Clean dream - a U.S energy transformation

The field of mirrors at the Sierra SunTower solar power plant, in California's Antelope Valley, reflects Barack Obama's vision of a fundamental change in the US energy supply. Photo / eSolar

It looks like an epic art installation: 24,000 heliostats arranged in precise rows across the desert floor in the Antelope Valley outside Lancaster, north of Los Angeles.

The heliostats - mirrors that follow the sun's arc across the Mojave Desert sky - sit on the Sierra SunTower site, a demonstration plant built by eSolar, one of a legion of Southern California renewable energy start-ups that are remaking the United States energy industry.

The Pasadena-based company pledges to make solar electricity "for less than the price of coal, without subsidies ... and truly change the world".

It's a promise that fits perfectly with President Barack Obama's vision of a fundamental US energy makeover, moving from fossil fuels such as coal and oil to renewable sources including solar and wind.

Like other solar arrays, the Sierra site, which covers 4ha, uses heliostats to focus sunlight on to a thermal receiver atop a tower (there are two towers at this location).

The sun boils water inside the receiver to create superheated steam, which drives a turbine and generates electricity. The steam cools, reverts to water, and the process repeats itself. The company says it can generate 46 megawatts of electricity from just 65ha, enough to light up 37,000 homes during peak sunlight hours.

But what makes eSolar unique, explains chief financial officer Merrick Kerr, is solar tracking software that calibrates heliostats to the sun's arc - at any time of day, on any day in the year, at any location - to one milliradian, a tiny measurement.

This makes eSolar a world player - a major project with India's Acme Group was announced in March - and illustrates the marriage of clean tech and IT knowledge that is reshaping California's economy.

Eighty kilometres east, outside Barstow, is another desert array, where 1800 heliostats focus sunlight on a receiver to create steam and generate electricity. The array was built by SolarReserve, a spin-off from LA's Rocketdyne, which powered the space shuttle, the Apollo lunar module and the International Space Station.

While many other solar plants work only when the sun shines, SolarReserve touts something new: molten salt that retains heat to produce power 24/7.

"We put the sun's heat into a liquid metal - molten salt or sodium potassium nitrates - and heat it to over 1000F or 550C," explains company president Terry Murphy. "You can put in all this heat then store it in a tank. It's like a solar dam. We capture the sun's energy and then we dam it up, put it in a bottle ... The beautiful thing about molten salts is you've trapped all this energy and a utility can turn the turbines on and off as needed."

Such technologies are potential game changers in a state blessed with sunshine and vast areas of uninhabited desert, as America turns to renewables. The US Energy Department calculates a 160sq km parcel of the Mojave - which straddles Nevada, Utah, California and Arizona - receives enough sunlight to power the entire country.

Compared with coal, responsible for 33 per cent of US greenhouse gas emissions, solar arrays leave no carbon footprint after manufacture of components and construction. They also, notes Murphy, get free energy without price volatility.

"That gets lost in discussion. I have a hard time believing solar won't be less expensive than any fossil fuel system in, say, 20 years. And have the environmental benefits that do the right thing for future generations on this planet."

The US ranks fourth - after Germany, Spain and Japan - in solar power production, generating about 8800MW last year according to the Solar Energy Industries Association, a trade group, or less than 1 per cent of America's energy usage.

Elsewhere in the state, clean tech and software companies, fuelled by venture capital and federal grants, are racing to develop everything from algae biofuel to photovoltaic panels that absorb 10 times more energy from the sun than current models.

Such projects mesh with Obama's belief that renewable energy will wean the US from imported oil, enhance national security, fight climate change and recharge the economy.

"From China to India, from Japan to Germany, nations everywhere are racing to develop new ways to produce and use energy," Obama said last month, as he began to turn up the heat to make the case for climate change reform. "The nation that wins this competition will be the nation that leads the global economy ... And I want America to be that nation."

But America's chances are weakened by red tape, political posturing, die-hard lobbyists from the fossil fuel industry, funding shortfalls, even conservationists.

Last March, in a dispute the Los Angeles Times dubbed "a duel in the desert", US Senator Dianne Feinstein, a clean energy Democrat, signalled that she would push for a law to ban wind and solar projects from hundreds of thousands of hectares of California's deserts. Her objective was to protect fragile ecosystems, home to imperilled tortoises, bighorn sheep and other species, by creating a national monument.

"I'm a strong supporter of renewable energy and clean technology," said Feinstein, mindful that both are vital factors in recharging a moribund state economy. "But it is critical that these projects are built on suitable lands." Feinstein's move, predictably, aroused cries of Nimby-ism - not in my back yard - among Republicans. It also exasperated California's Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who has cultivated a green image by moving to cut carbon emissions and tackle climate change.

"If we cannot put solar power plants in the Mojave Desert," he said, "I don't know where the hell we can put them."

Other California protests concern high-voltage transmission lines, such as a proposed US$1.9 billion ($2.6 billion) "superhighway" to carry energy from renewable sources in the deserts of Imperial County, west to urban consumers.

Protesters want to build power plants near cities, conserve energy and encourage home power generation. Either way, the US needs to build a digital "smart" grid that improves efficiency and conserves power by allowing utilities, consumers and renewable energy producers to interact.

Conservationists have won some battles. In September BrightSource Energy dumped plans for a 2080ha solar array on land Feinstein envisages as a national monument. And in Los Angeles, the mighty Department of Water and Power said it could string transmission cables along interstate highways instead of building the Green Path North, 140km across desert from southeast California and Arizona to LA.

"It's mostly a refinement process," says David Myers, executive director of the Wildlands Conservancy, which lobbied to keep desert habitat pristine. "There are about 155 solar and wind projects proposed in Southern California. Some are in the right place that environmentalists support. In other places companies just went out and got an application because the area was flat."

However Washington is slow in getting off the mark. The Obama administration has yet to issue a single permit for wind or solar development on public land, onshore or off, even as oil and gas drilling proceed (in September scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration urged Obama to halt offshore drilling, citing environmental threats, a move that if adopted could boost clean tech).

"Things need to be streamlined," says Murphy. "There are a multitude of agencies and processes that get involved ... a lot of agencies are asking for the same data. There's no reason for it to be so laborious."

This has worsened now agencies such as the Bureau of Land Management, which has jurisdiction over huge areas of land in the US West, are swamped by "hundreds" of applications for solar power alone.

California's dilemma, potentially pitting clean energy advocates against greens, is mirrored elsewhere in the US and highlights the legal, environmental and regulatory challenges to Obama's vision of a clean energy economy.

Perhaps the longest-running dispute concerns the Cape Wind Project, an eight-year-old proposal to build an offshore wind farm in Nantucket Sound, Massachusetts. The scheme, floated by a private developer, would position 130 turbines, with a hub height of 87m (the blades would bring this to 134m), over 6200ha of water.

"It's a fairly bold and provocative proposal," says Barbara Hill, executive director of Clean Power Now, which supports the scheme. "It's the first offshore wind farm in the US."

Clean-tech entrepreneurs hope it will trigger similar projects, plus jobs, near major US cities. Hill says 28 maritime or Great Lakes states use 78 per cent of US electricity.

But Cape Wind is also a cautionary tale. The US$900 million project, which will generate on average 170MW of electricity, 75 per cent of demand from Cape Cod, Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket, has had to negotiate a regulatory labyrinth, dealing with the US Army Corp of Engineers then, when the goalposts moved, the US Interior Department.

The Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound, a protest group, says turbines will endanger aircraft - the Federal Aviation Authority worries radar interference from spinning blades may pose a "presumed hazard" - desecrate sacred Indian land, disrupt fishing and "industrialise" a marine sanctuary.

"We're not anti-renewables," says Audra Parker, executive director of the alliance. "But this is the wrong place."

The controversy hit the radar in August when the First Family visited Martha's Vineyard. Ironically, one of Obama's mentors, the late Senator Edward Kennedy, whose family has a Cape Cod home, was fiercely opposed to the project.

Cape Wind - a test for the nascent offshore industry, with 11 out of 33 announced projects well advanced - is "by no means a done deal," says Parker. "They have no federal permits in hand."

Hill says critics have run a misinformation game, funded by "people who have made their fortunes in coal and oil".

The project is tied up in court.

Obama had his problems too. In September he was forced to fire Van Jones, his "green jobs" adviser and the head of Green For All, which seeks to involve poor communities in the emerging green economy, after conservatives outed Jones for having signed a petition that questioned whether the Bush administration "deliberately allowed 9/11 to happen".

And then there's the US Chamber of Commerce. Last August the business group tried to initiate a public hearing, a "Scopes monkey trial", to see if humans are warming the planet (evoking the 1925 case which challenged evolution; conservatives won that battle, but lost the war), a bid to block Government plans to curb greenhouse gas emissions.

The Environmental Protection Agency, which in September issued new rules that would reduce automobile greenhouse gas emissions, said a hearing on the science that "overwhelmingly indicates climate change presents a threat to human health and welfare" would be "a waste of time".

Significantly, several large corporations, including Apple and Nike, and at least three major US electricity companies, moved to distance themselves from America's biggest business lobby, a signal that corporate America is embracing the reality telegraphed by Obama's declaration.

Undeterred, the Chamber of Commerce, allied with the National Automobile Dealers Association, sued to block the new vehicle emission rules, specifically by challenging an EPA waiver that allows California to set its own standards.

The President has also met resistance in Congress, which has stalled a climate change law, expected to adopt a cap-and-trade model for dealing with emissions. A bill, with concessions to the fossil fuel lobby, energy's ancien regime, made it through the House of Representatives in June but the Senate has kicked the issue into committee and no law is expected this year.

Which leaves Obama in a tight spot on the global stage, where there are high expectations - ignited by the President's exhortation, voiced at July's G8 summit, to tackle climate change - that the US will go on the offensive against climate change at next month's talks in Copenhagen.

"Obama is going to have to make some very dramatic decisions in the coming few months," says Damon Moglen, Greenpeace USA's point man on global warming. "Because he will not have congressional legislation to stand on."

In short, the US needs to make a big splash, reducing its carbon footprint, as a carrot to induce China, India and other rapidly evolving economies to do the same.

China is playing both sides of the fence, racing to build coal-fired power plants even as it emerges as the leading player in solar and wind manufacture.

The world's biggest carbon dioxide emitter burns more coal than the US, Europe and Japan combined, but Beijing is worried climate change will dramatically reduce water supplies from shrinking Himalayan glaciers. Last year China-based Suntech took solar pole position, ahead of US firms First Solar and SunPower.

But as climate change worsens, and public concern increases, the pressure to rein in greenhouse gas emissions is likely to intensify. In May US economist Paul Krugman suggested that nations which refused to curb emissions could face trade sanctions such as taxes on their exports.

"They will complain bitterly that this is protection, but so what?" Krugman wrote in the New York Times, in reference to China's rapidly rising emissions.

"Globalisation doesn't do much good if the globe itself becomes unliveable."

Still, Obama will be able to claim some progress at Copenhagen. The EPA's adoption of California's vehicle emissions standard is supported by the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers. Cars and light trucks will have to get at least 35.5 miles per gallon by 2016, up from 25mpg now, the first major US move to curb greenhouse gas emissions on a national level.

The EPA also debuted plans to regulate large-scale emissions from power plants, refineries and other sources.

Last month an executive order gave federal agencies - which employ 1.8 million people, run 600,000 vehicles and use 500,000 buildings, making them America's biggest energy users - 90 days to decide how to cut greenhouse emissions.

The Obama administration has also primed the pump, most recently last month when it announced US$3.4 billion to help build a smart grid.

In all, US$80 billion of stimulus grants has been spent to "jump-start" clean tech, crucial earlier this year when venture capital melted away and banks were loath to loan. It is here - public money for clean tech - that Obama has the freest hand and can act fairly quickly, at least compared to the glacial pace adopted by Congress.

Clean tech's holy grail is to reach "parity", where the price of renewables is competitive with that of fossil fuels.

"At that point there will be no logical point for new fossil fuel plants to be built," says Chris Stimpson, executive campaigner for advocacy group Solar Nation.

Faced with conservative resistance to climate-change legislation, the administration has stressed both national security and job creation, countering hysterical claims that new energy will only cut jobs.

The American Solar Energy Society forecasts that a shift to renewable sources could create as many as 37 million US jobs by 2030.

"But while there is tremendous opportunity, there is also a real sense of urgency," says a recent ASES report.

"Every year's delay by policymakers has a highly disproportionate and negative impact on long-range growth.

"The longer that policymakers delay in implementing ambitious renewable energy and energy efficiency programmes, the more difficult it will be to achieve the report's goals by 2030."

California is leading the charge. Last month Schwarzenegger mandated that at least 33 per cent of state energy come from renewables by 2020 (it's now 12 per cent). This may have a ripple effect, as the state imports 30 per cent of its energy and some demand this should come from renewable sources.

Los Angeles, the nation's second-largest city, with its gargantuan water and energy appetites, is also a major player. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa has pledged that LA will be the "greenest big city in America".

Despite using hybrid electric cars for city staff, tougher efficiency standards in building codes, or self-compacting, solar-powered street rubbish bins, this is a work in progress. The big shift will be bringing renewable power to the megalopolis.

The state dominates US patent registrations for green technology, says Palo Alto research company Next 10, and investment in clean tech reached record levels last year, increasing synergy between venture capitalists and legislators. A June report, Clean Energy Economy from the Pew Charitable Trusts, said green jobs grew faster than the overall US job market up to 2007, especially in California, and federal grants are expected to expand this.

Last year venture capitalists put US$4 billion into clean tech. This plummeted to about US$500 million up to July, but has since rallied, not least because of Schwarzenegger's mandate. In September, Silicon Valley's Khosla Ventures said it had raised US$1.1 billion, mostly for clean tech.

The state's reputation as a cradle for innovation is typified by the California Institute of Technology, where scientists are working to increase tenfold the efficiency of photovoltaic panels, which generate power directly from sunlight, and by algae biofuel firms at La Jolla's "Biotech Beach", home to the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

While setting up, say, a solar array on the supply side is expensive, clean tech has stimulated less capital-intensive IT research into demand, helping business reduce its carbon footprint via water conservation, smart power grids or better waste disposal. Federal stimulus money has helped.

If renewables are to go mainstream, the real cost of fossil fuels must be addressed. "You have to include all the externalities of all fuel sources," says Stimpson.

Oil's externalities include protecting fuel shipment routes or mitigating environmental damage; nuclear power leaves lethal waste; while coal has huge pollution and health problems. Factor in public subsidies and none looks cheap.

"It's clear that solar is close enough to market parity so utilities are putting out contracts and big energy players are looking to play," says Murphy. "I think they'll be involved. Once we start cap-and-trade and tax emissions, and alternative technologies work, I don't see any reason why big companies won't turn the corner. Once you start breaking ground ... people will move into the market. That's when you'll get real acceleration."