Industry coalition seeks to squeeze the risk out of energy technology
A new administration in the White House means a new opportunity for the energy industry to take a lead role in getting alternative power sources ready for prime time after four years of a presidential preference for fossil fuels.
A coalition of industry organizations is urging the Biden administration and Congress to accept their offer to spearhead a proposed drive to “squeeze the risk” out of various new and improving technologies that will eventually provide necessary support for a clean-energy future that is presumed to be dominated by solar and wind power.
The Carbon-Free Technology Initiative (CFTI) was launched this month by nine organizations, including the Clean Air Task Force (CATF) and Edison Electric Institute. The debut was marked with introductory letters to congressional leaders urging them to look closer at funding and incentives for various technologies at or near the point of being added to the energy mix but still need a slight boost to make them more acceptable to investors.
“The goal is to make these technologies completely normal and boring,” Armond Cohen, co-founder and Executive Director of the CATF, told Daily Energy Insider. “Wall Street hates risk, and we are trying to squeeze out that risk.”
The new administration, which has made climate change a top priority, seems more open to a wider range of possibilities than the Trump team regarding alternative energy. “The previous administration was very selective in their thinking, whereas the Biden team is more eclectic and broader in their thinking,” Cohen said. “It would not be an exaggeration to call it a sea change.”
Being more open, however, doesn’t mean that the CFTI will be a catch-all for outside-the-box ideas. The strategy sticks to technologies that are already making their way off the drawing board and can be used to supplement wind and solar generations, especially at certain times of the day – or times of the year – when sunshine and suitable breezes are in lower supply.
“Ultimately, technology will drive the timeline to a 100-percent clean energy future; and federal policies are a necessary catalyst to accelerate the pace of innovation and to ensure these technologies are demonstrated and commercialized in the time that electric companies need them,” the CFTI said in its introductory letter to Capitol Hill leaders.
The list of potential developments includes:
- Long-duration energy storage
- Hydrogen and other zero-carbon fuels
- A new generation of nuclear power, both fission and fusion
- Carbon capture and storage, which can be used at existing natural-gas power plants
- Advanced renewables, including “superhot rock-deep geothermal,” which can also be developed in conjunction with existing plants
Most of these ideas are well along on the development timeline but could use a nudge from Washington in terms of incentives or outright funding to get them scaled up and into widespread use. “A lot of this proposal isn’t about lab science or breakthrough technology,” Cohen said. “But a lot of it is about large-scale deployments and demonstration projects, and those aren’t cheap.”
Proposing new spending to Congress might sound like an invitation to a standoff between evenly divided Democrats and Republicans, but it might actually be an opportune time. Cohen said the utility industry and other major corporations have embraced renewables, even during the Trump years, and announced their own “zero carbon” goals and timelines, which even the most rocked-ribbed conservatives can go along with.
President Biden plans to emphasize advancing technology to curb climate change; the White House Monday unveiled plans to add another 30 gigawatts of offshore wind power along the Atlantic Coast. These steps are bound to increase the frequency of congressional hearings and debates over the finer points of the transition. In the end, the CFTI could be the means to a bipartisan end of whatever controversy remains over the advancement of green energy and turning it into the kind of “boring” technology that Wall Street loves, and voters take for granted.
“We have the technology that will be around in the future, but we need to scale up,” Cohen said. “But if you had said 15 years ago that wind and solar technology would be in a position to be as dominant as they are now, I would have said that you were dreaming.”
