The Clean Energy Policy Razzies: Recognizing & Learning from Last Year’s Flops
In Hollywood, this time of the year is firmly-established as awards season– the Golden Globes have been handed out, the Oscars are around the corner, and everyone is making their picks for best movies of the year. However, February also comes with another set of more ignominious awards in the Golden Raspberries (“the Razzies”) that are meant “to ‘dis’honor the worst achievements of the movie year.” The 39th Annual Razzies are being held on February 23, 2019, and will feature Gotti, The Happytime Murders, and Holmes & Watson as the most-nominated films. And to be clear, the Razzies are given to movies that had every intention of being unironically enjoyable but failed to do so, so filmmakers doing their best Tommy Wiseau impressions to make the “so bad it’s good” movies aren’t striving for the Golden Raspberry. Rather, these awards are going to those in the industry who had the best of intentions but ended up putting out true stinkers due to lack of awareness or failed execution.
While the energy industry has its own plethora of awards given out by various organizations and publications to celebrate the best of the year (including the Clean Energy Awards from Global Energy News, the State Leadership in Clean Energy Awards, and EPA’s Green Power Leadership Awards, just to name a few), no Razzie-equivalent gets handed out for well-intentioned but ultimately unsuccessful initiatives in the world of clean energy. Chester Energy and Policy seeks to change that with the first Annual(?) Clean Energy Policy Razzies!
Selecting the Clean Energy Policy Razzies
Just like the Razzies, these nods of recognition will go to technologies, policies, and trends that are meant to be positive for the clean energy transition– whether by reducing power sector emissions, enhancing affordability and reliability of clean energy, or transforming the energy sector– but ultimately fail in any number of ways. As such, acts like lobbying for uneconomical and carbon-emitting coal generation will not win because the actors behind such pushes have their intentions and actions in sync. Rather, these Clean Energy Policy Razzies have been carefully chosen for having the goal of promoting a clean energy transition but flopping just as bad as a post-2005 Adam Sandler movie.
Source: The Guardian
Note, also, that the intent of the Clean Energy Policy Razzies is not to shame the ‘winners’. Rather, each of these awardees came from a positive place intent on making an impact on the clean energy sector. However, by identifying where the end results did not line up with the goals, opportunity arises to find areas for improvement and lessons learned. Future initiatives that have similar goals can look at these failures as a roadmap of mistakes to avoid and ultimately ensure others don’t fall into the same traps. If that happens, then any individual Clean Energy Policy Razzie winner can point to the future successes as having built upon their mistakes to achieve the ultimate clean energy economy that is the shared goal of the whole industry.
With that said and without further ado, let’s get to this year’s winners….
Winners
Most Unsuccessful Clean Energy Ballot Initiative: Arizona’s 50% Renewable Energy Mandate
The U.S. midterm elections of 2018 saw renewable energy take the center stage in many states across the country. Not only were Congressional seats won by candidates running on ideals like the Green New Deal, but many governors promising clean energy progresswere elected and a handful of ballot initiatives were approved by voters to set state clean energy goals.
One ballot initiative that failed this past November, though, was proposition 127 in Arizonawhich called for a state constitutional amendment to “require electric utilities in Arizona to acquire a certain percentage of electricity from renewable resources each year, with the percentage increasing annually from 12 percent in 2020 to 50 percent in 2030.”
Source: Ballotpedia
While a ballot initiative like this one failing would not alone be worthy of such a Golden Raspberry, two aspects made this occurrence particularly bad:
The initiative was defeated by a greater than a 2-to-1 ration, with the ‘No’ side receiving almost 70% of the votes, and
Nevada, close neighbor to Arizona, passed an exceedingly similar ballot initiative to mandate 50% renewable energy by 2030 in their Question 6 initiative.
The real flop that earns Arizona’s Proposition 127 this recognition is failing so spectacularly while Nevada not only passed the same initiative, but did so by over 20 percentage points. These two ballot initiatives were considered policy twins by some, as they were both created by NextGen Climate Action. In both states, the policies were up against incumbent utilities and outside interests fighting the initiatives and both were backed and funded by climate activist and billionaire Tom Steyer, creator of the aforementioned NextGen Climate Action.
Source: Axios
So, what was the difference? Unsurprisingly, the fates of these policies came down to money. While Steyer pumped in many of his own funds to push the ballot initiatives in each state, the opposition in Arizona (namely, political action committees funded by Arizona utility companies) ended up spending over $31 million compared with almost $24 million from the proposition’s supporters and making this the most expensive ballot initiative in state history and the third-most expensive campaign across the country in 2018 (including gubernatorial and congressional races). The lesson to learn here for future clean energy initiatives is an understanding of how deep the pockets of the opposition will be and a recognition of how fervently such funds can and will be leveraged.
Honorable mention in this category goes to Washington state’s third attempt at passing a carbon tax failing, though they made great progress since the 2016 attempt so the future of such policies looks brighter than it has in the past.
Worst Execution of Clean Energy Policy, Emerging Economies: India’s Renewable Energy Auctions
As the world faces the global climate crisis and seeks to take the necessary actions to as quickly as possible, emerging economies that are rapidly growing are ground zero for where clean energy is needed. Chief among those economies is in India, whose growth is expected to accelerate even faster than China’s. Economic growth typically goes hand-in-hand with increased energy demand and associated carbon emissions, especially in developing nations, so building such economies on the back of renewable sources is of critical importance.
Recognizing this importance, government officials in India have sought to accelerate clean energy capacity through an auction mechanism. This policy would see private operators bid to build renewable energy projects to generate power for the state-run Solar Energy Corporation of India, a seemingly valuable prospect in the country that was found to be the largest global market for auctions of new renewable energy generation projects.
The issue, though, was that potential bidders chose to shun the auctions. Two such auctions failed in November after having already decreased the amount of power requested from the auctions due to lack of interest. Investors are avoiding these potential projects because of a variety of detrimental policies in place, including capping of tariffs in the bids, a safeguard duty of 25% of imports of Chinese solar components, contract lengths of just two years, and requirements that generators also install manufacturing capacity.
These policies continue to alienate any potential developers from bidding in the auctions, putting India’s goal of 175 gigawatts of new renewable installations by 2022 in serious doubt. Future clean energy efforts can look to this Razzie-winning endeavor in India as a signal that the desire and agreements to purchase clean energy are not enough when the surrounding policies on potential developers are not investor-friendly. Comprehensive clean energy policy must take these stakeholder concerns into account early and often.
Worst Execution of Clean Energy Policy, Industrialized Economies: Germany’s Energiewende
Germany’s goals for clean energy transformation are genuine and their efforts are real, but the Energiewende program has notoriously fallen short in execution. First put into place in 2010, Energiewende called for German GHG emissions to drop by 40% by 2020, 55% by 2030, and 95% by 2050, compared with 1990 levels, making it one of Europe’s and the world’s most ambitious clean energy plans, taking a global leadership role.
In the years since, though, Energiewende has become a frequent target as clean energy policy gone wrong. The total bill so far has been €150 billion, not to mention the immense political capital required in an attempt to scrap not only fossil fuels but also nuclear power, but with the first ‘due date’ of 2020 approaching it’s become clear that Germany will fall well-short of their desired emission reductions. Despite taking this leadership role, Germany now trails 11 other European countries in success in shifting from coal to clean energy. Further, even though renewable energy generation increased to about 36% of total electricity use in Germany, those gains were largely offset by CO2 emissions actually increasing in the transportation, building, and industrial sectors.
Source: Clean Energy Wire
The outlook for the 2020 goal is so bad, in fact, that Germany more or less abandoned that goal and doubled down on their ability to meet 2030 goals. But as the recent IPCC report spelled out, the planet is running out of time to make necessary progress on emissions reductions, so Germany kicking the can down the line is not good enough. Further, where Germany intended to be a leader in this space, Agora Energiewende made clear that “Germany as a pioneering country is on the brink of failure” when it comes to clean energy.
What went so wrong in Germany to bring them from leader to joke in clean energy policy, and how can other countries avoid a similar fate?
The focus has been predominantly on the power sector, letting the transportation sector emissions run amok with growing number of cars on the road, while betting on diesel-powered cars rather than electric vehicles as a cleaner alternative.
Talks of phasing out coal have never really gotten off the ground, as the fuel still provides up to 40% of the nation’s power and the political power of those betting on coal remaining quite strong.
To replace coal dependencies, Germany has focused on gas (which comes with geopolitical ramifications from increasing reliance on Russian resources, not to mention to associated CO2 emissions of natural gas) and renewable sources (which have not been developed enough to supply the entire nation). Concurrent with the push to phase out coal has been a pledge to close all nuclear plants in the nation by 2022 and forgoing the carbon-neutral generation such already-built resources could provide. Put together, these factors make clean energy transition more a dream than reality.
Where certain renewable power resources are available, through offshore wind in northern Germany, is not where the power is most needed, namely the highly industrial south regions of Germany. The transmission system to move that clean energy is inefficient and not useful when quick response times are needed, so upgrades are being discussed to that system but the costs and time needed for completion continue to rise and push out the expected delivery of meaningful change in Germany’s carbon footprint.
All told, Germany had the best intentions to set the pace on clean energy policy. But from then through this past year, various false steps, miscalculations, and short-sighted takes have besmirched Germany’s reputation on the stage of green energy transformation. Hopefully not only other nations can learn from these failings, but Germany can look to the past to come up with a better plan for the future and Energiewende can earn a ‘comeback of the year’ type award.
Are there other clean energy policies that had great intentions but were flawed from the start? Should they have won the Clean Energy Policy Razzies instead? Let me know in the comments below or on Twitter!