OUR VIEW: National standard for renewables?

There’s nothing like good, cheap and clean energy production to get Americans united. After all, despite what environmental activists and left-wing bloggers believe about conservatives, there are few people who relish the sight of a coal-burning power plant belching smoke into the atmosphere. Environmental regulations have put the brakes on such sights, common several decades ago. These days, the pollutants released from those plants tend to be harder to see, but are still dangerous. That’s why technology such as Dr. David Neumann’s emissions cleaning invention discussed in this space last week is exciting. It’s also why environmentalists and businesses with a dog in the hunt continue to clamor for higher amounts of renewable energy, usually imposed by law.

It’s difficult to argue against renewable forms of electricity production, at least in theory. They generally are clean, producing few, if any, atmospheric emissions. We’ll always have the sunshine and wind, so we’re not in any danger of running out of those resources. And the emerging industries will provide jobs for the future.

Those are all reasons the nation has seen in recent years a number of states, including Colorado, instituting renewable energy requirements for utilities. Although 25 states and the District of Columbia have “renewable portfolio standards,” and six other states have non-binding targets for renewable energy production, many activists and politicians are pushing for a national standard. That’s a bad idea.

Anyone with a passing familiarity of how this nation is set up knows we don’t have a national government; we have a federal government. (In reality, we have a more national government than the U.S. Constitution allows for, but for the purposes of this column, we’ll stick to the theory.) That means most of the lawmaking power remains in the states, except in cases such as national defense where it’s simply not practical. This arrangement enables states to set standards that best suit the individual states. What works in Colorado might also work in other less-populated Western states, but not in, say, Connecticut or Massachusetts.

A national renewable portfolio standard would be a one-size-fits-all federal mandate that hasn’t worked well in other endeavors and there’s no reason to believe it would be any more successful in energy production.

If the federal government were to mandate 20 percent of electricity come from renewable sources, the most logical thing would be for individual states to decide how to best reach that goal. Colorado, with its abundant sunshine and wind, would likely look to those technologies, even though they might not be as efficient as wood and other biofuels. Maine, on the other hand, with the largest percentage of forested acres of any state, would, and has, relied on that source to feed its renewable energy generators.

According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, almost twice as much electricity was generated by wood generators as from wind and solar combined. In this hypothetical situation, Maine would have a much easier job meeting the mandate than Colorado. And in energy, easier usually means cheaper.

Mandates for renewable energy production are driven by ideology, not technology. Colorado’s law requires utilities to get 20 percent of their power from renewables by 2020. It’s very unlikely whoever wrote the law studied the technologies, estimated the time until they would be mature enough to supply those demands and set the percentages and time according to that information. No, it’s simply a number some bureaucrat picked out of the air, with no consideration as to whether it was even possible with current or projected technology. We can’t imagine any more real planning would go into a national standard.

When it comes to providing electricity to a growing population, it’s likely we’ll be using fossil fuels for the foreseeable. But renewables also have a place at the table. As those technologies mature, they can provide a larger share of the nation’s electricity. However, it’s important to realize those technologies have many drawbacks that render them not quite ready for the big time.

If renewable energy standards are going to be required, they should remain at the state level, where innovators can work with regulators to try new technologies and regualtions to find out what works best. Getting the feds involved would only muck up things worse than they are now.