Energy from My Backyard - The Renaissance of Renewable Energy - page 237

Presidential Library, and with a 0.1 per cent share of global primary energy production, the
solar revolution is still waiting to happen.
In 1979 the United States was the leading force in the nascent solar industry. At the
turn of the twenty-first century, another country took the lead, and for the same reason
that the United States lost it: political will. In the midst of the political turmoil and
jubilation that accompanied German reunification in 1990, a law was quietly passed that
would remake Germany's renewable energy sector. The 1991 Feed-in Tariff Law, the last
piece of legislation passed by the West German parliament, required power utilities to buy
electricityfromrenewableproducersatrateswellabovemarketprice.Thecostswouldthen
be spread across the system. Germany was not the first country to devise such a system
of market subsidies - the United States had again led the way more than a decade earlier
with PURPA, 9 a federal law that requires major power utilities to buy electricity from
smaller producers at above-market prices. The difference between the United States and
GermanyonthispointwasthatoverthenexttwentyyearssuccessiveGermangovernments
maintainedandexpandedthesystemoffeed-intariffs,whileintheUnitedStatesthefederal
supports for renewable energy were undermined, leaving a few states such as California to
pursue a more progressive path on their own.
This example illustrates the importance of political will for the emergence of energy
alternatives. The model presented by Jacobson and Delucchi, while certainly ambitious
and visionary, is not technically implausible. Most energy scenarios (whether technical
or political) assume that the share of renewables in the global energy mix will rise
significantly inthenexttwentyyears,andrenewables areexpected tobecome thedominant
low-carbon energy option by 2050 in the majority of currently available scenarios (see
Section 7.6 ) . However, whether we see a slow incremental emergence, such as that
predicted by the IEA, or the revolution advocated by Jacobson and Delucchi, will depend
more on resolve than on technology.
All the energy technologies that have emerged in the past two centuries have been
boosted by either market pressure or state support. In the case of the coal-powered steam
engines that drove the Industrial Revolution, the profits from mechanised production
offeredampleincentivefortechnological innovation.Themarketforthefirstcommercially
available petroleum product - kerosene - was driven by the rapid decline of whale
populations. Yet subsidies have also been used to encourage the development of new
energy sources. The oil and gas industries have long benefited from subsidies and tax relief
as incentives to exploration. In the early twentieth century, many governments invested
heavily in large-scale hydroelectric plants. After the Second World War, solar power
emerged from the American space programme and nuclear power from the deep coffers of
military research. The latter has been particularly generously funded. In the period from