Showing posts with label grid. Show all posts
Showing posts with label grid. Show all posts

Five Groups Urging Support for US Energy Efficiency Bill

A number of groups have written joint letters demanding that the federal government pass energy efficiency legislation currently working its way through Congress. On April 18, 2013, Mrs. SHAHEEN (for herself, Mr. PORTMAN, Mr. COONS, and Ms. COLLINS) read the bill known as the Energy Savings and Industrial Competitiveness Act of 2013. It was read twice and referred to the Committee on Energy and Natural Resource.

The five groups that signed the letter are:
The Alliance to Save Energy
The Bipartisan Policy Center (BPC)
Business Roundtable
The National Association of Manufacturers
US Chamber of Commerce’s Institute for 21st Century Energy

The letters state that the Act enjoys strong, bipartisan support and should serve as the foundation for a comprehensive national energy policy.

The White House letter encourages the administration to maintain energy efficiency as a top priority in shaping energy policy for the country. It describes the president’s target of doubling the country’s energy productivity by 2030, which was issued in the most recent State of the Union, as an “ambitious but achievable goal…best met through deployment of energy efficiency.”

Some of the signatories to these letters had previously released reports that substantiate the value of the bill.

The Alliance to Save Energy’s Energy2030 report, calls on the nation to invest, modernize, and educate in order to reach a goal of doubling US energy productivity by 2030.

BPC’s report America’s Energy Resurgence: Sustaining Success, Confronting Challenges, includes more than 50 consensus-based recommendations on policy options to diversify energy production, including through cost-effective energy efficiency.

The energy efficiency bill calls for:
  • strengthening national model building codes to make new homes and commercial buildings more energy efficient while working with states and private industry to make the code-writing process more transparent
  • Providing competitive funding to states in support of commercial building energy-efficiency financing; 
  • Encouraging the Department of Energy to work with private sector partners to invest in the research, development and commercialization of innovative energy-efficient technology and processes for industrial applications
  • Establishing a volunteer Energy Department program – SupplySTAR – to help improve the efficiency of corporate supply chains.
© 2013, Richard Matthews. All rights reserved.

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Cleantech the Next Great Investment Opportunity

Cleantech is the next great investment opportunity. Huge amounts of investment wealth have been generated by technological innovations like the microprocessor (personal computing and mobile telecommunications) and the Internet (ecommerce and social networks). These two innovations have ushered in unprecedented investment growth in the 1980s and 1990s. According to many predictions, Cleantech is the next investment wave that may very well eclipse the first two.

The rise of microprocessors driven the herculean growth of companies like Intel (NasdaqGS: INTC), Microsoft (NasdaqGS: MSFT), Dell (NasdaqGS: DELL), and Qualcomm (NasdaqGS: QCOM). The rise of the Internet has catapulted companies like Facebook to become a 28 billion dollar business. The Internet has also driven the stock of companies like Apple (NasdaqGS: AAPL) Google (NasdaqGS: GOOG), Amazon.com (NasdaqGS: AMZN), and eBay (NasdaqGS: EBAY).

Cleantech is all about efficiency and this is a mantra for businesses looking to be more competitive in economically challenging times. The cleantech revolution is sure to grow as oil becomes more scarce and more expensive. Further, attempts to minimize the impacts of climate change will drive the price of cleantech stock.

Cisco Systems (NasdaqGS: CSCO) vice president Marie Hattar has said that cleantech will not only be the biggest innovation ever, but it will be 10 to 100 times bigger than the Internet.

Here are some forecasts for cleantech growth:

The global market for all cleantech applications, which includes energy storage and the smart grid, will double to $3.6 trillion by 2020.

Morgan Stanley (NYSE: MS) projects that the annual smart grid revenues will double by 2014 and then quintuple to more than $100 billion annually by 2030.

According to Cisco Systems, the communications portion of smart grid investment alone is expected to reach $20 billion annually.

Goldman Sachs sees smart grid investments totalling $750 billion over the next 30 years.

Wind power is projected to expand from $60.5 billion in 2010 to $122.9 billion in 2020.

Solar photovoltaics are projected to grow from a $71.2 billion industry in 2010 to $113.6 billion by 2020.

© 2012, Richard Matthews. All rights reserved.

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