Would you expect anything less?

Pioneering U.S. renewable energy lab is neglected

Thirty years after it was founded by President Jimmy Carter, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory at the edge of the Rockies here still does not have a cafeteria.

Evaporation chambers for new solar energy systems look like they belong in an H.G. Wells movie. Technicians had to knock out a giant door from a testing facility to fit modern wind turbine blades, which now stick out like a bare toe from an old sock.

The hopes for this neglected lab brightened a bit just over a year ago when President George W. Bush made the first presidential call on the lab since Carter. He spelled out a vision for the not-too-distant future in which solar and wind power would help run every American home and cars would operate on biofuels made from plant residues.

But one year after the presidential visit, the money flowing into the primary national laboratory for developing renewable fuels is actually less than it was when the Bush Administration took office. The lab's fitful history reflects a basic truth: Americans may have a growing love affair with renewables, with cutting oil imports and conserving energy, but it's a fickle one.

Riding that wave, the new House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, recently promised committee hearings on how lawmakers could limit climate change and enhance energy independence, and Congressional Democrats pledged to find research dollars for clean energy.

The problem is that, despite a lot of promises, no one so far has wanted to pay the extra costs to make wind and solar more than a trivial energy source. Research is uncertain and expensive, and the benefits seem far away.

So while all kinds of domestic energy technologies are being advanced in the name of energy independence, most of the money and attention is still focused on the dirty, but cheaper energy standbys: offshore oil, oil sands and coal.

"You have fossil fuels competing with renewable fuels," said Benjamin Kroposki, a senior scientist at the lab here. "Renewables lose every time."

One example is the shotgun approach to tax incentives, loan guarantees and other spending in the 2005 energy act, the first major energy legislation enacted by Congress in a decade: $13.1 billion for oil, gas and coal, $12 billion for nuclear energy and $7.7 billion divided among a wide assortment of renewables including ethanol, and hydroelectric, wind and solar power.

Now that they are in control of Congress, the Democrats have promised to increase the amount going to renewable energy sources, taking the money from tax breaks for oil companies.

But even additional money for renewable energy will be going up against government tax policies that encourage more energy consumption.

Companies can still deduct purchases of sport utility vehicles and utility bills, for example, while consumers get a break to build bigger homes with deductions for interest payments on mortgages even on second homes that far outweigh their energy saving credits.

Meanwhile, fuel efficiency standards for automobiles have changed only slightly over the decades and the federal government still does not have a building code to encourage energy efficiency.

It is a policy mix that goes back many administrations and appears difficult to shake, due partly to the fact that dirty sources of energy like coal and shale are what the United States has in abundance.

"We are going dirtier," said Amy Jaffe, an energy expert at the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy at Rice University. "If you need to come up with a fuel source other than drilling for oil under the ground in the Middle East, what is the most obvious thing with today's economy, today's infrastructure and today's technology? Oil shale, liquefied coal and tar sands. It's all dirty but its fast."

Renewable energy today supplies only 6 percent of America's energy needs, and much of that comes from decades-old dams supplying hydropower. Under current policies, the Energy Information Administration estimates, renewables will increase only slightly in importance in the decades ahead. They would supply 7 percent of U.S. energy supplies by 2030 while coal would increase over the same period from 23 percent to 26 percent.

"Denmark gets 22 percent of its electrical energy from wind today and we get .5 percent," noted Robert Thresher, director of the National Wind Technology Center at the lab. "That shows you what you can do when you really want to."

Meanwhile imports of oil and gas are set to continue rise in the decades ahead, as domestic production slows and the population grows.

"The current trends do not seem sustainable," said Faith Birol, chief economist of the International Energy Agency. "For me the most important thing that is missing from current consideration is an increase in vehicle fuel efficiency."

As they have in the past, higher prices for oil and gas have driven the renewed interest in alternative energy sources. With prices falling, some of that momentum may falter.

Still, Bush is expected to advance his call of last year to end the nation's oil addiction, And the incoming Democratic Congress appears ready to put clean energy front and center in their agenda.

"I expect the president will be talking about new policy in the State of the Union and I expect it will be bold policy," said a senior White House official, who spoke on condition he not be named. He added that renewable energy "will be a very strong priority of the president, one of the things we will continue to push for in the next year's appropriation."

Prominent Democrats are talking about doubling the budget of the renewable lab, and otherwise greatly increase the priority of producing clean energy.

"You got to invest in this new energy future that everybody pays lip service to, but when push comes to shove do we really stand there?," said Representative Mark Udall of Colorado, a senior Democratic spokesman on energy issues. "This is the country's economic future not to mention the national security ramifications."

Institutional investments in private clean energy companies in North America and Europe are rising quickly, from $500 million in 2004 to $1.3 billion in 2005 and $2.7 billion in 2006, according to Venture Business Research, an independent group based in Britain.

But even while top energy companies are also beginning to invest significant amounts of money in wind, solar and biomass, those investments pale in comparison with the resources they are pouring into making synthetic fuels out of oil sands, which emit significantly more carbon than conventional oil.

Likewise, energy companies are stepping up research and investments into oil shale, deep-ocean oil and gas drilling, and gasifying and liquifying coal — all energy sources with significant environmental consequences.

For instance, Royal Dutch Shell has invested $1 billion over the last five years in clean energy like biofuels for transportation, solar and wind for electrical generation and hydrogen. That is one of the biggest commitments into clean energy by any energy company, but it is less than one fifth of what Shell invested over roughly the same period with Chevron and another partner in a giant oil shale mining project in Canada.

The companies say they can contain emissions through a process called carbon capture and sequestration. But most experts say development of technologies to bury significant amounts of carbon gases effectively so that they do not escape into the atmosphere will take years, if not decades.

At the lab here, signs of change are mixed. The institution opened its first building last year in a decade, although inadequate budgets will probably leave its main laboratory without 80 percent of its equipment for the next several years, unless Congress suddenly comes to the rescue. Congressional earmarks that redirected Department of Energy funding last year slowed, or even shelved, many research projects, including ones to develop bigger and more efficient wind turbines, to make hydrogen power out of a mix of algae and water, and to make electricity out of biomass.

Scientists are also doing groundbreaking work on finding environmentally benign ways of generating electricity to produce hydrogen from water to power cars; they are working on new materials and designs to make solar cell devices cheaper; and they are developing enzymes and more efficient machinery to convert switch grass and corn stalks into biofuels to reduce oil consumption.

When Chevron decided last year that it wanted to develop the next generation of ethanol and renewable diesel biofuels out of trees and agricultural waste, it turned to the lab here for a scientific partnership. Now Chevron and scientists from the federal laboratory are working to make hydrogen energy out of decomposed plants. DuPont, Cargill and the National Corn Growers Association look to the lab for help in reducing costs of producing ethanol.

But it is hardly the kind of crash program that government labs have conducted in the past to build an atomic bomb or go to the moon. Rather, the lab gingerly hands over slices of its yearly budget of $200 million to a smorgasbord of programs in solar, wind, biomass, geothermal, hydrogen and fuel cells, building efficiency, advanced vehicles and fuels and electric infrastructure.

"Our budget is nothing compared to the price of a B-2 bomber or an aircraft carrier," said Rob Farrington, manager of advanced vehicle systems at the lab.

Original article posted here.