Renewable Energy

Some people assess the relative attractiveness of alternative transportation fuels by comparing their greenhouse gas emissions to those associated with oil. Others compare different fuels based mainly on price: cheaper fuels, in this view, are invariably the most desireable ones. A third crowd, meanwhile, focuses first on whether any particular fuel can be produced at home rather than abroad. Each of these lenses leads to different conclusions: corn ethanol, for example, scores poorly on the first measure, moderately on the second, and well on the third. In our recent article in Foreign Affairs, Bob McNally and I emphasized another priority for energy policy: tamping down the sort of fuel price volatility that can pitch economies into recession. Indeed the importance of dealing with volatility is increasingly recognized by analysts and policymakers alike. To the best of my knowledge, though, there’s no assessment out there of the relative merits of various alternative fuels when views judged by this criterion. I thought I’d take a stab, in this post, at sketching out what such an assessment might look like. I come to pretty pessimistic conclusions regarding the potential contribution of alternative fuels to damping volatility. Fleshing this out would be a great project for a public policy student. Consider four different alternative transportation fuel sources: biofuels (ethanol or biodiesel), synthetic liquids (gas-to-liquids, coal-to-liquids, or biomass-to-liquids), natural gas in vehicles, and electricity. What we’re interested in is the short-run elasticity of supply for each fuel. If availability of a given fuel can grow quickly in response to rising prices, that can blunt the price rise, all of which dampens volatility. If availability is fixed, though, we wouldn’t see any supply response to rising prices, and hence wouldn’t expect any diminution of volatility. First generation biofuels may score pretty decently on this count. Their cost is heavily dependent on feedstock and operating expenses. A rising fuel fuel price environment, then, could spur additional production. The big variables, it seems to me, would be the availability of spare distilling capacity, and, if there isn’t much, the time required to build more plants. Cellulosic ethanol would probably perform less impressively. Capital costs for cellulosic ethanol are expected to dominate feedstock ones. That makes it more likely that whatever facilities exist will already be running at full capacity when a price shock hits. That would leave them without any room to expand supply in response. Synthetic liquids also hold out little promise. The economics of GTL and CTL would look pretty attractive right now if investors could bank on current commodity prices lasting forever. But both sorts of plants cost a ton of money (and GTL ones entail substantial technical risk too). Investors probably won’t build them en masse unless they’re super-confident that long-term commodity prices will make them profitable. This means that once plants are built, they’ll probably be operated at full tilt, leaving no room for rapidly expanding fuel production in response to high prices. The two exceptions would be in the case of mass miscalculation by investors, which could leave the world with lots of spare (X)TL capacity (analogous to the overinvestment in oil in the 1970s that left OPEC with a long spare capacity hangover) and strategic investment in spare capacity by states. Electricity is a bit trickier to think through. Once I buy an electric car, it’s almost invariably cheaper to use it than to drive using gasoline or diesel. If I’m already using electricity, then, I won’t change my behavior in response to an oil price shock, and hence won’t implicitly expand the supply of electricity used in transportation. Ditto for natural gas vehicles. But I can think of a couple possible exceptions. If I’ve got a plug-in hybrid electric vehicle, and oil prices jump, I might make more of an effort to charge it frequently enough to avoid switching to the gasoline engine. And if I’ve got two cars – a gasoline powered one and an electric one – I might lean harder toward using the electric one only. This actually suggests another angle: behavioral flexibility (which is really a demand side option) might be more powerful than having multiple fuel options. Having public transit options, for example, allows people to switch rapidly to transit as their source of mobility and away from gasoline. And since transit tends to be publically subsidized, “spare capacity” of mobility is more likely to develop. Like I said, though, this is all pretty preliminary thinking. If anyone decides to flesh out this exercise, or if I’ve missed the publication that already does it, let me know – I’d love to see the results.

I have a new piece in Slate that looks at the consequences of moving away from nuclear power. The climate policy analysis has attracted some thoughtful pushback. Let me address a few of the more important concerns. I noted that DOE and EPA simulations of the next couple decades tend to find that a moderate carbon price boost nuclear significantly but does little for other sources. I also observed that we basically have three (not exclusive) options for near zero carbon power generation, which is what we’ll eventually need: nuclear; carbon capture and sequestration (for coal or gas); and renewables with storage. (Over the nearer term – lets say a couple decades – we also have gas without CCS.) I argued that if the United States eventually adopts a serious carbon constraint, the choice will ultimately be “between the devil [we] know and a technological prayer”. The first line of opposition was to the DOE and EPA modeling of the Waxman-Markey bill (which I used as a proxy for a generic price on carbon). In particular, many argue that DOE modeling consistently underestimates plant construction costs. Alan Nogee of the Union of Concerned Scientists posted a helpful chart of DOE nuclear cost assumptions versus actual costs of real nuclear plants. I have a couple thoughts. First, the chart suggests that real costs could be lower or higher than the ones used in EIA 2010, though I’d agree that the high-end risk seems more substantial. Second, as Alan notes elsewhere, the EIA 2011 model is better. Yet the early release of the 2011 AEO suggests that the nuclear projections are similar to those from 2010. (The modelers see five new nuclear plants by 2035 rather than six, though it’s impossible to tell how much of this is due to higher capital costs, and how much is due to the assumption of cheap natural gas.) To really dig into the full consequences of the capital cost updates, of course, you’d need to remodel a carbon price using the 2011 NEMS code. The second line of skepticism came from George Hoberg at the University of British Columbia. (Yes, for those of you who are clicking on these links, I now conduct all of my serious technical debates over twitter.) He flagged a paper from Energy Policy that suggested ways to get all global energy from wind, water, and solar by 2050. That paper does not rely on centralized energy storage to match supply to demand. Instead, it argues that a combination of demand management, hydropower for gap filling, long-distance grid integration, and the use of surplus power to produce electrolytic hydrogen would probably suffice. It also notes that the use of electric vehicle batteries for storage might be necessary – and that centralized energy storage might even be required. Relying on a hydrogen economy to materialize, or betting that centralized energy storage either will be possible or won’t be necessary, strikes me as qualifying for the label “technological prayer”. That is not to say that I dismiss the possibility – far from it – but it’s far from something we can count on. The last challenge comes from David Roberts at Grist, who asks whether, in a world of limited resources, “variety” and “all of the above” are actually real options. (He points me to a thoughtful recent article in which he fleshes out his ideas.)  I have mixed feelings about this. My guess is that the answer depends on a few things. If we have a hard, black and white emissions goal, where if we hit it all will be ok, but if we miss it we’re doomed, we might want to concentrate all our (limited) firepower on one technological bet and hope that it turns out ok. If, on the other hand, various degrees of success all count, we might want to adopt a more resilient investment and innovation strategy, even at the expense to lower odds of delivering a big bang. The answer also depends on exactly how constrained the innovation budget is. And it depends on the timelines we have in mind for steering money into the system: yes, there are increasing returns to scale up to some point, but beyond that, simply pumping more money into one area will yield declining results, and perhaps even backfire through cost inflation. (For more on all that, this paper by Varun Rai and colleagues is great.) Bottom line? I certainly wouldn’t put all my bets on nuclear, but I’d be wary of putting all my bets on some other technology too.

Writing in the Washington Post a couple weeks ago, Jeffrey Leonard argued that Congress should scrap all energy subsidies – and that clean energy would come out ahead. The op-ed was a shorter version of an essay in the current issue of the Washington Monthly. Here’s his bottom line: “If President Obama wants to set us on a path to a sustainable energy future—and a green one, too—he should propose a very simple solution to the current mess: eliminate all energy subsidies….  It will be better for national security, the balance of payments, the budget deficit, and even, believe it or not, the environment. Indeed, because wind, solar, and other green energy sources get only the tiniest sliver of the overall subsidy pie, they’ll have a competitive advantage in the long term if all subsidies, including the huge ones for fossil fuels, are eliminated.” I understand the political logical of this pitch: the current climate in Washington makes it easier to cut subsidies than to impose new regulations. But the odds that clean energy would win from eliminating all subsidies is roughly zero. Here’s the heart of Leonard’s argument: “One thing about [subsidies] is easy to summarize: they are heavily tilted toward fossil fuels. Government statistics show that about 70 percent of all federal energy subsidies goes toward oil, natural gas, and coal. Fifteen percent goes to ethanol, the only renewable source of energy that consistently gets bipartisan support in Congress (think farm lobby and Iowa). Large hydro-power companies—TVA, Bonneville Power, and others—soak up another 10 percent. That leaves the greenest renewables—wind, solar, and geothermal—to subsist on the crumbs that are left.” There are two problems with this. First, the statistics are wrong. The Department of Energy reports that renewable energy gets far more subsidies than any other source. As of FY2007, renewables received 30% of federal subsidies. Coal, oil, and gas together received 33%.  (The rest went to end use, generic electricity, nuclear, and conservation.) Second, fossil subsidies are spread across a much bigger base than subsidies for alternative fuels, since alternative fuels still make up a tiny fraction of U.S. primary energy. The same DOE report I just linked to showed that coal- and gas- fired electricity received average subsidies of 44 and 25 cents per megawatt hour, respectively. In contrast, wind and solar got subsidies of $23 and $24 per megawatt hour, respectively. Take those subsidies away, and you can guess which energy source wins. Even if Leonard’s statistics were correct, the much larger base for fossil fuels would still lead you to conclude that renewables wouldn’t benefit from eliminating all subsidies. I’d love to find a quick fix for America’s energy problems just as much as the next guy. I’d also be delighted to have a reason to cut subsidies, many of which are hugely wasteful. But an effort to eliminate all energy subsidies without instituting better alternative policies should be understood for what it is: a recipe for cementing the dominance of traditional fossil fuels against their competitors.

Keith Bradsher reports in yesterday’s New York Times that Congress is forcing the Defense Department to forego purchases of Chinese solar panels. My initial instinct was to scream “Protectionism!” – but there’s actually a strong case for what Congress is doing. The situation is pretty straightforward. China hasn’t signed the WTO agreement on government procurement. That means that Chinese government purchases are exempt from China’s free trade obligations. But the state is a massive piece of the Chinese economy. In practice, then, Beijing uses that loophole to mandate domestic content for a huge amount of its economic activity. The United States, whose government is a much smaller part of the economy, can’t behave similarly. The result is a perfectly legal Chinese policy that is in practice unfair. The response that Congress has forced on the Pentagon responds by using WTO law in a tit-for-tat fashion. The United States has signed the agreement on government procurement. That allows it to limit government contracts to other states that have signed the agreement too. That’s what Congress has told the Defense Department to do – and, since China hasn’t signed the agreement, it will be left out. This seems reasonable to me. It’s perfectly legal. It will help mollify some of the forces that are calling for much more draconian (and counterproductive) protectionist measures from the United States. It isn’t economically damaging to the United States in the way that broader trade barriers might be – sure, the Pentagon will spend a bit more on solar panels, but not much. And it’s inherently limited: since the government is a limited part of the U.S. economy, there’s isn’t a huge danger of descending down a slippery slope. But, for the same reason, I also wouldn’t expect it to yield much. The U.S. government procurement market is tiny compared to the size of the market that China is currently shielding from free trade rules. Beijing isn’t going to open up massive swathes of its economy just to sell a few solar panels to the Pentagon. The huge structural asymmetries between the U.S. and Chinese economies mean that WTO law provides only a limited guide to how best to approach the market access problem. More creative solutions – and quite possibly more contentious ones – will ultimately be required.

If you haven’t seen Google’s new "Ngram Viewer", you’re missing out. The tool allows you to see how often any word shows up within Google’s massive database of books, and to graph how that evolves over time. (Here’s a good run-down in the Journal.) Without further ado, then, here are some interesting tidbits about energy and climate. Energy and Security Mentions of coal and oil both spike around 1920, just after World War I. (I’m looking at English language books here.) But by World War II, coal no longer matters to military success, so only oil jumps. War, by the way, is nicely correlated with oil in the first half of the 20th century, but after that, the two are pretty independent. Coal begins a long decline around 1920, and is passed by nuclear in 1960. All three fuels make comebacks around 1980, when general interest in energy peaks too, right after the big oil crises of the 1970s. The rising tide of interest in energy lifts all boats: attention to solar and geothermal both see record highs at the same time, and use of the phrase “alternative energy” spikes to highs that we’re nowhere close to today. Environment and Climate Change Environment has taken a downward turn in the English language since 2000 (left) – but, somewhat surprisingly, it keeps going up if you only look at books published in the United States (right). No matter how you slice things, it’s increased spectacularly over the last two hundred years. And regardless what pollsters tell you, climate change is much more popular (at least among authors) than energy security. China I desperately wanted to get some insight into China by looking at statistics on Chinese books. And I was rather excited when I found this disturbing correlation between “war” and “oil”. Then I threw in the words “happy”, "rain, and "horse", and found basically the same pattern. Unless someone can offer a crackerjack theory that explains why these words go together, I’m going to conclude for now that this part of the Ngram database isn’t ready for primetime. [UPDATE: It turns out that you need to enter Chinese. Duh! I’d thought that Google was running English input through a translator. Take a look at the comments for an excellent Chinese graph.] (Images from Google through creative commons license.)

While the climate talks continue in Cancun, the most important developments in climate policy are still happening at the national level. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu gave a speech on Monday arguing that the United States is at risk of losing to China in a clean energy race. The most striking graph -- and Chu emphasized it in his presentation -- came near the start of his talk: Looks scary, right? But if you flip back ten pages in the study that Chu uses as a source, you’ll find this: Here, the U.S. is back firmly in the lead, with a steady share. China has gained, but at the expense of Japan. Whatever U.S. losses we see in recent years appear to be going to the EU. What’s the difference between the two graphs – and which one should we care about? The first shows the total value of exports; the second shows value added. It’s the second that describes the contribution than China makes – and the net revenue it gets. That’s the one that matters. Imagine that Japan makes most of a car for $10,000 and sends it to China where a $1,000 gizmo is added before the $11,000 car is finally shipped to the United States. The first graph would show $10,000 of exports for Japan, but $11,000 for China; the second would also show $10,000 for Japan, but only $1,000 for China, which clearly reflects what we’re actually interested in. The reality is that China still tends to take expensive stuff from elsewhere and adds a little value to it before stamping “Made in China” on the product. Yet a few pages later in the presentation, Chu makes a similar mistake. Here’s what he says about Suntech: "Suntech imports the raw silicon crystal material from U.S. suppliers [emphasis in the original], manufactures the high-tech solar cells in a modern, automated facility in China, and is building assembly plants world wide, including the U.S." "What is wrong with this picture?", he asks in the actual talk, as if the answer is obvious. I must admit that I’m not sure. Making highly pure silicon is a lucrative business. Making solar cells, less so. Yes, there’s a high-value-added intermediate step (making wafers), much of which is migrating to China, which may be a net economic loss for the United States. But as I’ve argued before, it’s far from obvious that the broader trend here isn’t a win-win for the United States and China. The high-tech silicon companies in Texas that are making money from a booming solar market (spurred in part by cheap Chinese contributions to the value chain) certainly don’t think so. Neither do the folks in Arizona who are assembling and installing the finished panels. I’m not trying to be a Pollyanna – China poses a real competitive challenge in many respects. But it doesn’t help anyone to confuse the real situation.

I wrote last week about how Chinese gains in solar energy could help, rather than hurt, U.S. businesses. My argument was that if China focused on those parts of the value chain where it had a natural edge, and the United States focused on those parts where it was most suited, they could together bring down the cost of solar. That would increase the market for solar, and they would both win. In particular, I argued that Chinese strength in the later stages of solar manufacturing wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. But that does not mean that it’s always a good thing. What matters is whether the source of Chinese competitive advantage is genuine comparative advantage of the sort I just described, or whether it’s the result of unfair industrial policy. China can move into new parts of the solar value chain because it’s genuinely better suited to being there. In that case, the United States should applaud. Or it can move into new parts of the value chain because of illegal government supports of the sort that the United Steelworkers are accusing the Chinese government of using. That’s a much more problematic situation. It’s also the one we often find ourselves in these days. That leads to a big question: Do we lose or benefit when China subsidizes its solar industry? Several smart commentators suggested last week that the United States is a winner from Chinese subsidies, since we get cheaper clean energy solutions. That’s potentially a myopic and short-term view. The availability of cheaper electricity made by Chinese solar panels stimulates some of the U.S. economy (i.e. those who use solar electricity) a bit, as many note. But it hurts certain U.S. solar producers, as most of the same commentators have neglected. Whether that’s a net positive for the U.S. economy is an open question, particularly in the present situation, where there’s a dearth of demand. There’s also a timing problem: Chinese industrial policy may give us nice cheap solar panels in the near term, but if it drives competitors out of the market, and China then withdraws its supports, things could be much uglier in the long term. We don’t like it when firms abuse market power to drive out competitors, and we shouldn’t like it when countries do it either. Relatedly, Chinese subsidies may be squeezing innovative (and eventually lower cost) technologies out of the market. I’m told, for example, that the big Chinese government push to build up its silicon-based PV industry is stifling the thin-film solar business, damaging the prospects for that potentially valuable technology. That, again, may make solar cheaper in the short term, when it’s least important, but more expensive over the long haul, which is when it matters most.

Keith Bradsher has a largely excellent article in Wednesday’s Times that’s focused on the (possibly illegal) advantages that the Chinese government is providing its clean energy firms. In reporting the piece, though, he falls prey to a deceptive story about the success of Chinese solar at the expense of U.S. industry. Since it’s a story that regularly shows up in one form or another, it’s important to understand why there’s less than meets the eye. (I’ll have more to say on the broader trade issues in several upcoming articles and posts.) Here’s the basic outline: Chinese solar businesses are booming. In this particular story, Hunan Sunzone Optoelectronics, which exports 95% of its panels, is held up as an example. U.S. businesses, meanwhile, are being hurt. Here the example is Evergreen Solar, which, we’re told, “plans to move the final manufacturing steps for its solar panels from Devens, Mass., to China next summer, eliminating 300 American jobs”. It’s a simple story: China wins, the United States loses. But let’s take a more careful look at what’s going on. There are four basic stages in solar module manufacturing: silicon purification, ingot and wafer manufacturing, cell production, and module assembly. Evergreen Solar, according to its website, derives its competitive advantage through a proprietary low-cost technology for making wafers. Hunan Sunzone Optoelectronics, meanwhile, advertises its focus as being on cell production and module assembly. The two types of firms are not entirely, or even mostly, in competition. This should not be particularly surprising. In what is quickly become one of my favorite obscure academic papers, Arnaud de la Tour and his colleagues at MINES ParisTech took a careful look (PDF) earlier this year at the structure of the Chinese solar industry. They found that China (circa 2008) was strong in the later stages of the solar value chain (27% of the cell and module market), but that it lagged far behind in the earlier stages (2.5% of the ultrapure silicon market and less than 5% of the ingot and wafer market). Those two later stages accounted for 60% of the cost of a module but only 18% of its profit. That’s because they’re less technologically sophisticated than the earlier stages, which accounted for only 40% of the cost but a whopping 82% of the profit. Those higher-value-added steps, in turn, support higher-wage jobs. Seen from this vantage, the Sunzone/Evergreen story is decidedly less depressing. U.S. firms are unable to hold on to cell and module manufacturing (“the final manufacturing steps”) but still have an edge in wafers and silicon, where there is far more profit to be made. Indeed by lowering the cost of turning Evergreen Solar’s wafers into finished solar products, companies like Hunan Sunzone Optoelectronics help grow the market for the things that Evergreen Solar makes. Evergreen may have lost 300 cell and module manufacturing jobs to China, but it’s quite possible – indeed even likely – that it’s gaining (or retaining) high-wage jobs elsewhere in its value chain because of the same low-cost Chinese developments. Indeed if the United States were to insist that all parts of the solar value chain stay in the United States, the result might not be more jobs – it might be less. Unable to reduce the cost of cell and module manufacturing, the cost of solar might stay too high, reducing the overall solar market, and with it jobs in wafer and silicon production too. This dynamic is no different from what happens in many other sectors. China assembles computers that used to be made in the United States. Does anyone think that this means America is losing from the computer and IT revolutions? Of course not: the United States is making its contributions primarily in areas that yield far greater profits, while cheap Chinese computer assembly is enlarging the market for everything computer and IT-related. The same is true in solar: it’s quite possible for the United States and China both to win, with China lowering the cost of relatively low-tech parts of the value chain, in turn growing the market for the higher-tech parts that are still handled by the United States. Of course, this state of affairs isn’t guaranteed to last forever. The MINES ParisTech study looks at 2008 data; things have probably tilted in China’s direction since then, and they may continue to do so, particularly given unfair trade policies from China. But the lesson remains: just because cleantech products don’t get stamped “Made in the USA” in the finishing stages doesn’t mean that the United States can’t win from the clean energy race.

Yingli Solar, the Chinese rooftop solar photovoltaic company, has been making waves with its prominent sponsorship of the 2010 FIFA World Cup. The Times picked up the story yesterday, quoting a Yingli spokesperson who said that the company “pondered” its decision “profoundly, deeply”. My colleague Liz Economy flagged the sponsorship last week. Noting that Yingli’s ads were running next to ones from McDonalds, she worried that China was embracing the future while U.S. companies were stuck representing the past. I’m not so much worried as I am puzzled by Yingli’s decision to buy such an expensive sponsorship. Take a look at the other sponsors at the same tier: Budweiser, BP Castrol, Continental tires, McDonald’s, MTN (a South African cellular company), Mahindra Satyam (an Indian IT services company), and Seara (a Brazil-based global food company). They are almost all consumer products companies – precisely the sort of company that’s most likely to benefit from sponsorship of an event like the World Cup. (All six higher-tier sponsors are consumer products companies too.) Mahindra Satyam is clearest exception, though it’s worth noting that its sponsorship deal also benefits automaker Mahindra and Mahindra, which is a part owner through Mahindra Tech. Yingli, in contrast, strikes me more like a business-to-business operation. If solar PV is going to make it big, it’s not going to be because individual consumers are taking the time to differentiate among solar panel manufacturers. It’s going to be because consumers have bought a package of services from a local business that provides not only the panels but also installation, financing, and maintenance. That’s the brand that consumers will look at. The local provider will do the comparison-shopping among panel makers for them in order to minimize its costs. Yet companies that are selling primarily to other businesses don’t tend to drop the kind of cash that Yingli is on advertising. Several reports (including the Times one) peg the sponsorship at north of $20 million, while one rumor in China apparently has it at $80 million. The best I can figure out is based on this report, which would have the sponsorship at $10-$25 million annually, or $40-$100 million over its four year life. If you figure that the bulk of the value from the sponsorship accrues this year, that works out to about 4-10% of its roughly $1 billion in annual revenue. That is an unusually high fraction of revenue for a B2B company to be spending on advertising. My understanding is that these sorts of companies typically spend 1-2% of revenue on advertising, since their customers are focused primarily on cost and benefit, not brand; numbers like Yingli’s are more typical of companies that are marketing directly to consumers, where branding matters much more. What might explain the difference? One possibility is that Yingli sees the near-term solar landscape much more like a consumer goods play. Solar is still a relatively expensive and niche market. People who are installing it are often as interested in making a lifestyle statement as they are about calculating costs and benefits. If they associate Yingli will nice things like the World Cup, they might be more willing to buy. The other possibility, of course, is the Yingli has made a bad investment choice. Perhaps by 2014, when we see who chooses to advertise at the next World Cup, we’ll know the answer.

Bill McKibben has an op-ed on the oil spill and climate politics in the LA Times. It’s got a mix of good stuff and crazy stuff in it. But one line in particular irritated me: “Had [Obama] chosen to, he could have pledged: ‘Ten years from now, America will be using half the oil we do today and producing 10 times as much solar power.’ That would have been stirring.” Can we all agree that solar power doesn’t do anything to reduce our use of oil? (Yes, McKibben doesn’t explicitly say that we should replace oil with solar; that, however, is precisely how the typical person will read this.) Unless we’re all going to start driving cars with solar panels on the roofs, the two are basically unrelated. Yes, if we move to plug-in vehicles, solar energy will be able to help power them. But so will nuclear, wind, gas, and hydro. As far as replacing oil goes, they all do pretty much the same thing. Also: Even if we plugged our cars into all the solar power that McKibben says we should build, the effect on U.S. oil consumption would be inconsequential. The United States is expected to get 1.19 billion kWh of electricity from solar this year. This is the same amount of energy as one finds in 700,000 barrels of oil. If we were to produce 10 times as much solar power, that would have the same amount of energy as 7 million barrels of oil. The United States consumes 20 million barrels of oil each day. For solar energy to replace the energy in half of the oil we use, we would need to use 521 times as much solar energy as we do today. I suspect that will not happen.

There is a persistent debate over whether forecasters are excessively optimistic or pessimistic in projecting trends in pretty much anything, including energy. A new World Bank working paper looks at 116 projections over a period of 36 years to try and answer the question. One of the more interesting findings is that projections of future renewable energy production are pretty much random. That doesn’t inspire much confidence in any of the projections we’re working off today. Here is a chart from the paper that shows the projected share of renewable energy in 2010 according to the 36 studies. Can you see a trend? If not, that’s because there pretty much isn’t one. Here’s their fit: Not that these are completely random guesses – they are influenced by events. It’s just that those events don’t necessarily have the impact that modelers think they do. Take a look around 2000. You’ll notice that the projections perk up. Here’s the authors’ diagnosis: “Studies published in 2000 seem to be influenced by the Kyoto Protocol which spurred optimism about carbon free energies.” Somehow that didn’t quite turn out right.