As I discussed in a previous blog, renewable energy trade disputes are becoming a particularly contentious issue between many nations. The United States and China are facing off in one of the most publicized of these disagreements. Further action was taken last week as the U.S. Department of Commerce made its second ruling of the year on this issue, placing tariffs on solar photovoltaic (PV) imports from China.

A Suntech Power Holdings employee at a Chinese solar PV manufacturing facility. The Commerce Department ruling placed a 31.22% tariff on Suntech products. (source: China Daily)

The previous Department of Commerce ruling from March 2012 placed countervailing duties on solar PV imports in order to balance what the department determined to be illegal subsidies to solar PV manufacturers from the Chinese government. The initial tariff rates, which were set between 2.9 and 4.73 percent, came in much lower than what was expected by most experts.

The new preliminary ruling comes in response to the second set of claims by the Coalition for American Solar Manufacturing (CASM) that Chinese solar companies have been dumping their products in the U.S. market at below market value. The coalition, led by SolarWorld USA, looks to level the playing field for U.S. solar manufacturers against what they see as artificially cheap imports coming from China.

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Following the devastating 2010 earthquake, much of Haiti’s infrastructure, including its already limited ability to manage its municipal solid waste (MSW), was damaged or destroyed. Due largely to lack of public waste management services and sewage treatment centers, thousands of people have died and hundreds of thousands more have suffered through outbreaks of cholera. Haiti needs improved sanitation, and improving and building infrastructure to reliably collect MSW will help achieve this goal.

Improved MSW management can also increase power generation from domestic sources in Haiti, providing some relief from its dependence on imported heavy fuel oil and helping to electrify a country where 75 percent of people do not have access to the grid.

Recent studies show that there is potential for waste-to-energy in Haiti. The metropolitan Port-au-Prince area produces between 1,400 and 1,600 tons of MSW every day. Before the 2010 earthquake, as much as 40 percent of Port-au-Prince’s MSW was collected by waste management services. If the metropolitan area can return to this collection rate and use the MSW as a fuel for power generation, Port-au-Prince could fuel a 5 MW power plant. While this may seem like a marginal addition, it would contribute significantly to Haiti’s power mix considering that the country’s entire operational installed capacity is little more than 100 MW.

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As we described last week, there is a growing consensus that the time is right for a global shift to sustainable energy solutions. The Worldwatch Institute, in partnership with the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), is taking a leading role in facilitating this shift through the creation of the Renewable Development Index.

Countries enacting renewable energy support policies or targets as of 2011 (source: IPCC SRREN, 2011)

Countries worldwide are recognizing the significant role that renewable energy can play in their national development. As of early 2011, nearly 100 countries had set targets for wind, solar, biomass, and other renewable energy sources. Governments aim to utilize these technologies to meet a host of development priorities, including reducing carbon emissions, expanding energy access, enhancing energy security, and creating new jobs and industry opportunities. At both the national and sub-national levels, they are using a variety of policies and measures to support centralized and decentralized renewable energy installations and to work toward achieving wider national development goals.

Despite the many forces working in favor of renewables, growth within the sector remains constrained. Although renewable energy technologies accounted for roughly half of the newly installed power generation capacity during 2010, they were responsible for only 16 percent of global final energy consumption and close to 20 percent of electricity generation that year. Government support policies, adopted by 118 countries as of early 2011, continue to be one of the most significant forces driving renewable energy deployment.

To more efficiently harness the potential of renewables to meet national goals, decision makers must have a better understanding of the effectiveness of support policies in overcoming existing barriers. Countries continue to face challenges in the renewables sector, including gaining public acceptance and buy-in, mobilizing financing, attracting investment, building local capacity, and facilitating collaboration between the public and private sectors.

Worldwatch is partnering with IRENA to help governments develop policies aimed at best utilizing their renewable energy potential as a way to meet national growth and development goals. As a first step, the project seeks to identify barriers constraining renewable energy deployment. It will then develop strategies that can help policymakers overcome those hurdles. Finally, the project aims to develop a set of renewable energy indicators, with the goal of helping countries assess the effectiveness and efficiency of renewable support programs. Because there is no one-size-fits-all policy for promoting renewable energy, fully inclusive indicators can help to inform the policy community in a more objective manner.

In the development arena, well-designed high-level indicators, such as the United Nations Development Programme’s Human Development Index (HDI), have been influential in shifting the discourse away from one based solely on domestic economic growth, providing the basis for a deeper understanding of national progress toward overarching development goals. The Renewables Development Index aims to achieve a similar goal in the energy arena, steering the discourse away from conventional fossil fuel energy usage and toward cost-effective and more environmentally sound approaches to meeting global energy needs.

Worldwatch has actively engaged key actors from leading institutions in the international energy community on this initiative. Through a series of interviews, meetings, and workshops, the Institute’s Climate & Energy team will facilitate the development of this new and influential tool.

When completed, the analysis based on this small and concise set of renewable energy indicators will provide governments with a powerful new instrument to better inform domestic policymaking, implementation, and monitoring processes. The indicators can be used for steering investments, refining policy choices, optimizing the impact of limited financial resources, and understanding the outcome of policy results supporting renewable energy development.

This Renewables Development Index will fill an important void in the landscape of sustainability indicators and will help countries in their important transition to a sustainable energy future.

Evan Musolino is a Climate and Energy Research Associate at the Worldwatch Institute, an international environmental research organization. Alexander Ochs is Director of the Climate and Energy Program at Worldwatch.

Energy is at the very foundation of modern economies. Since the Industrial Revolution more than 200 years ago, all countries—if at a quite different pace—have developed on the back of the production and burning of fossil fuels. There is no doubt that the comfortable lives many of us live today would not be possible without the fossil-fueled development of the past. But the merits of fossil fuels now seem less and less convincing.

Renewable energy technologies, such as solar PV, offer the potential to benefit countries around the world. (source: Flickr user Magharebia)

First, take subsidies. Currently, we throw about 10–12 times more taxpayer money at fossil fuels than we put into renewables—and those are just direct subsidies. In addition, local air and water pollution and related health consequences cost trillions of dollars worldwide. The U.S. National Research Council estimates the “hidden” costs of fossil fuels in the United States (the real costs to society that are not reflected in the fuels’ market prices) at $120 billion annually. The Chinese government believes pollution and related healthcare costs amount to 10 percent of that country’s GDP.

Then there is the volatility of fossil fuel markets, which has arguably led to enormous economic instability in the recent past. Just to give an idea of what this volatility means to some nations: an increase in the world oil price of just $10 can mean a decrease in the GDP of some small nations of 2–3 percent.

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For the seven countries of Central America—Belize, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Panama—a transition to renewable energy and low-carbon technologies is imperative. In addition to reducing greenhouse gas emissions, a robust renewable energy industry can stimulate the growth of clean energy manufacturing and help address regional problems such as an energy supply deficit, low rural electrification, and poverty.

Yet despite abundant renewable energy resources—including wind, solar, biomass, and geothermal—Central America remains highly dependent on imported oil, fossil fuel-based electricity, and unsustainable large hydropower. In the 1990s, deregulation of regional electricity markets opened the power sector to private investments, but it also paved the way for a surge in fossil fuel-based capacity, as most governments did not consider policies to promote renewables during the early stages of these reforms.

Solar panels used by Alimentos Campestres to dry fruits and vegetables. Source: Alimentos Campestres.

As the region’s economies expand, led by strong growth in Panama, energy demand is expected to surge. As a result, these countries will only become more vulnerable to high and fluctuating energy costs from imported oil.

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In a previous blog, I discussed the value of pumped-storage hydro systems, especially when it comes to integrating intermittent renewable energies like wind and solar into a power system. However, traditional pumped-storage hydro systems require two reservoirs of fresh water (one upper and one lower), which are not always available at locations that might otherwise benefit from an energy storage system. An exciting technology that tackles this problem – requiring only one on-land reservoir – and that has gained recent momentum is seawater pumped-storage hydro.

An aerial view of the seawater pumped-storage hydro system on Okinawa Island (Source: wastedenergy.net)

Seawater pumped-storage hydro works similarly to traditional systems. Excess electricity from fossil fuel, nuclear, or renewable energy power plants is used during periods of low power demand to pump water uphill to be stored in reservoirs as potential energy. Then, when demand peaks the reservoirs are opened, allowing water to pass through hydroelectric turbines to generate the electricity needed to meet power demand. The main difference for seawater pumped-storage is that instead of having a lake, river, or some other source of fresh water serve as the lower reservoir, these systems pump salt water uphill from the ocean to a land reservoir above. This lowers the system’s fresh water footprint and greatly expands the potential for pumped-storage hydro worldwide because seawater pumped-storage is much less site-specific than traditional systems.

There is currently one seawater pumped-storage hydro system operating in the world, on the northern coast of Okinawa Island, Japan. The system began operation in 1999 and has the potential to generate up to 30 megawatts (MW) of power. The hydropower plant has a total head – the vertical distance, or drop, between the intake of the plant and the turbine – of 136 meters and the upper reservoir is located just 600 meters from the coast.

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With the continued advancements in the development of renewable energy technologies and their ever-increasing cost competitiveness, there is more and more money at stake for countries and companies alike. A number of countries have recently found themselves at odds with one another over the international impact of certain domestic financial support policies for promoting renewables. The United States, China, Japan, Canada, and the European Union, discussed here, along with many others, currently find themselves on varying sides of major international trade disputes on this topic. High-end manufacturing of renewable energy technology components, and the money and jobs this brings with it, is becoming an increasingly important component for policymakers and an increasingly contentious issue at the international level.

A worker assembling solar PV panels in a Suntech Power Holdings Co. factory in Jiangsu Province, China. (Source: Bloomberg)

The dispute between the United States and China over solar photovoltaic (PV) manufacturing is probably today’s most high-profile renewable energy trade dispute. The Chinese share of global solar PV manufacturing has grown at an incredibly fast pace since the country entered the market, as Chinese manufacturers have rapidly expanded from a 15 percent market share in 2006 to provide nearly half of the world’s total solar PV manufacturing output today. As of 2008 China produced 2,500 megawatts (MW) of solar cells, up from just 4 MW a decade earlier, as reported in the Worldwatch-REEEP report Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency in China. With an existing installed capacity of 900 MW at the end of 2010, much of this production is being slated for export.

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Earlier this month, the Indian state of Maharashtra announced a US$25 million smart grid program covering electricity distribution networks in eight cities including Mumbai, the country’s financial capital. Maharashtra has commissioned the German company Siemens to install smart grid technologies in the state to tackle issues such as outages and electricity theft. Smart grid technologies will also improve the efficiency of the existing and very inefficient Indian transmission and distribution network. Currently, nearly a quarter of electricity in India (and up to half in some states) is lost while being transported through the grid system (compared to 7 percent in the U.S.), causing economic losses to utility companies and contributing to widespread electricity shortages.

Evidence of an inefficient electricity grid in Hyderabad, India. Image source: Flickr user mckaysavage.

This investment is just one aspect of a recent major push for smart grids by state and central government in India. India ranks third in the world for smart grid investment behind the U.S. and China, and its investment is growing rapidly. A meeting of the Central Electricity Authority on March 5 led to a proposal for nearly US$50 million of funding from the Ministry of Power for smart grid projects across India. State governments are also expected to contribute about half of the funding required for smart grid pilot projects.

The Ministry of Power has established the India Smart Grid Forum – a voluntary consortium of power utilities, implementing agencies, smart grid consultants, research agencies, and nongovernmental organizations, among others – which aims to bring different stakeholders together to ensure a rapid and efficient deployment of smart grid technologies in India. The Forum calls for implementation of smart grid systems in all state capitals and large cities between 2014 and 2017.

The Ministry of Power also established the India Smart Grid Task Force (ISGTF), which serves as a platform for smart grid activities, but also focuses on coordinating initiatives between different government Ministries.

Recent weeks have seen smart grid projects moving forward in other Indian states as well. Puducherry was selected by ISGTF as one of eight pilot cities for smart grid technologies, and it recently signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Power Grid Corporation of India to install smart meters on 87,000 homes over four months this year. The new advanced metering infrastructure will allow customers to view their electricity billing in real-time and better manage their consumption. Smart meters will also enable the Puducherry Electricity Board to detect electricity theft, which costs India billions of dollars each year, much more easily. The city of Bangalore also launched a program this month that aims to install one million smart meters over the next year.

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Last Sunday marked the first anniversary of an unprecedented catastrophe that struck northern Japan. On March 11, 2011, a tsunami—triggered by a major earthquake—swept into the area surrounding the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station, disabling the cooling capabilities of three of the plant’s oldest reactors. In the days and weeks that followed, as workers struggled to cool and dismantle the plant, reactors 1, 2, and 3 went into meltdown. A series of explosions and fires led to the release of radioactive gas, and fears of contamination ultimately prompted the evacuation of approximately 100,000 people from the immediate area; some 30,000 may never be able to return to their homes.

The Fukushima Daichi Nuclear Power Plant, 25 March 2011 (Source: econews)

The first anniversary of this horrific event—the worst nuclear disaster since the Chernobyl accident in 1986—is a time to commemorate the more than 20,000 people who died in the initial earthquake and tsunami, as well as the courage of those who risked radioactive exposure to regain control of the plant and prevent further calamity. But it is also a time to look forward—to examine what we have learned from Fukushima and what it means for the future of energy in Japan and around the world.

A “moment of opportunity” for Japan

In the aftermath of the meltdown, the Japanese public turned decidedly against nuclear power, marking a pronounced change in a nation that was once one of the world’s most committed proponents and producers of civilian atomic energy. Japan has been using nuclear power since the 1960s, and in 2010 it generated 30 percent of its electricity from nuclear plants. In the past year, however, the vast majority of nuclear facilities in Japan have been shut down for routine maintenance or “stress tests” and have not yet been reopened. Today, all but two of Japan’s commercial reactors have been shut down, with the last one scheduled to go offline as early as April. The country has also abandoned any existing plans to build new reactors.

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In November of 2011 a solar photovoltaic (PV) energy project began construction on the roof of the “National Energy Commission” (CNE) headquarters in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic.  CNE is the institution responsible for overseeing the energy sector in the Dominican Republic.  The solar PV energy project was completed in January 2012 with a total installed capacity of 22 kilowatts (kW) and an estimated annual generation of 35,358 kWh, around 20 percent of the building’s annual electricity consumption.  The solar PV energy system is connected to the utility grid Edesur under a net metering contract. CNE is using the solar panels to help mitigate its use of electricity from traditional fossil fuel sources, such as coal, fuel oil, and diesel.  The project’s main goals are to lower the headquarters’ greenhouse gas emissions and to demonstrate for others the feasibility of installing solar PV energy systems on roofs.

The solar PV system at CNE's headquarters (Source: CNE).

This project was made possible by the Energy and Climate Partnership of the Americans (ECPA), which was created in 2009 in order to fund energy efficiency and sustainability initiatives.  Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton invited Caribbean governments to join the ECPA Caribbean Partnership, which is administered by the Organization of American States (OAS) and is supported financially by the Department of State.  In addition, Secretary Clinton announced that members will receive grants to improve renewable energy development.  In 2010, Caribbean governments submitted over 20 proposals to the OAS for renewable energy development projects.  The OAS awarded technical assistance to six projects in six countries.  One of the six projects was for the construction of a solar PV energy system at the CNE headquarters. In addition to receiving assistance from the OAS, CNE received assistance from the Caribbean Renewable Energy Development Programme (CREDP), which is administered by the “German Society for International Cooperation” (GIZ) and is supported financially by the Austrian Development Agency. The total cost of the project was around US$ 130,000 with ECPA contributing US$ 65,000, CREDP contributing US$ 35,000, and CNE contributing US$ 30,000.

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