Iowa Global Warming

by Phillip Brasher pbrasher@dmreg.com

Washington, D.C. – Construction of wind farms surged in Iowa and nationwide in 2009 after Congress included new financial incentives for the industry in the economic stimulus bill.

Industry officials say construction should continue relatively strong this year with the incentives still in effect. They say that long-term growth will hinge in part on whether Congress enacts a mandate for renewable energy and clears the way for new long-distance transmission lines.

The industry grew by 39 percent last year, adding 9,922 megawatts of generation capacity to exceed 35,000 megawatts nationwide, the American Wind Energy Association said in a report being issued today. About 4,040 megawatts of that new capacity came on line in the last three months of the year.

Iowa, which held on to its ranking as the No. 2 wind power producer, added 534 turbines in 2009 that can produce 879 megawatts. The majority – 393 – of those turbines, with a capacity of 618 megawatts, went on line in the fourth quarter.

Construction of new wind farms stalled in early 2009 after the meltdown on Wall Street and the freeze in the credit markets. Investment banks traditionally financed new wind farms by purchasing wind-production tax credits to offset income and lower their tax bills. However, in 2009 that tax credit was of little use to banks that were struggling financially, so Congress stepped in and created a new tax credit for the developers themselves as part of the stimulus bill passed in 2009. Companies that can’t benefit from the 30 percent tax credit were given the option of getting an equivalent grant directly from the government.

“It was extraordinary the impact that lifeline had,” Denise Bode, CEO of the wind association, said of the new subsidy. “The industry was dead in the water” in early 2009, she said.

The new incentives had less of an impact on companies that make wind turbines, blades and other parts. The wind industry gained 1,500 to 2,000 jobs overall last year, but that was only because employment for the new wind farms offset a drop of as many as 2,000 jobs in manufacturing, according to the association.

Texas extended its lead over Iowa in wind power by adding 2,292 megawatts of capacity in 2009, boosting the state’s total to 9,410 megawatts.

California remained No. 3 with 2,794 megawatts but added just 277 megawatts in 2009.

Bode said construction nationwide should continue fairly strong in 2010 ahead of the expiration of the incentives, but she stopped short of predicting it could reach 2009’s level.

She also said the industry’s long-term growth, and particularly the future of turbine manufacturing, depend on whether Congress enacts a renewable electricity mandate. Such a policy, she said, “sends the right signal to these manufacturers who are saying, ‘Where do I put my next factory? Do I put it in China or the U.S.?’ ”

A leading transmission company in Iowa, ITC-Midwest, has 9,000 megawatts of requests pending for connecting proposed projects, two-thirds of which are in Iowa and most of the rest in Minnesota. The company expects about 400 to 700 megawatts of those projects to be connected this year. ITC-Midwest, which operates lines purchased from Alliant Energy, connected 716 megawatts of wind power in 2009.

“We haven’t seen any slowdown in requests moving forward,” said Doug Collins, executive director of ITC-Midwest.

Like Bode, the company believes additional action from Congress would help speed development of the wind industry in the long term.

A bill passed by the Senate Energy Committee in 2009 would require utilities to get up to 15 percent of their power from wind and other renewable sources by 2021. It would also give federal regulators authority to intervene in disputes among states over paying for and locating the new long-distance transmission lines that would carry power from wind farms to urban areas.

ITC-Midwest’s parent company has proposed a 3,000-mile network of transmission lines called the Green Power Express to carry power from as far west as the Dakotas to Illinois and possibly Indiana.

The renewable power bill was intended to be married to broader legislation, now stalled in the Senate, that would set up a cap-and-trade system for regulating greenhouse gas emissions. Democratic leaders have not said whether they would take up the renewable power bill separately.

full story here

In the month since the House of Representatives passed the American Clean Energy and Security Act, the conversation about renewable energy and climate change has gotten more intense in Iowa. Letters to the editor and editorials fill the opinion pages on what should be done in the US Senate. Sometimes the Iowa Global Warming Campaign’s work can be frustrating, especially when huge companies like Warren Buffett’s MidAmerican Energy runs a full scale media campaign designed to mislead Iowans about the costs of action, but the experience is rewarding nonetheless. In an unprecedented move, the Iowa Utility Board is accepting public comments on what the American Clean Energy and Security Act will mean for Iowa. I’m not sure that the Iowa Utilities Board should be making a statement on federal climate legislation, but we will be working to get the right answers incorporated in any recommendation the IUB makes.

We know that transitioning to a clean energy economy will create jobs and improve America’s economic security, but that’s not why I came to work here. What good are rock-bottom numbers on your utility bill if it’s not safe for your children to go outside because of scorching temperatures? What good is 7 cents per kilowatt hour coal electricity when our grandchildren will find half of the species on earth have gone extinct? What good is a small utility bill if millions of homeless climate refugees come to our shores? What good are low energy prices when food prices have tripled due to good farmland turning to desert? I realize that these things can be hard to imagine – climate change is a crisis in slow motion – but we have to realistically look at the costs of inaction. The business-as-usual scenario of burning ever increasing amounts of fossil fuels will assuredly doom future generations of Iowans with more climate-induced catastrophes.

I’m tempted to ask “will we let America lose the clean energy race?” but the stakes are higher than that. Delaying strong action on climate change dooms all of the world’s economies, constraining them with violent weather, useless farmland, disease outbreaks, lost natural resources, and rising oceans.

I decided to spend my summer in Iowa because I believe we can change the way we do things for the better. We are not helpless in stopping the effects of climate change. We can take action to reduce our emissions of dangerous greenhouse gases like CO2 and make a more durable energy and transportation infrastructure. The US Senate needs to pass robust energy and climate legislation this year, and I implore Senators Harkin and Grassley to be leaders in making laws that will effectively deal with the problem of climate change.

Drew

The Iowa Utilities Board has opened an inquiry into the federal climate change bill.

Critics say it will significantly boost electricity costs.

Supporters say it will curb global warming and only have a moderate impact on household budgets.

In a notice of inquiry Thursday, the board said it has had discussions with utilities, the state’s consumer advocate office and the Iowa Department of Natural Resources, among others.

“It appears that Iowa utilities generally support the concept of a declining cap on greenhouse gas emissions. However, they have a number of concerns with how allowances are allocated in the bill,” the notice says.

Allowances, essentially permits to emit carbon, are at the center of a trading market the legislation creates.

The House approved the bill last month on a 219-212 vote.

Rob Hillesland, a spokesman for the board, said an inquiry into a congressional proposal “is not typical.” But he said the idea is “to learn as much as possible, to gather information and know what the impacts might be in Iowa.”

Read the rest of the QC Times story here.

When our children, and our children’s children, learn about this period of U.S. history, let us hope the extramarital travails of South Carolina’s governor will be no more than a footnote. Let us hope they are taught that this year, the U.S. Congress passed a new kind of law, one that not only reduced harmful greenhouse-gas emissions but set the United States on a new trajectory to a more just, healthy and sustainable future.

The U.S. House of Representatives did just that late last month when it passed the American Clean Energy and Security Act. The bill in its current form does not go nearly far enough in reducing emissions and is overladen with giveaways to powerful business lobbies, but it aims in the right direction. If our children are to have a world in which they have the luxury to study history, this bill (or a stronger version) must become law.

Some have balked at the price tag on this legislation, but that amount is trivial when compared with the price of inaction. In June, the U.S. Global Change Research Program, an interagency team of scientists, published a “game changing” report laying out the consequences of climate change to the United States if we do not act now. Among its findings: a rise in mean temperatures of 7.5 to 11 degrees Fahrenheit (turning Iowa’s climate into Mississippi’s by 2095), dramatic loss of coastal areas to sea-level rise and erosion, and a breakdown in the water cycle that will leave the southern half of the country in perpetual drought while subjecting the northern half – including Iowa – to torrential downpours and flooding. We are already beginning to feel these impacts: Temperatures have risen 2 degrees over the last half-century, and over the past century, the heaviest 1 percent of downpours increased 20 percent. The damage these trends will have on the economy is measured in trillions of dollars.

Read the rest of the Des Moines Register article here.

So the House passed the Waxman-Markey climate-change bill. In political terms, it was a remarkable achievement.

But 212 representatives voted no. A handful of these no votes came from representatives who considered the bill too weak, but most rejected the bill because they rejected the whole notion that we have to do something about greenhouse gases.

And as I watched the deniers make their arguments, I couldn’t help thinking that I was watching a form of treason — treason against the planet.

To fully appreciate the irresponsibility and immorality of climate-change denial, you need to know about the grim turn taken by the latest climate research.

The fact is that the planet is changing faster than even pessimists expected: ice caps are shrinking, arid zones spreading, at a terrifying rate. And according to a number of recent studies, catastrophe — a rise in temperature so large as to be almost unthinkable — can no longer be considered a mere possibility. It is, instead, the most likely outcome if we continue along our present course.

Thus researchers at M.I.T., who were previously predicting a temperature rise of a little more than 4 degrees by the end of this century, are now predicting a rise of more than 9 degrees. Why? Global greenhouse gas emissions are rising faster than expected; some mitigating factors, like absorption of carbon dioxide by the oceans, are turning out to be weaker than hoped; and there’s growing evidence that climate change is self-reinforcing — that, for example, rising temperatures will cause some arctic tundra to defrost, releasing even more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

Read the rest of Paul Krugman’s article here.

In a triumph for President Barack Obama, the Democratic-controlled House narrowly passed sweeping legislation Friday that calls for the nation’s first limits on pollution linked to global warming and aims to usher in an era of cleaner, yet more costly energy.

The vote was 219-212, capping months of negotiations and days of intense bargaining among Democrats. Republicans were overwhelmingly against the measure, arguing it would destroy jobs in the midst of a recession while burdening consumers with a new tax in the form of higher energy costs. The Congressional Budget Office has estimated the bill will cost households an additional $175 in energy costs in 2020.

The House’s action sent the measure to a highly uncertain fate in the Senate, where Majority Leader Harry Reid said he was “hopeful that the Senate will be able to debate and pass bipartisan and comprehensive clean energy and climate legislation this fall.”

Read the rest of the story here.

The House of Representatives will vote this Friday on the American Clean Energy and Security Act, and we need your help. The bill will jumpstart our economy, reduce carbon pollution, and break our dependence on foreign oil. And the bill will create thousands of jobs here in Iowa. Honestly, it’s a no-brainer. Congressman Boswell is a key vote; please, call 202-225-3806 and take one minute to tell him to vote YES on the American Clean Energy and Security Act.

Calls are important because it’s a clear signal that there is a strong demand for action; but if you haven’t yet, you can also use this link to send an email message: http://actionnetwork.org/campaign/Iowa_ACES

This could be the most important single minute you spend this week!

Chairmen Henry A. Waxman and Edward J. Markey, co-authors of the Waxman-Markey American Clean Energy and Security Act (H.R. 2454) said that a new analysis of the bill by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) shows the that the net annual cost of the legislation would be approximately $175 per household in 2020.  This analysis comes on the heels of a new study that found 1.7 million jobs would be created by the clean energy legislation.

“This analysis underscores that this legislation is effective and affordable,” said Rep. Waxman. “It sets America on a course of energy independence while taking significant steps to reduce dangerous global warming pollution.”

“Americans know that building a clean energy economy has real value, and this CBO analysis proves it,” said Rep. Markey. “Low-income American families will see a $40 benefit from using more wind and solar energy and less foreign oil. And for the cost of about a postage stamp a day, all American families will see a return on their investment as our nation breaks our dependence on foreign oil, cuts dangerous carbon pollution and creates millions of new clean energy jobs that can’t be shipped overseas.”

Please read the rest of the article here.

The climate challenge just became a lot more challenging. We know that man-made carbon dioxide emissions are accelerating global warming. But intrepid research has revealed an additional sinister threat: methane. The warming of the Arctic is releasing vast quantities of methane that has been locked away for centuries in formerly frozen soil. Once released, methane traps 25 times more heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide does. So it is more imperative than ever to slash greenhouse gases quickly, to slow the venting of methane.

The single boldest stroke must come from Congress. The House and Senate are debating legislation that would impose either a cap-and-trade system or a tax on carbon emissions. Certain politicians and CEOs are trying to talk Congress out of it. Our representatives should dismiss the detractors and pass legislation, before November. That deadline is crucial: nations will meet in December in Copenhagen to hammer out new international agreements to limit emissions. The U.S., shamefully, has never signed such a protocol, and leaders worldwide have said, plainly, that the Copenhagen talks will fail if the U.S. does not enact legislation to clean up its own backyard.

Read the rest of the article at Scientific American.

Representative Bruce Braley held a special event in Cedar Falls last Thursday focused on the American Clean Energy & Security Act (ACES). When I got my chance I asked him this question: “How will you bring along Members of Congress from carbon-intensive districts while ensuring the bill jumpstarts the renewable energy economy and lowers emissions?”

Representative Braley responding by mentioning that the current allocations of revenue in the ACES bill are not what he would have decided, nor would they be what a Representative from West Virginia would choose. The current allocation scheme in the ACES bill is a compromise between diverse interests. That was good to hear. Then he said that he wished the renewable energy standards were stronger and the efficiency standards were better. He was adamant that this bill and this year were the best shot the nation would have for truly comprehensive energy and climate legislation.

He went on to say he doesn’t want to sell-out his children’s future by passing a bill that won’t effectively transition us off of fossil fuels and avert dangerous climate change. He finished his answer by telling the story of how committed young people in green hard hats were present in the committee room while ACES was being debated. Those young people were the tangible reminder that this bill was about their future and their quality of life. Most memorable line: “The clean energy revolution has begun and we need your help to make it a reality.”

I look forward to seeing more strong leadership from Representative Braley as the legislation moves through committees and goes to the House floor. We need each Representative from Iowa, those being Braley, Loebsack, Latham, Boswell, and King to be fighting for a stronger renewable energy standard in the final ACES bill. Voice your support for strong comprehensive energy and climate legislation by contacting your representative: http://actionnetwork.org/campaign/Iowa_ACES

Drew