilities by 34 percent by 2020. It's also the largest purchaser of green power in the U. S.

From Op-Ed columnist Tom Friedman:

"We’ve basically decided to keep pumping greenhouse gases into Mother Nature’s operating system and take our chances that the results will be benign — even though a vast majority of scientists warn that this will not be so. Fasten your seat belts. As the environmentalist Rob Watson likes to say: “Mother Nature is just chemistry, biology and physics. That’s all she is.” You cannot sweet-talk her. You cannot spin her. You cannot tell her that the oil companies say climate change is a hoax. No, Mother Nature is going to do whatever chemistry, biology and physics dictate, and “Mother Nature always bats last, and she always bats 1.000,” says Watson. Do not mess with Mother Nature. But that is just what we’re doing."

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/25/opinion/25friedman.html?_r=2&ref=opinion

From today's New York Times:

"But there's evidence for less optimism: 47 senators signaled discomfort with a federal policy reducing greenhouse gases. Six of them are Democrats, a margin of mutiny that, if transferred to a vote on climate legislation, would likely spell disaster.

They include: Sens. Evan Bayh of Indiana; Mary Landrieu of Louisiana; Ben Nelson of Nebraska; Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia; and Blanche Lincoln and Mark Pryor, both of Arkansas. All come from states that lean heavily on fossil fuels.

The final tally, combined with heightening campaign partisanship, seems to have convinced some cap and trade supporters that the climb is too steep this year."

Craven self interest trumps a future world worth living in.