Bush Could Boost Green Power With Buying Power
Today, the south wall of the Energy Department’s fortress-like Washington headquarters is a fitting symbol for an agency that itself has never quite established an identity: a 32,100-square-foot blank slab of concrete.
Shortly before leaving office, however, the Clinton administration awarded a Chicago architectural firm a contract to explore converting the wall into something quite different: a vast solar array that would provide much of the building’s heat and power.
The firm--Solomon Cordwell Buenz & Associates--has produced a spectacular design of a graceful, canopy-like Sun Wall that utilizes both photovoltaic panels and hydronic systems, a liquid-filled vacuum tube that warms with the sun’s rays and can heat the building in winter. Now the firm is working to estimate the cost of constructing its creation. “We think it would certainly draw attention to this whole new type of energy,” says Martin Wolf, one of the designers. “Which would be quite timely given where we are as a nation.”
The Sun Wall stands as a riveting symbol of Washington’s potential to advance the development of renewable energy through a tool that’s received almost no attention in the energy debate: the purchasing power of the federal government itself. Through all its departments and agencies, the federal government spends about $8 billion a year on energy--probably more than any other single consumer in the world. That buying power gives the government enormous leverage to speed the growth of renewable energy sources such as solar, wind, geothermal and biomass.
Today, all of these renewable sources (leaving aside hydropower) provide only 2% to 3% of the nation’s electricity, mostly because they are too expensive to compete with conventional sources. Renewables are in the same Catch-22 as many new technologies: Because they are too expensive, they cannot attract the sales that their makers need to both generate economies of scale and invest in more advanced manufacturing techniques.
Government can break the logjam by providing a market that allows renewable manufacturers to advance up the learning curve and lower the price of their technologies to a level that makes them commercially competitive.
Washington has done precisely this before, most important with a product that has literally transformed modern life: the microchip at the heart of the computer revolution. The first microchips were much too expensive to attract commercial customers, but in the early 1960s, both NASA (using the chips for the Apollo space program) and the Defense Department (embedding the chips in nuclear weapons) provided a guaranteed market--buying the chips without regard to cost.
As author T.R. Reid recounted in “The Chip,” his history of the microchip: “The government’s willingness to buy chips in quantity at premium prices provided the money the semiconductor firms needed to hone their skills in designing and producing [the] circuits. . . . As experience taught ways to solve the most common production problems, the cost of making a chip began to fall.”
Three years after the government first started buying, the cost fell far enough that the microchip attracted its first commercial customers. Its been a breakneck race to the future ever since.
An alliance of centrist House Democrats has sensibly proposed that Washington do the same for renewables. Earlier this month, the House New Democrat Coalition introduced legislation that would commit the federal government to purchasing a fixed percentage of its power from renewable sources; the bill also would provide grants and loans to encourage state governments and nonprofit organizations to also buy green. “Today, you can’t generate the revenue to make these technologies more commercially viable,” says Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.), one of the bill’s principal authors. “The way to get around that is to use the market power of the federal government to help create a market.”
With little attention, former President Clinton already committed the federal government to that course. In 1999, he signed an executive order mandating that Washington expand its use of renewable energy; later, his administration set a goal of obtaining 2.5% of its electricity from renewable sources by 2005, almost eight times more than today. Smith believes that goal is already too low, largely because renewables are becoming more competitive as conventional sources grow more expensive.
Even so, this initiative is already spurring new thinking. As part of the overall plan, the Clinton administration committed to installing 20,000 solar systems on government facilities by 2010; by the time he left office, 2,000 were already in place.
“It’s out in the national parks, where instead of having to string power lines to remote buildings, they are putting up solar systems,” says Dan Reicher, the assistant secretary for energy efficiency and renewable energy under Clinton. “There are several thousand units of naval housing in Hawaii that are now using solar. They are being used at the Coast Guard Station in Boston, a post office in Nantucket.”
Another dramatic project is underway in Nevada. Shortly before Clinton left office, his administration signed an agreement with a private consortium to lease part of an old nuclear test site in the desert northwest of Las Vegas as a giant wind power facility that would be the nation’s second largest. Eventually the site is expected to provide power for California and Nevada and the Energy Department itself from 500 wind turbines.
President Bush hasn’t tipped his hand entirely on leveraging government buying power to boost renewables. Disturbingly, the national energy plan that Bush released earlier this month says not a word about the use of government procurement. But Jill Schroeder, an Energy Department spokeswoman, says the administration has indicated no intention to revoke the Clinton executive order--and the green power purchasing goal it includes.
As for the Sun Wall, Energy Department officials sound dubious--but they are reserving judgment until Wolf’s firm completes its cost estimates. The cost could indeed be intimidating; even the Clinton team hadn’t committed itself to construction. But such a strategic purchase can pay dividends for decades--a fact evident in the debt that everyone who uses a computer still owes to the critical investments NASA and the Defense Department made in another technology 40 years ago.
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Ronald Brownstein’s column appears every Monday. See current and past Brownstein columns on The Times’ Web site: https://www.latimes.com/brownstein.
