Selling the Sun...and the Wind

By EUGENE LINDEN

There's an old joke in Brazil that it is the nation of the future--and always will be. For decades the same has been said of the renewable-energy industry. Someday soon, its promoters kept promising, solar cells and wind turbines would produce electricity more cheaply than would traditional plants burning coal and oil and natural gas. There have been many false dawns, as fossil-fuel prices soared and then swooned. But the promised day appears finally to have arrived at, among other places, windswept hilltops in Texas and Colorado. On King Mountain, near McCamey, Texas, Renewable Energy Systems has teamed with Cielo Wind Power to build one of the world's largest wind-powered generating facilities, with a capacity to light as many as 139,000 homes. This was no feel-good exercise. Wind power was chosen according to the cold calculus of business. It will produce electricity over the 20-year life of the facility for an estimated 3[cents] to 6[cents] a kilowatt-hour (kw-h). That compares with a recent average of 7.6[cents] a kw-h charged by Texas utilities. Using a similar calculation in late March of this year, the Public Utility Commission in Colorado chose wind over gas to power a new generating station built by Excel in Lamar. Brian Evans of Renewable Energy Systems expects that wind power could explode to supply 20% of America's electricity within 20 years. Exults Hal Harvey, president of the Energy Foundation, based in San Francisco: "We've found the holy grail: wind is now cheaper than any fossil fuel-based power source."

Since 1998, wind power has been the fastest-growing new source of electricity in the world, expanding an average of 30% a year. Sales of photovoltaic panels (also known as solar cells), which convert the sun's energy directly into electricity, grew by 37% last year. At high-tech companies and hospitals, executives with a special concern about power disruptions are looking at fuel cells to supply clean and reliable power on site (albeit at prices that currently remain higher on average than those charged by the big utilities).

The value of the world's electrical power generated from renewable sources such as wind and solar is about $7 billion--up from less than $1 billion a decade ago, but still a tiny fraction of the total electricity market, according to a study by green-technology consultants Clean Edge, of Oakland, Calif. That study projects the renewable market to reach $82 billion by 2010, as technological advances lower the price and make renewables easier to use. And governments around the world are pushing power producers to reduce emissions that contribute to air pollution and global warming. Joel Makower, co-founder of Clean Edge, calls this moment "a unique historical opportunity" for companies that produce renewable energy.

As the global market for renewable energy expands, however, it is European and Japanese companies--not American ones--that are winning most of the new business. As recently as 1996, manufacturers in the U.S. accounted for more than 40% of the world's photovoltaic shipments. But two years ago, Japan emerged as the world's leading manufacturer of these solar devices. The 214 giant wind turbines going to King Mountain in Texas at an estimated cost of $250 million come from Bonus, based in Brande, Denmark. Danish firms are supplying 60% of the wind turbines being installed in the fast-growing U.S. market, which this year alone will nearly double the total installed base of wind power. The only American wind firm with the heft to compete with the large European companies is an arm of the energy giant Enron, based in Houston.

European and Japanese firms have also established solid footholds in the enormous potential power markets in developing countries such as China and India, where solar and wind power offer the cheapest way to bring electricity to some of the 2 billion people just now getting their first lights and refrigeration. India is turning to renewables to bring electricity to some of the roughly 300 million of its people who lack power. The nation now has the fifth-largest installed base of wind generators in the world and plans to use renewables for as much as 15% of its new power over the next decade. So far, most of India's estimated $100 million annual spending on renewable-energy plants is going to Indian companies or firms such as Denmark's NEG Micon, which in 2000 had 9.1% of India's wind market--more than four times the share of the U.S. firm Enron. Says Dale Vince, managing director of Next Generation, which erected a large wind turbine for Britain's Sainsbury's grocery chain: "The export market will be colossal for wind energy, and the U.S. is lagging behind the Europeans."

To be sure, Enron has opened a new wind turbine plant south of Madrid, right in the heart of the European market. And Cannon, a U.S. wind-energy developer, has launched big projects in Turkey. But the wind turbines Cannon is installing are made by Danish firms.

Most galling for some is that the U.S. pioneered many of the key wind and solar technologies finding commercial success today. Notes Hal Harvey in frustration: "We paid to create wind and solar power, and we have been giving it away."

Some of it, though, is coming back. Big Danish firms such as Vestas are building turbine factories in the U.S. The two largest solar-device manufacturers on American soil are British-owned BP Solar and German-owned Siemens. Ownership may be foreign, but American workers benefit.

European and Japanese renewable-energy firms have prospered in part thanks to citizen commitment and government subsidies far more generous than those available to U.S. firms. A greater advantage for the foreign firms, however, is the higher price charged in their home countries for electricity generated by fossil fuels. Governments in Europe and Japan heavily tax oil, gas and coal to capture some of the hidden costs--from pollution and global warming to vehicular traffic--of consuming it. In the U.S., solar and wind energy have looked less attractive--at least until recently when fuel-generated electricity prices spiked for some customers in California to more than 25[cents] a kw-h.

In Britain, the fuel tax-driven rise in electricity costs helped encourage Sainsbury's in March to refrigerate part of a food-storage depot in East Kilbride, Scotland, with electricity generated by a towering, 213-ft.-tall wind turbine. Sainsbury's also powers the refrigerators on some of its delivery trucks through solar panels on the vehicles' roofs. Denmark's government used to subsidize the installation of wind turbines but abolished the program in 1989, when wind power was regarded as fully competitive with electricity produced from heavily taxed fossil fuels.

The global situation today in some ways compares to the decade after the 1973 oil embargo, when fuel prices soared. Americans suddenly wanted smaller and more fuel-efficient vehicles. The Japanese, who had been building such cars for years, won lucrative market share and customer loyalty that U.S. producers have never entirely regained. Now as then, the affected U.S. companies are debating not only corporate strategy but also the appropriate role for government.

While the Bush Administration's energy policy tilts toward traditional oil and coal interests, many renewable-energy entrepreneurs believe that global political and market forces are now on their side--and that their technologies have developed to the point where they can win, even on a playing field that is canted against them. Joseph Mahler, chief financial officer of FuelCell Energy, a Danbury, Conn., firm that builds relatively small but highly efficient and pollution-free power plants, says his factories are expanding production rapidly. Many buyers fear California-style blackouts, and he worries more about meeting demand than about whether the U.S. government tries to help.

But such assistance has proved invaluable to some renewable-energy technologies. Allen Barnett, founder and president of Astropower, America's largest independent producer of photovoltaics, developed his design at the University of Delaware with the assistance of U.S. Department of Energy funding. The U.S. government, he argues, could make American renewable-energy companies more competitive globally simply by treating them fairly in government-purchasing decisions. "The U.S. government is the biggest buyer of electricity in the world," he says, "and often at prices above what we can deliver with solar. All we are asking is that the government look at what it's paying, and anyplace where solar or other renewables are cost effective, use them."

Such pioneering purchases are a traditional way by which governments encourage new technologies. The now ubiquitous microchip is perhaps the best example. At first the U.S. military was the only market for the early integrated circuits, but by selling to it in bulk, companies learned how to make chips better and cheaper. Between 1962 and 1968, says Dennis Hayes, president of Seattle's Bullitt Foundation, the price of these components dropped 95% as their capabilities expanded, eventually making integrated circuits viable for commercial applications such as personal computers.

Mahler of FuelCell Energy says such economies of scale would make fuel cells even more competitive with fossil fuels. He estimates that with its current production at 50 megawatts a year, his company's cells can deliver power at 7[cents] or 8[cents] a kw-h. But when FuelCell increases production by 2004 to 400 megawatts a year, as it plans, the attendant savings could drop the price to 5[cents] or 6[cents] per kw-h, all else being equal.

This is the path by which Japanese companies were able to win the lead in solar exports from U.S. competitors. As Astropower vice president Howard Wenger notes, the Japanese government's approach has been to "massively build up the domestic market through incentives to encourage industry to scale up and then, in phase two, take the show on the road and dominate the world." Japan is currently the largest market for solar in the world, and 75% of the 4 million devices sold so far are on rooftops, partly because of government incentives. The experience of selling mass quantities of photovoltaics at home helped firms such as Sharp, with 17.5% of the world market for the basic modules that convert solar energy to electricity, and Kyocera, with 14.6% of this module market, pull ahead of American rivals.

Now Japan is applying the same approach as it seeks to develop ultra-efficient green cars. The government instituted a goal to make 100% of its fleet of 7,000 official cars "green," meaning they get ultrahigh mileage running, at least in part, on some ultra-clean fuel such as hydrogen. When told in May that this would take seven years, Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi responded with "That's too long--make it three!" Denmark, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Austria and Sweden also use government purchases to stimulate production of renewables. By contrast, the U.S. has no comparable federal policies to stimulate the market for green cars. A number of states, however, have set ambitious targets for using renewables.

What U.S. renewable-energy execs are asking is that government provide a regulatory environment that, at minimum, doesn't discriminate against them. Amory Lovins, co-founder of the Rocky Mountain Institute and a longtime cheerleader for clean energy, points out that in 1996 the California legislature discontinued a policy that encouraged alternatives and efficiency by allowing utilities to make money even if they sold less power (a policy that was reinstituted in April). Policies that allow solar and wind power to be sold to the grid during peak production periods--now in place in more than 30 states--also are encouraging use of renewables.

Some argue that U.S. tax policy discriminates against renewable-energy companies by taxing them at virtually the same rate as fossil-fueled competitors who impose big costs on society through pollution and greenhouse gases. Almost everywhere else in the world, fossil fuels bear cumbersome taxes. Japan has a "green tax" and the U.K. a "Climate Change Levy," as well as other taxes on fossil fuels.

As the Bush Administration resists international action on climate change, governments and companies in Europe and Asia are positioning themselves to deal with the threat posed by emissions of greenhouse gases. British Petroleum, for example, is investing large sums in solar and other renewables and experimenting with carbon-trading schemes that offset emissions in one place with protection of forests that capture carbon. While such U.S.-based companies as General Motors and American Electric Power are also experimenting with carbon trading and clean fuels, they seem at the moment to be motivated more by the threat of boycotts by international environmental groups than by market economics. The interest in renewables on the part of such big oil companies as BP and Shell, on the other hand, "has gone beyond window dressing," says Vince, the British wind-power executive. "They can see the future of energy. For them, it's business." And that may be the best evidence that renewable energy's future has finally come.

--With reporting by Maryann Bird/London, David Bjerklie/New York, Ulla Plon/Copenhagen, Toko Sekiguchi/Tokyo and other bureaus

For more about the renewable-energy business, visit our website at time.com/global

With reporting by Maryann Bird/London, David Bjerklie/New York, Ulla Plon/Copenhagen, Toko Sekiguchi/Tokyo and other bureaus