Yet there are substantial behavioral, institutional, and financial barriers. As I’ve discussed in this blog post, there may well be free lunches available, but they are hidden away behind misaligned incentives, inertia, and market barriers. Consumers are often unaware of the potential cost savings, cannot afford the upfront costs, or fear that home efficiency upgrades will not add much to the market value of a home. For renters, new construction, and commercial property, the people who pay energy bills are often not the same people as those who design buildings or invest in efficiency. At our university, capital budgets for buildings and operating costs come from two separate pockets that don’t necessarily communicate. In the corporate world, few have traditionally paid much attention to potential energy savings because nobody was paid to do so.

Demand response systems raise some particular issues relating to fears regarding privacy and corporate intrusiveness. The Economist article highlights a survey by Parks Associates, a Texas-based market-research company, that indicates that only 15-20% of US consumers would be willing to sign up for DR programs that enable utilities to control their thermostats. Yet the survey also shows that over 80% of households would pay up to $100 for cost-saving equipment if it chopped at least 10% off their monthly electricity bills. Utilities, however, are still in the business of selling electrons, and incentives for energy efficiency, such as California-style rate decoupling, is only making slow progress toward adoption in other states.

Real-time feedback to customers on the price and quantity of electricity they are using can help cut consumption, and new devices can give an analysis by appliance, illustrating the savings from cutting usage or running appliances on lower-cost night-time power. Google announced last year that it’s developing software package called Powermeter to provide real time information about home energy usage by communicating with household devices. But few appliances are ready for smart meters, standards don’t yet exist for Google or other smart meter devices (Google just released the API in early March 2010), and systems will cost several hundred dollars per home. Moreover, as The Economist points out, trying to run a home using this information could become a complex and time-consuming job.         

The next stage in smart buildings is to move from real time information to direct control of power consumption, from devices to heating, and cooling. Companies such as PassivSystems are developing intelligent home controls using multiple sensors, but they are expensive and would still require a lot more programming regarding preferences and trade-offs between cost, convenience, and comfort than your average consumer might be willing to take on. And as the surveys indicate, consumers are wary about ceding control of their homes to computer algorithms. Commercial and industrial buildings are likely to be more lucrative markets than residential in the early stages of this new market, because of the larger scale of opportunities for saving energy, not just in HVAC and lighting but in industrial processes that have some flexibility in load and timing, such as water treatment. Nevertheless, target markets are fragmented by sector and solutions frequently need to be customized.

In my MBA class on Business and Climate Change, several student groups are working with regional companies interested in demand response and smart grid. From my conversations with firms active in the area, a major problem is finding the right channel to potential customers. Facilities managers tend toward a conservative outlook and generally lack the funding and also the authority to implement systemic controls that affect operations. As with other areas of clean energy, the gadgets are cool but the implementation requires overcoming a host of organizational hurdles.

Last week, the Financial Times reported that two large oil companies, BP and ConocoPhillips, along with Caterpillar, manufacturer of heavy industrial machinery, pulled out of the US Climate Action Partnership (USCAP). USCAP, which still has 23 members paying $100,000 a year for the privilege of membership, is the leading business organization promoting cap-and-trade legislation in the US, and many of its members have also been active on the international scene, advocating for a coordinated global approach to emissions reduction. BP’s action is particularly significant because it has long been an industry trendsetter – it was the first oil major to acknowledge climate change and to leave the Global Climate Coalition, and it was a founding member of USCAP in 2007.

Even as BP and Shell were retreating from renewables during 2009 and moving Back to Petroleum, the oil industry still appeared to be part of the grand Carbon Compromise, pursuing a strategy of “hydrocarbon neutrality.” The industry realized that it was not mortally threatened by a flexible carbon regime with low carbon prices; indeed, it could even prosper as demand for liquid fuels for transportation grows, especially in India, China, and Brazil. The industry is also repositioning itself with major investments in relatively low-carbon natural gas. A weak carbon regime would not threaten core business operations in the short-to-medium term, leaving adequate time and resources for longer-term strategic shifts as the climate issue plays out. The Carbon Compromise would also help industry avoid paying the political or public relations price of fighting emission controls, such as the embarrassment caused by CEI’s 2006 risible advertisement Carbon Dioxide: They Call it Pollution, We Call it Life.

Back in August 2009, the oil industry was fighting a rearguard effort against cap-and-trade legislation in the US. The industry front-group Energy Citizens contracted with a professional events management company to plan about 20 rallies, with a focus on energy producing southern states such as Texas and Louisiana. Member companies encouraged their employees to join in. Energy Citizens’ website proclaims that it is “a nationwide alliance of organizations and individuals formed to bring together people across America to remind Congress that energy is the backbone of our nation’s economy and our way of life.” In fact, Energy Citizens was set up and financed primarily by the American Petroleum Institute (API), the US oil industry association, with support from the National Association of Manufacturers and other groups. This project complements a massive increase in lobbying efforts by the fossil fuel industry in the last six months.     

At the time, the oil industry campaign seemed like an anachronistic, even quaint echo of the carbon wars of the 1990s. In hindsight, it appears to be a prescient strategy that would help prepare the ground for the coming climate backlash. This backlash has been spurred by a confluence of seemingly unrelated events. Climategate broke just before the Copenhagen negotiations became hopelessly mired. An unusually cold winter in Europe and the eastern US, together with record snow in Washington DC has fired up the rhetoric of climate deniers, and their voices have been amplified and channeled to mass audiences through the tabloid press and talk radio. It was not cold everywhere, of course – for the planet, the decade 2000-2009 was the hottest on record. But it was cold where it mattered, for the media and climate policy. Public opinion polls in the US and the UK show a dramatic jump in the last year in the percentage of people who don’t think that climate change is a priority issue.

The loss of Ted Kennedy’s Massachusetts senate seat to Scott “the truck guy” Brown deprived the Democrats of their supermajority and made them even more dependent on Republican votes. As the Obama administration has tried to redirect its attention toward unemployment and the economy, healthcare reform has stalled and climate has fallen even further down the priority list. Business senses the vulnerability of the Democrats and is shifting campaign money to Republicans, who could recapture the Senate in the mid-term elections. In Europe as well as the US, concern about budget deficits is constraining ambitious clean energy agendas.

The resurgence of climate denial and the woes of the Obama administration are not unrelated. Like the global climate, the political, social and economic system is a dynamic system with complex feedback loops. The confluence of a few minor developments can cascade into a major shift in direction. The climate deniers and right-wing “tea-party” activists in the US are successfully tapping into populist anger rooted in economic insecurity and a perception that policy elites are out of touch. A recent study from Northeastern University pointed out that unemployment amongst lower income households is now higher that at the depth of the Great Depression of the 1930s. The ideological machine of the tabloid press, talk radio, and Fox News has successfully woven climate change into a populist cultural politics that fuses anti-government, anti-tax sentiment with a reassertion of masculinity. The Superbowl ads for Dodge and Audi perfectly capture this spirit, explicitly connecting environmental concerns with submissiveness to nagging women and the overreaching intrusiveness of the “green police” nanny-state.

It is against this backdrop of shifting cultural politics that Scott Brown’s unlikely victory in Massachusetts and developments in the oil industry can be understood. Back in August 2009, I suggested that there were three possible ways to understand the oil industry’s pullback from renewables and increasing hostility to cap-and-trade:

1. A “Back to Petroleum” product strategy needs a new political strategy. Political and product strategies need to be coherent and integrated. Corporate strategy resembles a multi-dimensional chess game, in which players seek advantage by repositioning themselves in product and political space. When oil companies were investing more heavily in clean energy, they also needed to invest in political strategies that would support markets for these technologies and products. Now that these companies are refocusing on their core products and competencies, they are returning to the corresponding political strategies they used in the mid-1990s to preserve the value of their fossil fuel assets and capabilities. The reputational value of proactive corporate action on climate is declining along with public support for aggressive climate policies.

2. A sectoral struggle over implementation: From this perspective, the Carbon Compromise is still on, but the current battle is about the allocation of costs and benefits across sectors. In many ways, Waxman-Markey and the proposed energy legislation are generally pro-business: a flexible market-based approach with plenty of offsets to help keep carbon prices low, 85% of carbon allowances are given away rather than auctioned to industry in the early phase, and there are plenty of subsidies to sweeten the medicine. The US oil industry, however, sees itself carrying an unfair burden. According to ConocoPhillips, the oil industry would receive just 2% of free allowances, while the electric power sector would receive 35%. The New York Times cited Gerry Waldron, the former staff director of the House select climate panel, arguing that groups like USCAP representing industries with different interests have a hard time finding common ground on the details of legislation. “They’re very effective at the framework level, at the 50,000-foot level,” Waldron added. “But when you get down to the messy business of making laws and the sausage making, it’s going to be hard to keep those people together.”

3. The Carbon Compromise was only a second best option: The preferred course for energy intense industries during the 1990s was voluntary measures. Mounting regulatory and public pressure, the strengthening of climate science, and the need to operate in carbon-constrained markets in Europe have led US business to acquiesce unenthusiastically to mandatory emission controls. A growing number of firms are waking up to opportunities in clean energy, efficiency, and carbon trading, but these are still niche markets. The shifting political winds and public sentiments have opened a window of opportunity to weaken or delay regulations for several years.

BP’s public statement regarding its exit from USCAP supports the second interpretation, that the oil industry is seeking a better deal rather than to kill carbon regulation outright:  ”We will continue to work for passage of federal legislation that . . . is environmentally effective, reduces emissions across the US economy in a measured and affordable way and which treats all energy consumers and producers in a fair and equitable manner. We don’t believe legislation currently pending in the Congress achieves these objectives.”

But the reality is that all three factors are playing something of a role, and business can sense the shifting winds, even if it cannot yet know the endgame. Just as the US Chamber of Commerce and its climate stance survived the exit of several high profile companies last year, so USCAP could survive the exit of three companies. Indeed, several new companies, including Honeywell, have joined USCAP in recent months. Yet surely BP’s action signals deeper tectonic shifts taking place in the cultural, economic and political spheres, with deeply unsettling implications for climate action and for the planet.

On January 27, 2010 the SEC voted to issue interpretive guidance on disclosure requirements of climate risks in SEC filings. The SEC stressed that the interpretive releases do not create new legal requirements but are intended to provide clarity and enhance consistency on existing requirements. Nonetheless, the issuance of guidance indicates the growing focus of the SEC on climate change disclosure and the need for companies to expand and improve their environmental disclosure.

Till now the SEC had not called for any specific disclosures regarding climate change nor provided interpretative guidance regarding the application of existing disclosure requirements for “material risks” to climate change-related matters. The SEC sent a signal that it was preparing for future action when in a briefing released July of 2009 it included “Environmental, Climate Change and Sustainability Disclosure” on the list of possible refinements of the disclosure regime for the Investor Advisory Committee.

As the SEC explains in its release, existing regulations require a company to disclose information related to risk factors and call for management discussion and analysis. The new guidance on those rules emphasizes that when assessing potential risks, companies should consider the impact of existing climate change legislation and regulation, international accords or treaties on climate change, indirect consequences of regulation or business trends, for example new risks for the company created by legal, technical, political and scientific developments, and the physical impacts of climate change. This appears to be an impressively comprehensive assessment of investor risk associated with climate change.

Ceres proclaimed this action to be the “the first economy-wide climate risk disclosure requirement in the world”. The guidance follows a petition sent to the SEC in 2007 by a group of investors, state agencies and environmental advocates, led by Ceres, urging the SEC to issue guidance on climate-related impacts. Ceres has long pursued a strategy of exerting leverage on companies by institutionalizing information disclosure of value to investors. Ceres initiated the Global Reporting Initiative and, more recently, the Investor Network on Climate Risk. The Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) mechanism has become the most prominent mechanism for corporate carbon disclosure, though the value of the information to investors is unclear.    

Moreover, CDP-style data has not been integrated into formal SEC reports. According to two major studies released last year by Ceres, Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) and the Center for Energy and Environmental Security (CEES) climate-related disclosure “continues to be weak or altogether nonexistent in SEC filings of global companies with the most at stake in preparing for a low-carbon global economy.” The SEC initiative responds to repeated investor requests for formal guidance on the climate-related disclosure companies should be providing in securities filings.

SEC Commissioner Elisse Walter commented that the decision “is designed to improve the quality of disclosures filed by U.S. public companies for the benefit of investors.”. She mentioned that she does not consider “that public companies today are doing the best job they possible can do with respect to their current mandated disclosures.” The SEC guidance thus represents an endorsement for more stringent and meaningful carbon disclosure, and moves it beyond a voluntary “social responsibility” type of activity into the regulatory realm.

Some critics have argued that the guidance will not lead to meaningful change in corporate reporting. Zac Bissonnette from DailyFinance writes that “the absolute best thing that will come of this policy is that some public companies will add a few lines of boilerplate that no one reads to the risk factors section of the 10-Ks they file with the SEC.” Others argue that some of the terms used are unclear. As an example, the guidance states that “when assessing potential disclosure obligations, a company should consider whether the impact of certain existing laws and regulations regarding climate change is material.” Jane Wells of CNBC questions “what constitutes material”. Julie Gorte, a senior VP for sustainable investing at mutual fund company Pax World Management LLC, suggested that corporate officers would still have considerable discretion in deciding what constitutes a “material risk” that must be shared with investors.

The guidance is likely, however, to prompt companies to increase climate disclosure or face the threat of legal action for failure to disclose required information in light of the 1933 Act. In his blog, John Shideler makes the case that “the SEC’s action should prompt more companies to collect, analyze and report on climate change information. Companies that do not do so face added risks of litigation or regulatory action if future developments show that management failed to disclose material financial impacts linked to climate change.”

Even though this SEC initiative provides “guidance” rather than create new legal requirements, its impact could be very far reaching. SEC enforcement and legal challenges will gradually clarify the detail and form in which companies have to assess and disclose climate-related risks in their filings and improve their climate related disclosure.

By David L. Levy

(This is an updated version of an earlier posting)

President Obama’s decision to speak at the COP-15 climate summit in Copenhagen in December 2009 cannot have been easy. Obama surely did not want to invest his shrinking political capital in backing the doomed international conference, but at the same time wanted to reassert US leadership after decades of denial and obstruction have cost it dearly in international credibility and influence. President Obama announced his decision to attend Copenhagen just as I was leaving the city after attending a conference on business education and climate change. Perhaps the President was inspired by our effort at Copenhagen Business School to infuse climate change into the business school curriculum, but I surmise that he had other strategic calculations.

Copenhagen was rebranded from a somewhat sleepy European capital to Hopenhagen,  the shiny new star on the global climate stage, showing off its clean tech sector with Vestas ads on every metro train. The conference I attended was, of course, also timed to cash in on the climate cachet of the city. I met a staff person from Copenhagen Capacity, whose organization is trying to attract clean tech investment to the region, and hoping for a boost from the media-grabbing climate conference. The city’s green credentials do not just rest on high tech renewables but on decidedly low-tech bicycles – Copenhagen is the biking capital of the Western world, with nearly 40% of commuters, many dressed in suits, pedaling to work through cold and rain. Whether they are motivated by environmental enthusiasm or the 200% tax on cars is hard to say.

Unfortunately, the Copenhagen brand is looking tarnished and, as the talks collapsed, many observers quickly renamed it Brokenhagen. The estimated 40,000 delegates, observers, and assorted groupies who descended on Copenhagen were unable to produce a binding treaty, despite the cost of more than $62 million borne by the Danish government, according to the Guardian in a special 10-page Copenhagen supplement. The Guardian noted that the delegates would emit more than 40,000 tons of CO2 during their travels and travails, which now looks like a rather bleak investment from a climate perspective. At least it must have been boom times for the retail carbon offset business.

Despite last minute by Obama and Chinese premier Wen Jiabao, the conference only generated a vague declaration of principles the Copenhagen Accord, which sets a goal of limiting global temperature rise to 2°C and recognizes that all nations need to work to that goal. A key part of the draft, a pledge to cut carbon emissions by 50% by 2050, was removed at the last minute, apparently under pressure from China. Yet even this watered down accord didn’t win broad endorsement (Click here for a Dr. Seuss-style satirical summary from the BBC).         

The Copenhagen debacle has been endlessly dissected and analyzed. Many blame the Chinese for thwarting an agreement, while some blame the US for lack of leadership and bullying developing countries. Both countries are wary of multilateral agreements that might infringe on sovereignty. The main stumbling block was the distribution of economic costs and benefits, with the axis of contention being the divide between rich and poor countries. Developing countries demanded emissions cuts in the industrialized world of around 40% below 1990 levels by 2020, while the “offers” were in the 15-25% range with various baselines (not to mention flexibility from offsets). Developing countries also argued that any new regime maintain the Kyoto principle that only industrialized Annex I countries have legally binding emissions targets, while the US and Europe demanded that a new agreement include binding and verifiable targets for the larger developing countries, especially China and India. China’s total GHG emissions edged past the US in 2008, to reach 6.1 GTonsC02e. Developing countries also demanded up to $200 billion a year in aid designated for mitigation and adaptation. Industrialized countries did finally promise short term funding of $30 billion over the next three years, mainly for adaptation in vulnerable developing countries, as well as longer term funding of around $100 billion a year from 2020.

Observers are not optimistic about the prospects for completing a binding treaty at COP-16 in Mexico at the end of this year. Most countries are filing their GHG targets by the Jan. 31 2010 deadline, though some are vague ranges. The problem is that country negotiators more closely resemble corporate managers concerned with “competitiveness” than adverse impacts from climate change. Moreover, the financial crisis has weakened national treasuries and resource constraints are stark. Fundamentally, collective action is very difficult when there are so many actors with divergent interests.

What might happen in the absence of a binding global deal? The failure to achieve a binding treaty could well send a negative signal that stalls momentum on climate action. The prospect of a strong global emissions agreement has provided the political and economic context for the beehive of climate activity in recent years, from carbon footprinting to voluntary offsets, from Walmart’s supply chain initiative to BP’s investments in renewables. According to the Financial Times, “The private sector investment needed to tackle climate change will not be made without a binding international deal on carbon emissions.” Lars Josefsson, chief executive of Vattenfall, a Swedish power company, and chairman of Combat Climate Change, a group of 60 large companies that includes BP, GE, and Unilever, stated that: “The necessary investments will only be made when you have a binding treaty and legislation. Of the money required to implement a deal, the vast majority – about 80% – will come from the private sector. That can only come when there is a stable legal framework….It is very important to get business more engaged, because they have the knowledge of the market economy and how investment decisions are made.” Wulf Bernotat, CEO of the power company Eon, has made it clear that accelerating emission reductions requires a strong global framework.

The more optimistic camp argues that the climate bandwagon will lumber on regardless. Just as a weak Kyoto, without the US or China, was not the primary motivator for a host of corporate, NGO and governmental initiatives, so a non-binding Copenhagen declaration of good intentions will have little relevance. Mat Hoffmann at the University of Toronto is researching how decentralized local initiatives can evolve into effective forms of governance even in the absence of global authority (see his blog). Climate change science remains a key driver; NASA just announced that 2000-2009 was the hottest decade on record. Action will continue to bubble up from a host of organizations, and business will pursue low-carbon investments because they recognize the longer term strategic dynamic and will be seeking profitable new markets and efficiencies. Concerns about the rise of China in clean energy technologies appear to be driving a new dynamic of competitive investments and incentives, as states strive for national competitiveness in the rapidly growing cleantech economy.

One positive sign is that the stalemate at Copenhagen did not appear to dent the value of cleantech shares. The chart below shows the value of PBD, a clean energy ETF from Powershares (in blue) over the last two years, through Jan. 12. 2010. It clearly tracks the NASDAQ closely (red line) but is also influenced by the price of oil (yellow line). The collapse of talks in Copenhagen at the end of December had no noticeable impact.

In the US, climate regulation is moving forward even without a national cap-and-trade system. The EPA has mandated that suppliers of fossil fuels, manufacturers of vehicles and facilities that emit 25,000 metric tons or more per year of CO2e are required to collect data and submit annual reports to EPA. The new rule, effective in 2010, will apply to nearly more than 12,000 facilities which account for about 85% of US emissions. The EPA also ruled in December 2009 that greenhouse gases pose a threat to human health, which enables the agency to use the Clean Air Act to regulate GHG emissions directly without legislation. This “endangerment finding” eases the path to stronger regulatory control of emissions from autos, power plants, buildings, appliances and factories. Finally,in late January, the Securities and Exchange Commission announced that publicly held companies should warn investors of any potential effects from climate change on their bottom lines.

Increasingly, business is realizing the dangers of the proliferation of multiple regulations, and standards emanating from various regions and states, and is lobbying for simple, transparent, predictable, and coordinated frameworks. General concern with the cost of carbon regulation has been replaced by fears of the compliance costs and uncertainties of trying to cope with a chaotic and fragmented climate regime. Energy intense business sectors are particularly concerned at the prospect of EPA regulation of GHGs – they would much prefer the flexibility and low carbon prices of a cap-and-trade regime. The Financial Times reported that large US-based companies are warning “that they will face a heavy regulatory burden should US Congress fail to pass climate change legislation,” as EPA and individual states develop a patchwork of regulations and measures. Peter Molinaro, head of government affairs at Dow Chemical, the largest US chemicals group, told the Financial Times that the proliferation of such initiatives would present “an enormous administrative burden” for companies that operate across different regimes. “Manufacturers are having enough trouble in this country competing with foreign companies,” Mr Molinaro said. “We’d be adding administrative and cost burden where we shouldn’t.”

The concerns regarding patchwork regulations are even more acute at the international level: Alison Taylor, vice-president of sustainability for the Americas at Siemens, the German engineering group, said businesses needed to know the price of carbon for planning reasons. “How do you have one price of carbon if you’ve got four or five different regimes?” she said. These concerns have played an important part in building corporate support for an international agreement and driving the recent defections from the US Chamber of Commerce. A string of high-profile companies including Coca Cola, GE, Microsoft, Cisco, DuPont, Johnson Controls and Nike tried to make the case at Copenhagen for a global agreement. But the business community is still far from reaching a consensus view, and the Chamber of Commerce and National Association of Manufacturers remain opposed to pending US climate legislation. Until mainstream business organizations become more coherent in their support, the prospects for meaningful national regulation in the US or for an international treaty remain dim.

by David L. Levy

When most people think about clean energy, solar and wind are the first things that spring to mind. Markets for these renewable energy sources have exhibited rapid growth of about 25-30% annually, and these sectors have attracted the lion’s share of venture capital funding and investor interest. They also tend to dominate the various Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) that track clean energy. Yet the clean energy economy extends far beyond renewable energy technologies, including everything from power controls and storage, carbon software and trading, and energy efficiency. In transportation, while auto companies chase expensive dreams of electric cars, more economically viable opportunities lie in mass transit, bicycles, and innovative car rental services such as Zipcar. Clean energy is also generating a vast range of engineering, professional, and financial services. The transition to a clean energy economy will therefore change the employment landscape (see Green Jobs Booming and Training the “Green and White” Collar Workforce). At the same time, it’s creating new investment opportunities to rival electronics and biotech. The best investment opportunities are the unsung heroes that lie in the more cloistered parts of the evolving cleantech economy.

There are two core principles involved in understanding which green sectors have the most potential and which are overhyped. The first is that successful investing requires better insights than the average market investor. Share prices for many cleantech companies already reflect the expectation of rapid growth – companies (or sectors) have to outperform these expectations to generate significant returns. Second, the market is not rational – the efficient market thesis does not hold. This means that share prices do not accurately reflect all the information out there. To complicate matters, these two principles are somewhat contradictory: What is the point of better knowledge, if the market is arbitrary?

Well, the market is not completely arbitrary – to some degree, it’s Predictably Irrational, to use the title of Dan Ariely’s book. Investors exhibit herd behavior, leading to macro market distortions – share prices (and P/E ratios) can expand in frothy bubbles or become mired in gloom, with prices detached from underlying profits and cash flows. There are similar distortions at the sector and individual company level. When a new sector is fashionable, investors pile in, the media provides glossy rationalizations, and even policymakers can jump to support the ‘next big thing’. Many investors don’t care about underlying value and try to ride these waves of momentum, but this market-timing strategy requires nerves of steel and considerable luck.

Eventually, reality catches up and capital move on. Interest in fuel cell powered vehicles, for example, has collapsed while biofuels are on the wane. But distinguishing ‘reality’ from conventional wisdom is a considerable challenge, even within the expert community. Ford and GM’s disastrous experiments with electric vehicles in the 1980s and 1990s created a firm belief in the US auto industry there was no future for electric vehicles of any kind, even hybrids. The institutionalization of this view led US car manufacturers to scoff at the prospect of Toyota and Honda introducing hybrids (HEVs) in the late 1990s, and now the hobbled US companies trail far behind (see my 2002 paper on the auto industry and climate change). Similarly, the failure of concentrating solar thermal pioneer Luz in 1991 put the sector in the freezer for over a decade. For HEVs,  the technologies were premature for commercialization, but CST suffered from capricious public policy and the association with low-tech solar hot water (hard to patent the technology) in comparison with high-tech solar PV.   

Tom Konrad, of AltEnergyStocks.com fame, recently presented a model clean energy investment portfolio that tries to identify undervalued sectors with the best prospects. It is notable for the absence of solar, and the dominance of efficiency, transportation, and electric grid.

In fact, the portfolio substantially diverges from the current market cap of various clean tech sectors given in a BofA Merrill Lynch Global Research report. Solar and wind dominate the pie chart, with each having about one-third of the total market cap. Popular clean energy ETFs are similarly overweighted  in solar and wind.

Konrad assesses each sector in terms of several criteria:
1. How big a role will this sector play in our energy future?
2. How large is the market cap of current firms in the sector?
3. Is the industry likely to be disrupted by new entrants and technologies?
4. Are there underlying enabling technologies that will benefit from the sector’s growth, or constraints that will hold it back?

By these criteria, wind and solar PV are poor investments because although they can play major roles in our clean energy future, they already have large market caps – the growth expectations are already “baked in”. Wind at larger scale is constrained by the lack (and cost and planning issues) of long distance transmission. Even worse for solar PV, the sector is at risk from technological disruption and new entrants, particularly from concentrating solar thermal (CST) or new variants of solar PV.

Konrad identifies transmission, smart grid, and storage as the key enabling technologies for the clean energy infrastructure, which have been somewhat overlooked but now seem ready to catch a wave of investor attention. Despite the recent success of lithium ion battery producer A123’s IPO, Konrad is pessimistic about plug-in vehicles due to their cost and inherent limitations of the technology, leaving automotive batteries highly vulnerable to disruptive innovation (also see John Petersen on this).

Konrad’s basic approach is very sound, especially for those who prefer a sectoral approach to the risks of individual stocks. It provides a useful framework for discussing particular technologies. For example, I would favor CST as a sub-sector because of its prospects to scale up at reasonable cost, the lower technological risk compared with PV, and the prospects for integrating thermal storage (also see this on SolarReserve). The offshore wind sector could also benefit from the $125 billion plan to build up to 25 GW of capacity, for which initial contracts were announced in early January.

I’m less sanguine than Konrad about the prospects for mass transit and high-speed rail, at least in the US, as it requires a level of governmental investment and coordination that seems unlikely in the current financial and political context. I fully concur regarding the outlook for efficiency. A McKinsey report points to the economic attractiveness of efficiency investments and a vast market potential of over $500 billion in the US over the next decade. Pike Research recently issued a report supporting a positive outlook, projecting that the Energy Service Company (ESCO) business in the US would increase from $5.6 billion in 2009 to nearly $20 billion by 2020. Utility demand side management programs are a major stimulus for this growth. The Pike Research report also noted opportunities at the intersection of energy efficiency and information/communications technology.

Although this is not the place for a discussion of particular stocks and mutual funds, it’s worth noting that investing in efficiency tends to be tougher than other sectors, because there are few public pure-play companies or dedicated ETFs. On the one hand, there are many small privately held companies, and on the other, some very large industrial companies for whom energy control systems and services are a relatively minor part of their business, such as Honeywell International and Siemens. The situation is similar with clean energy related professional services and software. Pike Research estimates that the market for carbon software management and services was a modest $380 million global market in 2009, but is poised for growth of more than 40% a year. This neglected part of the clean energy market has a few small players, but is increasingly dominated by the large accounting, management consulting, and enterprise software companies.

The country faces a serious long-term strategic threat from climate change. The largest population centers are along the coastal plain, just a few meters above sea level, and regional projections point to a decline in winter precipitation of 10-20%, increasing the likelihood of severe droughts. Although more than half the population considers climate change to be a serious threat, there has been little governmental attention to emissions until recently, and even the McKinsey report neglects the potential physical impacts of climate change.

During my visit to Israel in December 2009, I gave a talk at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, on climate governance (drawing from A Tale of Two Meltdowns), and my Israeli colleague from the university organized a meeting with the Minister of Environmental Protection, Gilad Erdan, and several of his staff, to talk about Israel’s plans for reducing GHG emissions and ways of engaging Israeli industry. Historically, environmental protection has been a relatively low priority in Israel, in light of more pressing security and economic development concerns. Israel has a standard of living approaching European levels, yet because it’s still classified as a developing country in the climate regime, it did not have binding obligations under the Kyoto process. Nevertheless, Erdan has been pushing for the country to adopt aggressive emissions targets, and is seeking ways to get the government as well as industry on board.

The key to advancing the climate agenda in this particular environment is to link it to other national priorities, in order to elevate its strategic significance and build the political coalition needed for action and investment. The Environment ministry recognizes this, and the McKinsey report notes four benefits that would accompany climate action:

An important motive for Israel’s ambitious GHG goals is to graduate from developing to developed country status, with a view to joining the OECD. This would offer broader economic benefits through trade and investment as well as improved international legitimacy. Israel’s active engagement in promoting clean development regionally and supplying critical technologies for global emissions reductions would also bolster its international status, enhance exports, and potentially provide a source of carbon credits.            

Energy security is clearly an important goal, as Israel is almost completely dependent on imported fossil fuels, including natural gas from Egypt. Yet current thinking is that energy security means independence through greater reliance on local renewables, primarily solar. My own view is that energy security can be linked to national security and pursued through regional energy collaboration, primarily with Egypt and Jordan. Though the McKinsey report lists solar power, both CST (concentrating solar thermal) and PV as the single largest contributor to Israel’s GHG reduction potential, the reality is that suitable land is quite limited, even in the southern Negev desert. Collaboration with Egypt and Jordan would open up the possibility of developing a regional grid drawing from large-scale CST in the Sinai desert, southern Jordan, even perhaps northern Saudi Arabia. Moreover, the intermittency of solar can be somewhat offset when complemented with wind power, which has very limited potential in Israel (McKinsey estimates at around 600MW), but is far more abundant in neighboring countries.

Of course, Israel does not want to be dependent on its Arab neighbors for energy. A regional grid would provide security through interdependence. Israel could be a key supplier of technology, as well as a conduit of power between Egypt and Jordan. Economic and technological collaboration on the scale required would also, one hopes, improve political relations. During the 1950s and 1960s, Israel made considerable diplomatic gains in Africa and parts of Asia from its contributions to international economic development. More ambitiously, if a Mideast regional grid were tied into the proposed Desertec supergrid, European participation would provide a strong political guarantee of supply security, as well as smoothing out supply intermittency issues.

Israel has a strong clean tech sector as part of the larger high-tech cluster and entrepreneurial culture in the country (see Start-up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle). The solar thermal and PV clusters are particularly well developed, and the country is home to major firms in water purification and desalination, geothermal energy, and other areas (see here and here, and Jonathan Shapira’s excellent blog on Israeli clean tech). The internal market, however, is far too small to benefit very much from Israel’s own emissions reductions efforts. The large economic payoff will come from exports, technology licensing, and international joint ventures in which Israel is the source for R&D, software, and high value components. BrightSource Industries Israel, for example, a descendent of the CST pioneer Luz, is now a subsidiary of California-based Brightsource Energy, and supplies R&D, engineering services, and key components for the company’s global markets. In fact, the Israeli tech sector is remarkable for its success despite the absence of advanced local markets – during my MBA at Tel Aviv University, I wrote some case studies on how Israeli companies operated within virtual clusters, with their major markets and sources of capital in Europe and the US.

Israel’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Potential

Though Israel’s total emissions are tiny in global terms, at 71 MtCO2e in 2005, they are growing rapidly, and expected to double by 2030 in a “business as usual” scenario. Emissions per head are already 10.2 tons, about the European average, and expected to rise to more than 14 tons by 2030. The structural reasons for this relatively high and growing carbon footprint are the country’s dependence on coal for power, under investment in public transportation, weak building standards, and high rates of economic and population growth. The country is also committed to energy gobbling large-scale water desalination projects.

The McKinsey report estimates that implementation of abatement measures could reduce emissions by about 45 MtCO2e, corresponding to 2/3 of the expected GHG emissions growth and about 1/3 of total expected BAU emissions in 2030. Behavioral changes, such as reduced air conditioning and greater use of bikes and public transportation, could reduce emissions by a further 7 MtCO2e. With characteristic optimism, McKinsey suggests that the net cost would be zero, with negative cost activities such as efficient lighting and car engines offsetting more expensive measures such as solar power. McKinsey’s estimates for large quantities of solar PV at a cost of under €10/tCO2e seems unduly sanguine.

Ten measures account for about 2/3 of the reduction potential:

As always, the core question is how to implement these measures. Just because more than half the abatement potential can be achieved at negative cost does not mean that it will occur spontaneously, due to the multitude of market failures and institutional hurdles (see McKinsey’s Expanding Free Lunch Program). McKinsey recommends four rather uninspiring steps for the Israeli government to consider:

1. Establish ambitious national GHG abatement goals as government policy.
2. Formulate Israel’s Low Carbon Growth Plan (LCGP) defining the mechanisms and timing of implementation.
3. Translate the national abatement plan into detailed operational measures including ways to finance the upfront investment.
4. Establish a central body to monitor progress in implementation.

What is really needed, in Israel and elsewhere, is a much broader mobilization of the public, government agencies, and business to position climate change at the top of the agenda as the critical strategic threat of the century. At the same time, it offers unprecedented potential for innovation, economic transformation, and regional collaborations. Outside the clean tech sector, Israeli business does not yet take climate seriously – my own research shows that the best way to shift perspectives is to engage people with leaders in the field. In addition to the targets and implementation plans, the Israeli government could partner with charismatic climate champions such as Shai Agassi and local clean tech companies to promote the issue and organize a high profile conference of international businesspeople, policymakers, and experts to jumpstart the process and generate local commitment.

Generating more energy from renewable sources will be crucial to our survival: not just as individual countries, but as a planet. With this in mind, Marie Shields takes a look at the current state of the renewables sector in two key regions: the US and Europe.

Europe and the United States: both Western, developed economic powerhouses, and by extension, voracious consumers of energy. Both also chasing ambitious targets for generating a portion of this energy from renewable sources: in the US, 10 percent by 2012, rising to 25 percent by 2025; and in Europe, 12 percent by 2010 and 20 percent by 2020.

What are the differences that lie under these surface similarities? Below, we take a look at the unique challenges faced by each region in its quest to safeguard our energy future.

Current status

Known primarily as Kyoto foot-draggers under the Bush Administration, the US government is once again a friend of the environment thanks to the election of President Obama last year. The Bush government gave $72 billion in subsidies to fossil fuels between 2002 and 2008, with renewables receiving $29 billion in the same period. Obama and his team must now try to redress this imbalance, starting with the $6 billion earmarked for renewable energy and electric transmission technologies loan guarantees in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act

The countries of the European Union, regarded by many as the global leaders in renewable energy development, have a longer track record of environmental consciousness. As long ago as 1997, the EU set a target of working toward 12 percent of energy from renewables by 2010.

David Levy, Director of the Center for Sustainable Enterprise and Regional Competitiveness at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, and author of the blog Climate Inc., points out that while renewables have traditionally been lower on the radar in the US, Americans are also very good at pushing ahead with an idea once they latch on to it. “I think it’s true that there is some catching up going on,” he says. “There’s a huge amount of wind power that is now being installed in Texas; and California is leading in terms of really large grid scale solar thermal installations.

“It’s been hard to get financing. Renewables haven’t had the kind of sustained, predictable subsidies here in the US that Europe has had, and we lacked a mandatory cap-and trade-system. The European Trading System for carbon and national targets provided a clear signal for business to take renewables seriously. It has been slower here in the US.”        

Despite its slower start, the US appears to have already moved ahead of the EU in terms of renewable energy consumption. According to the Energy Information Administration, renewable energy accounted for around 11.1 percent of energy produced in the United States in the first half of 2009. In Europe, meanwhile, figures from Europe’s Energy Portal indicate that 9.2 percent of Europe’s final energy consumption came from renewable sources in 2006, the last year for which confirmed data are available.

It should be noted, however, that 7.4 percent of the US total came from conventional hydroelectric power, with only 4.7 percent coming from ‘new’ sources such as biomass, geothermal, solar and wind.

As things stand, the EU may not succeed in reaching its original target 12 percent in 2010. In an attempt to address this situation, in 2008 the European Commission released its Renewable Energy Framework Directive, with an even more ambitious target of achieving 20 percent of generation from renewables by 2020.

Christine Lins, Secretary General of the European Renewable Energy Council, believes that Europe can meet the 2020 goal: “We are on track, but we must see some further impetus that this development will really happen. Progress so far has been made by five or six EU member states. The challenge we have ahead of us is to make sure that all 27 member states are being serious about renewables and developing them to their full potential.”

Lins’s point is that the overall figures mask a large variation between individual countries. Sweden topped the list of renewable-friendly countries at 41.3 percent according to 2006 figures, with Latvia at 31.4 percent, Finland at 28.9 percent, Austria at 25.1 percent and Portugal at 21.5 percent. At the bottom of the list, Malta generated none of its energy from renewables in 2006, with Luxembourg and the UK not doing much better, at 1 percent and 1.5 percent respectively.

Says Lins, “At the moment, development as far as renewables are concerned is coming from certain countries. However, there is a lot of potential in all the other member states. One of the major outlines in the renewables directive is that countries by June next year have to come up with national renewable energy action plans, outlining how they foresee reaching their binding national renewable energy targets. The hope is that these action plans will effectively provide the stability and framework for making sure that the objectives are achieved.”

Blown away

Wind and solar are two main areas of focus for renewables on both sides of the Atlantic. Wind energy is starting to take off in the US, according to figures from the American Wind Energy Association, which put installed wind power capacity at the end of the third quarter of 2009 at over 31,000 MW, generating enough electricity to power the equivalent of nearly nine million homes.

The state posting the fastest growth was Arizona, which installed its first utility-scale project. Pennsylvania ranked second in growth with 29 percent, followed by Illinois with 22 percent, Wyoming with 21 percent and New Mexico with 20 percent. Texas remains firmly at the head of the pack overall, however, with 8797 MW of operating capacity.

“Wind power installations are up, and that is good news for America’s economy, environment and energy security,” said AWEA CEO Denise Bode in a statement. “But manufacturing, which has the potential to employ many more Americans in good, clean energy jobs, remains uncertain. A firm, long-term national commitment to renewable energy is still needed for the US to become a wind turbine manufacturing powerhouse.”

AWEA says that since the early July announcement of rules to implement the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the wind industry has seen more than 1600 MW of completed projects, and more than 1700 MW of construction starts, which equates to about $6.5 billion in new investment. AWEA does not expect the fourth quarter of 2009 to be as strong as the fourth quarter of 2008, since the 5000 MW now under construction is nearly 38 percent lower than the 8000 MW under construction at this time last year.

In Europe, a report by the European Environment Agency confirmed that wind power has the potential to meet and even exceed the continent’s energy needs. The report, entitled ‘Europe’s Onshore and Offshore Wind Energy Potential’, states that in 2020 the amount of electricity that could be generated from wind power could be as much as three times greater than demand.

Germany, Denmark, Spain, Portugal and Ireland have particularly strong bases in wind power. Figures from the German Wind Energy Association show that 19,460 wind turbines, with a total capacity of 22,247 MW, were installed in country by the end of 2007, and that 39.5 TW of wind electricity were generated during that year, equalling more than seven percent of Germany’s electricity consumption. As of 2009, its installed capacity is 25 GW. Denmark has been vying with Germany for the top spot, with 19.7 percent of electricity production and 24.1 percent of capacity in 2007.

The European Wind Energy Information Network puts the annual median growth of the European wind power market at 35 percent, with EU member countries contributing about 75 percent of the world’s wind power. The wind power market is estimated to have helped create 25,000 jobs within the EU.

Sunny days

“The US solar energy industry grew to new heights in 2008.” So proclaims the Solar Energy Industries Association’s report ‘2008 Year in Review’. The report points out that capacity grew by 1265 MW in 2008, up from 1159 MW installed in 2007. “This brings the total installed capacity up by 16 percent to 9183 MW,” it goes on to say. “Capacity in both photovoltaic (PV) and solar water heating systems grew at record levels. And while no new concentrating solar power plants were completed in 2008, projects totalling more than 6000 MW are in the pipeline, most with signed purchase power agreements. Solar pool heating capacity grew at a slower rate than in 2007, reflecting conditions in the residential real estate market.”

The growth rate was found to be highest for grid-connected PV electric systems, with an increase of 58 percent, to a total of 792 MW. Domestic PV manufacturing capacity also increased by 65 percent, with preliminary estimates putting the total PV manufacturing capacity at 685 MW per year as of the end of 2008.

Photovoltaic solar power also has a strong base in Europe, at least according to the European Photovoltaic Industry Association (EPIA). The association recently commissioned a study on PV power in Europe, ‘SET For 2020′, from the management consultancy AT Kearney. The study concludes that PV power can supply as much as 12 percent of Europe’s electricity needs by 2020, assuming appropriate policy-driven support and evolution in the set-up and functioning of the electricity distribution system.

“The fundamentals of the PV industry are and remain strong,” said Secretary General of the EPIA Adel El Gammal at the sixth European Photovoltaic Industry Forum held in September in Hamburg. “It needs an ambitious policy support for the next three to nine years, until photovoltaic power is able to compete with conventional electricity on price.”

Solar thermal power is also growing in the US. The largest solar thermal generating installation in the world – the Solar Energy Generating Systems (SEGS), a group of nine solar thermal power plants – is located in California’s Mojave Desert.  The plants use parabolic trough solar technology along with natural gas and have a combined generating capacity of 354 MW.

On the European side, the European Solar Thermal Industry Federation conducted a study “to provide the European Union and its member states with substantiated information on the contribution solar thermal can make to the 20 percent renewable energy target set by the RES Directive.” Market statistics released by the ESTIF show that the solar thermal market in the EU and Switzerland grew by more than 60 percent to 3.3 GW of new capacity.

Despite the positive messages put out by both sides of the solar energy sector, UMass’s David Levy believes the focus is shifting from PV to thermal. He points out that the economic crisis has prompted several countries, including Germany and Spain, to cut back on subsidies to consumers for the installation of PV panels – although he also underlines the cyclical nature of such interest: “Solar thermal was doing well a few years ago, but then when Luz went bankrupt, many people said, ‘We can’t do solar thermal.’”

Israel-based Luz Partners were the original builders of the SEGS solar thermal plants in California. The company failed in the early 1990s after drastic cuts in federal tax credits to the solar thermal industry.

“In Arizona and the Southwest, we’re seeing much bigger solar thermal installations,” Levy continues, “whereas with solar PV, companies are losing money because of the cut-throat competition. PV is selling below cost, and even so, power generation is still too expensive for grid scale production.”

Further evidence of solar thermal’s resurgence may be exemplified by the re-emergence of Luz as Luz II, now called BrightSource Industries. The new company claims to have advanced solar thermal technology by developing a proprietary design that increases solar-to-thermal conversion efficiency from about 36 percent (for the older parabolic trough technology) to above 40 percent.

Future directions

The US and Europe may both be moving full steam ahead with wind and solar power, but there are other areas in which they remain quite far apart. The US, for example, with its long history of coal-fired power generation, will not easily give up its dependence on carbon. This may explain why it is investing so much time and effort into developing new carbon sequestration technologies, despite widespread disapproval from environmental groups.

In Europe, where the coal lobby is not as strong, carbon capture has a much weaker focus. David Levy also mentions geothermal as a high area of interest in the US, less so in Europe. By contrast, Europe is far more advanced in the development of wave power.

In the end, though, it doesn’t really matter what the differences or similarities are, or who achieves their target first – the US with its can-do attitude under the new administration, or Europe, with its stronger historical groundwork. What matters is that we get there, somehow. The future of our planet depends on it.

Renewables in Europe

EU countries with the highest share of renewable consumption to gross final energy consumption:
Sweden 41.3 %
Latvia 31.4%
Finland 28.9%
Austria 25.1%
Portugal 21.5%
Denmark 17.2%
Romania 17%
Estonia 16.6%
Slovenia 15.5%
Lithuania 14.6%

[Source: www.energy.eu]

US wind power

The top five states in total operating wind capacity are:
Texas 8797 MW
Iowa 3053 MW
California 2787 MW
Minnesota 1805 MW
Oregon 1659 MW

Solar energy systems

Photovoltaic
A photovoltaic system uses solar cells to convert light into electricity. It contains multiple components, including cells, mechanical and electrical connections and mountings and means of regulating and/or modifying the electrical output. Because each individual cell has a low voltage (typically 0.5V), several cells are combined into photovoltaic modules, which are then connected together into an array.

Thermal
Solar thermal technology harnesses solar energy for thermal energy (heat). Solar thermal collectors are defined as low-, medium-, or high-temperature. Low temperature collectors are flat plates generally used to heat swimming pools. Medium-temperature collectors are also usually flat plates, but are used for creating hot water for residential and commercial use. High temperature collectors concentrate sunlight using mirrors or lenses and are generally used for electric power production.

Other renewable energy sources

Bioenergy
European bioethanol production equalled 1592 m litres in 2006. Germany is the leading producer in Europe, at 431 m litres, with Spain running a close second with 396 m litres. France was the third largest European producer in 2006 with 293 m litres.

According to the US Department of Energy, bioenergy ranks second to hydropower in renewable primary energy production and accounts for three percent of the primary energy production in the United States.

Wave power
The first 2.25 MW of electricity produced from wave power was expected to be brought ashore by submarine cable at Aguçadoura, in northern Portugal, in October. The electrical energy produced will be enough to power 1500 homes.

In the United States, the Pacific Northwest Generating Cooperative is funding the building of a commercial wave-power park at Reedsport, Oregon. The project will use a system of modular, ocean-going buoys: the rising and falling of the waves moves the buoy-like structure, creating mechanical energy that is converted into electricity and transmitted to shore over a submerged transmission line.

by David L. Levy

The transition to a global low-carbon economy will require the large-scale mobilization of financial, technological, and organizational resources. With government coffers depleted by the recession and bailouts, the vast majority of these resources will have to come from the private sector (see Beyond Copenhagen). Understanding the decision processes behind corporate strategy is therefore essential. We need to know the factors that lead some companies to invest billions of dollars to develop new low-carbon products and technologies and which sectors they are choosing. In light of current concerns about green jobs and regional competitiveness, it’s also important to know how companies choose where to invest.

The Harbor at UMass-Boston

The Center for Sustainable Enterprise and Regional Competitiveness at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, is part of a new international comparative study of corporate climate strategies in energy intense industries, a project designed to tackle these important questions. The research is a collaboration among Oxford University’s Smith School for Enterprise and Environment, the University of Western Sydney, and UMass-Boston, and is funded by a AUD300,000 3-year award from the Australian Research Council under the National Competitive Grants program. We’ll be examining corporate strategies in several energy-intense sectors, including oil, utilities, automobiles, chemicals, and metals, in the US, Germany, the UK, and Australia. We will also be looking at the influence of governmental policies and NGO strategies on corporate strategies.

The importance of corporate strategies was made clear this week with the news of Exxon’s $41 billion acquisition of XTO, a major player in the US gas industry with substantial interests in unconventional shale sources (see The Economist on Exxon’s long term strategy). Private decisions to allocate large chunks of capital to a particular technology or fuel source have a significant impact on the direction of energy development and the trajectory of carbon emissions. Burning natural gas to generate electricity creates only half the CO₂ emissions of coal, so offers the prospect of large-scale reductions in greenhouse gas emissions in countries where coal still accounts for a large share of power, such as Australia, China, and the US. There has been considerable uncertainty regarding the technical difficulties, the costs, and the environmental impacts of recovering shale gas. For Joe Romm, shale gas is a game changer that will make it easy for the US to meet a 20% emission reduction target (and see this NYT piece). The environmental impact of deep drilling and injection of chemicals near groundwater resources is giving cause for concern, however. Tom Konrad thinks shale gas has been somewhat over-hyped.

The biggest energy deal of the year signals that Exxon, a very risk averse company, has enough confidence in shale gas for this investment, and assures that the company’s vast resources will be devoted to developing the technologies needed to recover gas in a cost effective manner – and perhaps to overcoming the environmental concerns. For Ed Crooks at the Financial Times, it’s also “a play on the likelihood that that the US will make further moves to curb greenhouse gases.” Exxon has long been the most powerful corporate opponent of mandatory emission curbs, so its encouraging to see the company look past the chaos and deadlock in Copenhagen. The other oil companies have also been increasing their gas investments, and climate change is not the only driver. As Crooks observes:

Getting XTO gives Exxon a powerful position in US “unconventional” gas, including shale gas, where it has not been one of the leaders in the revolution that has opened up the huge new source of US gas supplies. With many of the resource-rich countries around the world still making life difficult for foreign investors (viz Exxon’s travails in Russia and Venezuela), resources in a stable developed country are attractive, and in Exxon’s own back yard particularly so.

In addition to those attractions, however, an important part of the case for buying gas assets in the US today is the prospect that energy and climate change legislation will tilt the balance of the energy mix away from coal and towards gas for power generation.

In an earlier post, Back to Petroleum, I explored the US-European oil industry convergence on a compromise strategy of “hydrocarbon neutrality.” While retreating from heavy investments in renewables, the industry realizes that it can live with inevitable advent of carbon controls, in the form of a flexible regime with low carbon prices. This would not threaten core business operations in the short-to-medium term, leaving adequate time and resources for longer-term strategic repositioning as the climate issue plays out. Gas is the perfect medium-term play.

Exxon knows that its core expertise lies in geology, hydrocarbon chemistry, extraction technologies, and distribution, and the XTO acquisition allows it to extend these capabilities to a vast new market. Exxon has also joined the other oil companies in making more modest investments in biofuels. It announced in July 2009 a $600 million algae biofuels project with biotech company Synthetic Genomics. Biofuels clearly represent a better strategic fit than solar or wind, and though more risky than gas, promise to extend the age of liquid hydrocarbon fuels.

The corollary, of course, is that several decades of plentiful natural gas (and nuclear) might hurt investment in renewables and delay the era of zero-emission power. There have recently been setbacks with geothermal power, the only other prospect for short-term renewable (baseload) energy [see Tom Konrad's comment below].

The Financial Times reported some intriguing new McKinsey data this week on carbon mitigation costs across sectors and countries. The data indicate that there are substantial differences in costs, and predictably, that building efficiency, lighting, and HVAC are the low-hanging fruit available at negative cost. The implication is that US companies should look to efficiency measures at home before buying international offsets, though international offsets might be preferable to renewables in the US.

The surprise in the data is that mitigation costs for most efficiency measures in the US appear to be substantially below those in Europe, China, and India. The cost per (metric) tonne of CO2 saved approaches €50 (Euro) in the US for these efficiency measures, while in Europe the saving is about €25 Euro. In India and China, there is a positive cost to these measures. The exception is lighting, for which the cost saving in Europe, China, and India is €60-90/tonne. Even more surprising is McKinsey’s estimate of mitigation costs from cleaner vehicles (hybrids and pure electrics), at negative €79 in the US and about €35 in Europe (i.e. net savings).

The Financial Times does not give the basis for these calculations, and the estimates are projected for 2030. It’s unclear if McKinsey is estimating real resource costs, or the costs as viewed by consumers or manufacturers, taking subsidies and taxes into account. Perhaps McKinsey is factoring in much higher fuel prices and lower battery costs by 2030, but these values are highly speculative. I looked at buying hybrid Prius last year, which cost about $6000 more than the Mazda 6 I finally settled on. I would have to drive about 15,000 miles a year for 10 years, with fuel at $3/gallon, to break even (and that ignores discount rates for future savings). My actual mileage is only around 7,000 miles a year, which is why I don’t feel too bad about not buying a hybrid. It’s also unclear why the savings in the US, with it’s cheap gasoline, are more than double those in high-cost Europe. Perhaps its because Europeans are already driving lightweight high-efficiency diesels.   Another mystery is why renewable power is so much cheaper in China and India compared to Europe and the US. Most of the cost in solar and wind is in manufacturing, which is already dispersed through a complex global supply chain. So those costs should be the same wherever the renewables are installed. Installation and maintenance will rely on local labor, which is much cheaper, of course, in developing countries (but might be expected to rise quite sharply over time).

The availability of free carbon lunches has been discussed before on Climate Inc. Mark Sarro and Jurgen Weiss urged caution regarding the hidden costs of energy efficiency, while I noted that the low-hanging fruit might be locked up or hidden away behind misaligned incentives, inertia, and market barriers. Indeed, he fact that negative cost (i.e. profitable) opportunities to reduce carbon are not being exploited points to the importance of these hurdles. Because these barriers are frequently organizational, behavioral, and institutional, putting a price on carbon is not the best way to move ahead: a price high enough to be effective would be politically infeasible.

To repeat what I said in the earlier post: Most companies have traditionally paid little attention to potential energy savings because nobody was paid to do so. Once companies assign managerial responsibility for the task, measure the savings, and evaluate performance accordingly, they start finding a lot of low-hanging fruit. Many of the barriers are more complex, and require restructuring markets and institutions – California is famous for paying utilities to save energy, not sell it. Utilities are also finding that they can nudge consumers in the right direction with non-price signals, such as comparisons with their neighbor’s bills. The booming field of behavioral economics points to all sorts of low-cost ways of shifting behavior.

Of course, these solutions are not cost free – they involve managerial time, some capital, and transaction costs. Some of the barriers are complex and would require large scale institutional restructuring, requiring government-business collaboration. But one person’s transaction costs are another’s business opportunity (the transaction costs of carbon markets will keep financial firms smiling). The key point here is that there are creative organizational and managerial approaches to unlock the doors to low-cost or even negative-cost carbon reductions. The carbon price is, by itself, an inefficient and ineffective tool.

This is a second guest contribution by Tom Konrad Ph.D., CFA, an investment analyst and policy wonk specializing in clean energy.  This is an edited version of two articles that first appeared on AltEnergyStocks.com, where he blogs about investing.  He also writes about energy policy and economics on Clean Energy Wonk. It’s worth burrowing down into some of the links to find out more about prospects for specific sectors and companies.

A reader of my article on asset allocation for green energy investors brought up an important point: we may have green opportunities in our own lives, such as improving the energy efficiency of our homes, which will return much safer and higher returns than green stocks, especially when the market as a whole is as overvalued as I currently believe it is.

Homeowners typically have a large number of high-return energy efficiency investments they can make.  Since energy efficiency reduces energy use, it both produces returns and is very green, since pollution from fossil fuels is reduced.  Even reducing the use of renewable energy is green, because all energy production has some impact on the environment and uses resources.  Furthermore, energy efficiency reduces financial risk, because you are less subject to fluctuating energy prices if you use less energy.

Assess Your Opportunities

An energy audit is a good way to discover your opportunities.  Many utilities have programs to give customers free or subsidized energy audits.

Check with your utility (gas and electric) first to see if they have such a program.  If not, and you are a do-it-yourselfer, visit a website dedicated to helping you improve your home’s efficiency, such as the EnergyStar site. If you’re not a do-it your selfer, look for a RESNET certified energy auditor and pay for an energy audit.  Prices for audits vary a lot, but I’ve heard that $200 – $300 is a good ballpark figure.

You will be amazed, or even shocked, at how many opportunities for savings you find, even in a brand-new home. The improvements you make usually qualify for federal tax credits, as well as (possibly) rebates from your utility or state tax credits.

Any energy efficiency or renewable energy measure with a payback of less than 10 years is likely to be a better investment than green stocks or funds, especially in today’s overvalued markets.  Here are ten that almost always have great financial returns, many of which are good enough to perform even if you rent and plan to stay in one place for a year or two. 

1. Keep your car tires inflated to the proper pressure.
2. Change and clean your air furnace filter regularly. Take a hose and get the dirt off the coils in the outside heat exchanger as well.
3. Caulk air leaks.
4. Use Compact Fluorescent Lights.
5. Install a Water Heater Blanket.
6. If you have an old fridge in the garage or basement, unplug it.
7. Install low-flow showerheads.
8. Use an intelligent Power Strip to turn off standby mode.
9. Get a power meter to hunt for energy hogs around the home.
10. When replacing electronics, computers, cars, and appliances, get energy efficient ones, especially anything that’s often on or in standby when plugged in. (cordless phones, TVs and set-top boxes, clocks, etc.)

Lists like this abound on the internet. Consult several for ideas.

How Much to Invest

An informed decision of how much to invest in green energy is at least as important as how you make the investment.  The choice between green Exhange Traded Funds (ETFs) and green Mutual funds rests on a difference of about one percent per year, caused by differences in fees.  Yet in the first three quarters of 2009, the S&P 500 (general stocks) returned 17%, ICLN, a green ETF returned 21%, and my ten green stocks for 2009 returned 41%.  With differences between performance as large as 20-30% a year (green stocks did much worse than the market as a whole in 2008,) the decision between investing 10% of your portfolio or 60% of your portfolio in green stocks will make a large difference (8% to 12%) in your total returns for the year, far more of a difference than how you invest.  The other important factor will be sector selection within green energy.  I believe that the main reason my Ten Green Stocks for 2009 have done so much better than the benchmarks is because I emphasized sectors I believed would benefit from the stimulus package.  At that time, the stimulus was  only something that I (and other green commentators) were predicting as part of Obama’s response to the financial crisis (He had not yet been sworn in.)

Your Allocation Decision

How much of your savings you put into green energy will depend on two things:

1. Your risk tolerance and market expectations.
2. Why you are investing in green energy in the first place.

All further discussion in this article assumes that either:

1. You have chosen not to time the market.
2. You have faith in your own predictive ability, and believe the market will continue to rise, OR
3. Your portfolio will be hedged against major market moves.

Risk Tolerance

Many green energy investments are more volatile than other sectors.  This is because the majority of green energy stocks are not yet profitable, and do not have the internal cash to see them through hard times.  This can force companies to raise money from the financial markets when those markets have fallen, and will cause the stock prices to fall further in market declines.  Such stocks are especially concentrated in the domestic and specialty green ETFs, such as PBW, TAN, and KWT.  Most of the green energy mutual funds, and the international green energy ETFs such as ICLN and PBD are less volatile due to a higher concentration of established companies.

Investors can deal with the greater volatility of green energy in several ways:

1. Stick to the less volatile green energy investments.
   1. Stock investors can emphasize profitable green companies over unprofitable ones.  Almost all of my 10 for 2009 picks referenced earlier are profitable companies, and those that are not currently profitable had a history of profitability prior to the financial crisis.
   2. Stick to the less volatile ETFs that contain a broad base of profitable global companies, instead of the more volatile domestic ETFs.
2. When hedging your portfolio, use a larger market hedge than you would otherwise.  The method I outline in my hedging strategies article automatically incorporates this adjustment.
3. If replacing an allocation of normal stocks with an allocation of green stocks in a larger portfolio,
   1. Replace an equally volatile sector allocation with your green energy allocation, or
   2. If replacing an allocation to ordinary stocks, replace part of that allocation with less volatile bonds, and part with green energy stocks.

Investment Motivation

It makes sense that the more confident you are that green energy will outperform other sectors, the more money you should allocate to it.  Keep in mind, however, that almost everyone has a strong overconfidence bias. That is, we believe we are going to turn out to be right a lot more often than we actually do.  This bias persists even when we are aware of overconfidence bias.

Hence, we should only let our confidence in green energy have a small influence in our overall allocation decision.  Like market timing, this is another rule that I honor in the breach: my entire stock portfolio is in some way related to green energy.  In ten or twenty years, we’ll find out if I actually know what I’m doing, or am just overconfident like most everyone else.

Motivation: Doing the Right Thing

If your main motivation for investing in green energy is to be more environmentally responsible, you are faced with a trade-off: the more you invest in green energy, the more volatile your portfolio will become.  However, feeling better about your investments may make you more comfortable with the added volatility.  This may allow you to hold more green energy because of your increased risk tolerance.

However, if you don’t believe that green energy will outperform, there are less risky ways to do the right thing.  You could instead replace your stock holdings with companies that are more green than most companies in their sector.  In a recent paper by Meir Statman and Denys Gluskov entitled “The Wages of Social Responsibility”, the authors found that socially responsible investment managers were able to achieve higher returns by favoring “best of class” companies in each sector, a process they described as socially responsible “tilt.”  In contrast, they found that completely shunning sectors such as alcohol and firearms led to lower returns over time.  Based on theses results, there is a win-win available for environmentally responsible investors who want to do the right thing: they can rebuild their entire stock portfolio by keeping the same sector allocations they had made before the change, but replacing the stocks in each sector with the greenest stocks from lists such as Newsweek’s rankings of the 500 largest US Corporations that I wrote about in September.

Motivation: Fighting Climate Change

If your motivation for investing in green energy is to fight climate change, you must balance the trade-off of increased risk from concentration in one industry, with your expectation that that industry will produce higher long-term returns because of increasing regulation of greenhouse gasses, and support for alternative energy.  In general, I find it very difficult to predict which companies are going to benefit from climate change regulation.  Will politicians choose to subsidize solar, wind, biofuels, or energy efficiency?  Will carbon credit giveaways create a windfall for utilities and other large emitters of greenhouse gases.

Not being able to predict politicians, I instead choose to focus my investing based on the (clearly false) assumption that politicians will do (roughly) the right thing. How do we know what the ideal actions are?  We look at reports from relatively unbiased sources that recommend particular actions.  I recently wrote two articles based on an article from two economists that looked at what Modern Portfolio theory has to say about the best technologies for climate mitigation (here and here.)

In terms of how much of your portfolio you should devote to fighting climate change, it should depend on how quickly you expect the effects of climate change to occur.  The biggest gains from a climate change focused portfolio will occur as more and more political leaders stop being able to ignore the urgency of responding to climate change.  I personally feel that this will be triggered by the increasing frequency of climate-related disasters, caused by the increasing severity and frequency of unusual and dangerous weather events such as hurricanes, droughts, floods, and blizzards.  This is something that I already see happening, but I don’t expect it to be obvious to the many people who want to ignore the effects of climate change for another 5-15 years.

Based on your own belief of when you expect this political transition to occur, you should only allocate money to climate change mitigating investments if you do not need to withdraw that money before the expected political change is likely to occur.  In some ways, this political change has already begun, and money is being awarded to deserving green energy firms.  However, investors should not ask what has already happened, but what unexpected changes are likely to occur.  The unexpected (by most other investors) change that I expect is the realization that Climate Change will not only be a serious problem, but that it will be a serious problem in our lifetime, and that it’s worth risking damage to the economy by devoting massive resources to the project of combating it.

In my case, my investment horizon is about 20-30 years, which is longer than the 5-20 I expect for the political change, so I consider fighting climate change as a good motivation to increase my portfolio’s allocation to green energy.

Motivation: Peak Oil

The connection between fossil fuel prices and the performance of green energy stocks is tenuous at best.  Investors should not expect their solar stocks to go up or down with the oil price.  After all, we do not yet have a fleet of plug-in vehicles which might let us substitute electricity from solar for gasoline from oil.  Hence, investors motivated by peak oil should stick to green energy sectors which reduce the need for liquid transportation fuels.  These sectors include biofuels, hydrogen fuel cells, technologies which make transportation more efficient, and technologies such as batteries which enable the electrification of transport.

Like climate change, how soon you expect to see the effects of peak oil should affect how much money you invest.  I feel that the effects of peak oil in terms of the reduced affordability of gas and diesel are already upon us.  This does not just mean high oil prices (which we have), but decreasing ability to purchase oil due to the economic disruption and contraction caused by those prices.  Low oil prices make our economies vibrant, which provide the money needed to buy oil.  High oil prices cripple the economy, which in turn means that we’re less able to buy oil at any price.  This is what I mean be “reduced affordability.”

In a recent report, “The Peak Oil Market,” Deutsche Bank predicts that post peak, both oil prices and oil demand will fall due to the introduction of disruptive technology: plug-in vehicles (If they’re right, investing in oil or oil companies is not the best way to profit from peak oil, but rather the potential disruptive sectors.  Of the sectors I mention above, efficient transportation, hydrogen, and electrification are the only ones that can possibly scale to replace a significant portion of our fossil fuel demand.  Biofuels are limited by the available supply of biomass.  Biomass can more efficiently power a vehicle when burnt to produce electricity to charge an electric vehicle’s battery than when converted into liquid fuels for an internal combustion engine.  A similar efficiency argument applies to hydrogen, although breakthroughs in electrolysis and fuel cell technology could change this.  However, I don’t consider betting on possible technological breakthroughs a sound investment strategy.  After all, even if a breakthrough occurs, it’s at least as likely to come from a new player than an industry incumbent.

Batteries will need some technological breakthroughs in order to make plug-in vehicles economical enough to displace gasoline. However, the needed improvements to the electric grid needed to accommodate electrified transportation (as suggested in the Deutsche Bank report) can be accomplished with existing technology.  Hence, investors motivated by peak oil should be looking to investments in transport efficiency, transmission and smart grid stocks.

In terms of how much to invest in these strategies, it probably should be a lot (at least if you believe as I do that the peak in oil production has either already happened, or will happen soon), and it should probably be accompanied by a hedge using shorts in oil intensive industries such as airlines.  The hedge is necessary because a peak in oil supply will hurt the world economy, and is likely to make stock prices as a whole fall, quite possibly even the stock prices of the companies which are working to displace oil with disruptive technology.  However, it is a good bet that these companies are likely to fare better than companies whose economics depends on the large scale consumption of cheap oil.

Conclusion

Your goals, expectations, and risk tolerance will affect both how you invest in green energy, and how much you invest.  Before you make any decisions, answer these questions for yourself:

1. Do I believe investing in green energy is the right thing to do? Will this help me bear the pain of declines in my portfolio?
2. How soon will Climate Change reach the top of the political agenda?  Do I have the time to wait for the expected investment returns?
3. How soon will oil production peak?  Do I have time to wait for the expected returns?
4. How confident am I about my answers?  Do I have reason to be confident, or is my confidence based on self-delusion?