Phase II of Renewable Energy in America

National Policy Conference

November 28-29

Cannon Caucus Room, Washington, DC

American Council On Renewable Energy (ACORE)

I want to thank Mike Eckhart for the opportunity to speak here today before ACORE's Fourth Annual Phase II Conference.  This is the must-attend policy conference in Washington for those of us that are interested in renewable energy.  I know you've all been discussing the energy bill, and I'll be looking forward to hearing about what the results of that discussion were.  We in the U.S. Government under Secretary Dorr and I hope similarly to accelerate sharply the global market adoption of renewable energy through our deliberations at the Ministerial, March 4th through 6th, 2008.  We're delighted that ACORE's our partner, and we noted with interest in your outlook on renewable energy 2007 that you're projecting a possible 635 gigawatts of renewable electricity generation by 2025, and the possible replacement of 30 to 40 percent of current U.S. petroleum products with biofuels by 2030.  That's really a future to strive for.  I'll speak about WIREC a few moments, but first I want to outline the U.S. approach to international renewable energy policy.  So I'll focus on foreign policy knowing that all of you are venture capitalists and policy experts on the domestic side.  Let me take Secretary Condoleezza Rice as the tap-stone of our policy.  She said that our goal is to do transformational diplomacy.  Work with many partners around the world to build and sustain democratic well-governed states that respond to the needs of their people and conduct themselves responsibly in the international arena.  She further said transformational diplomacy is rooted in partnership, not paternalism, and then doing things with people and not for them.  One of the most dynamic ways we can do that is to look at the-- take this foreign policy vision and apply it to the energy and climate policies in the world today.  This is right for transformational diplomacy.  President Bush addressed this issue when he spoke at the major economies meeting on energy security and climate change September of 2007.  He said "Energy security and climate change are two of the great challenges of our era.  The world's response will help shape the future of the global economy and the condition of our environment for generations to come."  He cited "renewable energy" many times in his speech as the part of the solution.  Renewable energy helps us-- helps the U.S. to answer many foreign policy questions.  It helps us to answer the question of climate change mitigation, because it's going to lower the greenhouse gas intensity of electricity generation and transportation sectors.  I think of it always as one of those wedges along with clean coal and nuclear that are going to help us get to a significant reduction of greenhouse gases by 2050.  But it also, and this hasn't been discussed much today so far as I can hear, helps to resolve the question of sustainable development.  Sustainable development is key in terms-- getting renewable energy into the mix for these developing countries.  And thirdly, as many of the speakers have said, helps us to resolve the energy security problem, because if you're dependent on one source or one type of fuel you're in a world of hurt.  Senator Richard Lugar put this very well when he said "No one is honestly assessing the decline of American leverage around the world due to energy security dependence can fail to see that energy is the albatross of U.S. national security.  We believe that U.S. national security will be served by more robust coordination of all the elements that contribute to energy security.  Our policy should be targeted to replace hydrocarbons with carbohydrates.  Recognizing the global nature and the serious challenge of these issue, the United States continues to work collaboratively with other nations across the globe.  And I want to briefly describe a number of these initiatives and partnerships to illustrate how we're in the U.S. Government advancing the use of renewable energy and changing the political environment so that we can tackle greenhouse gas emissions by sharing technologies and by encouraging more investment.  We always do it through partnerships just as we're doing with the WIREC public/private partnerships.  Let me begin with a few partnerships that changed the enabling environment for renewable energy.  First and foremost I want to mention REN21, our partners.  And they are-- we have a seat on the steering committee of REN21.  As the name states, REN21 is a global network of renewable energy experts dedicated to dramatically increasing the adoption of renewable energy technologies.  REN21 is actively engaged in a wide range of activities designed to resign the terms of energy discourse to integrate renewable energy more fulsomely into domestic and international discussions.  A second initiative I can mention is the global bioenergy partnership.  This partnership was launched at Gleneagles in 2005 and its designed to power to cleaner future by supporting wider cost-effective biomass and biofuel's deployment, particularly in developing countries.  And the United States is actively supporting the partnership's work including we are leading the work on developing common methodologies for measuring greenhouse gas benefits of biofuels.  And there's been quite a bit of discussion of that today even in the talks I've heard.  A third valuable partnership is the renewable energy and efficiency partnership.  This is a multi-stakeholder partnership whose goal is to expand the global market for renewable energy.  To date they've funded over 100 projects in 44 countries that address market barriers to clean energy in the developing world, and the U.S. is a vital part of REAP.  This projects provide new business models, policy recommendations, risk mitigation and the measurement of greenhouse gas reductions.  I might add that both REN21 and REAP are cooperating closely in the preparation for WIREC.  Finally in the category of initiatives to change the enabling environment is the International Biofuels Forum, which includes Brazil, China, India, South Africa, the United States and the European community, and it was launched in 2007.  The Forum has created a mechanism to structure the dialogue among some of the biggest producers and consumers of biofuels to address energy security and global warming issues.  IBF is working closely with Global Bioenergy Partnership to create common standards and codes for bioenergy products which will facilitate world trade in bioenergy projects.  I've mentioned four of the ways we're changing the international legal environment for renewables.  I'd like to now talk about a couple of ways in which we're directly putting new power kilowatts into the world environment.  And one of these is the Methane to Markets Partnership.  It's initiative that promotes energy security, improves environmental quality and catalyzes economic growth.  We've got 21 partners with the European Commission as the most recent, and we have 600 private sector and other government and civil society organizations  Capturing and using this waste methane provides an additional energy source and stimulates economic growth while reducing global emissions.  The United States led by the State Department has committed up to $53 million for the first five years of the partnership.  EPA estimates that this partnership could recover up to 183 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent by 2015, annually by 2015.  The second project is the Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate.  This partnership brings together seven major Asian-Pacific countries: Australia, China, India, Japan, Korea, Canada and the United States in an effort to address energy need and the associated air pollution.  What makes the approach unique is that Asia-Pacific Partnership is bottoms-up.  It's private industry, it's U.S. Government and the six other partner governments, and we develop projects in the most practical and efficient way.  We've got 110 projects underway now.  The partnership provides a unique opportunity to engage India and China in constructively moving their energy economies toward a more climate-friendly direction.  And we've created eight task forces.  This is the sectoral approach which you'll find through much of the United States Government's renewable energy foreign policy.  It's the sectoral approach in the APP.  And one of these is the renewable energy sector.  The Renewable Energy and Distributed Generation Task Force is helping to install biomass power generation units in three demonstration sites in India:  In Madhya Pradesh, in Uttar Pradesh and in Orissa.  The demonstration of renewable energy will reduce the dependence of these villages on fossil fuel energy and ultimately promote economic independence.  Also works under way to build capacity in three Indian states, West Bengal, Gujarat and Punjab.  On the critical issue of Grid, interconnection for renewables and distributed generation, something that we just talked-- the BP we just mentioned is a problem even in the United States.  Working with state government and utilities on these issues, will assist in creating a policy and regulatory framework conduce to the diffusion of clean energy throughout India.  In addition to all the initiatives I've mentioned so far, and they are six, I would like to say that our sister Agency for International Development is collaborating with several nations on a number of renewable energy projects from wind mapping in Pakistan to rebuilding hydroelectric facilities in Afghanistan, to studies on the expansion of biodiesel for transportation in the Asia-Pacific region.  AID also has had great success with their global village energy partnership.  And by 2012 they aimed to provide modern energy access to an additional 300 million people in the developing countries of the world, with a heavy emphasis on wind, solar and hydrapower.  Well, let me come to the heart of the matter, and that is with all these partnerships, with all this private/public partnership and spurring, changing the enabling environment for renewable energy and actually putting kilowatt hours out into the developing world, we are very pleased to be working with our colleagues in USDA and the Department of Energy, a whole host of agencies that Mike mentioned earlier to create in March of 2008 the Washington International Renewable Energy Conference.  And if you go to our Web site which I think Judy had up there, wirec2008.gov, you'll see that we have our vision prominently mentioned right up front.  We say "We will bring together government, civil society and private business leaders to address the benefits and costs of a major and rapid scale-up in the global deployment of renewable energy technology."  So there is no question where we stand, what we hope to achieve from this conference.  As has been said, it's the third global ministerial event on renewable energy, and will be an important opportunity for ministers to get together with business and private sector and NGOs to talk about these challenges.  And as we've already mentioned, there'll be four cross-cutting themes: research and development, rural development, finance and market uptake or deployment.  We're well-positioned, the United States, to host such an event as America is a major producer of renewable energy such as biofuels.  And we're a principal developer of many renewable energy technologies such a wind, solar and battery.  Indeed the global trends and sustainable energy investment 2007 shows a clear U.S. lead in the number of clean energy incubators reflecting a more commercial attitude toward research and development outside the EU27.  Finally the U.S. is a substantial marketplace for renewable energy industries globally.  WIREC 2008 is going to provide an opportunity to advance renewable energy even more by bringing world leaders together.  WIREC will provide national, sub-national and private sector leaders the opportunity to make voluntary pledges.  We want to collect pledges just as previous conferences have.  The pledges from bond 2004 resulted in an estimated greenhouse gas emission reduction of 100 million tons per year.  But after the passage of four years and the strong rise in the price of oil which we've all noted, and the emerging carbon price, it seems only natural that our conference in 2008 will see many more pledges, a much greater volume of impact on greenhouse gases through the uptake-- the rapid uptake of renewable energy.  Worldwide enthusiasm for renewable energy has increased dramatically, and this enthusiasm has translated into increasing investment activity and renewables.  According to the previously-cited study, investments in renewable energy reached a record $71 billion in 2006.  That was a 43 percent increase over 2005, and we think the same thing will happen in 2007.  Of course the U.S. and EU accounted for 70 percent of that, but there's also rapidly increasing investment going into China, India and Brazil.  In fact Chinese companies are the second-largest recipients of venture capital.  As you know, Brazil's the largest renewable energy market in the world.  They've got 75 percent of their cars on flex fuel.  Therefore I hope and expect to see many in this audience back in Washington next March to make WIREC the success that we hope it will be.  I believe growing economies and sustainable resources can be complimentary, not competing interests.  They are the key to the success.  And I believe that when we achieve the success of sustainable energy and thriving global economies, we'll have taken a big step toward our foreign policy vision to help citizens of the world better their own lives, build their own nations and transform their own futures.  Thank you for listening.
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