Author: mattwvd

Uncertainty over Germany’s solar subsidies is causing at least one major investor to pull back from solar stocks, according to Bloomberg.

Gabelli & Co’s SRI Green Fund has cut its holdings and is taking what fund manager John Segrich calls  a “defensive view.”Germany’s coalition government has been debating the cuts to feed-in tariffs, which guarantee a premium price for electricity generate by solar power thereby spurring demand for panels, since the September election.

The German Environment Ministry is considering a delay in the 15 percent cut for one month, from April 1 to May 1. Other lawmakers from the ruling Christian Democrats have proposed cuts of 25 percent to 30 percent.

It isn’t clear how the cuts will shake out, but Segrich tells Bloomberg that the fund has “reduced a lot of exposure.” He declined to give specifics on the fund’s holding but has previously said the it was heavily invested in Chinese solar stocks.

The shares of one such Chinese solar stock, Suntech Power Holdings (NYSE:STP) , have fallen from a 2010 high of $18.40 on Jan. 5 to $13.55 at noon today.

President Obama’s FY 2011 budget contains some shiny baubles for renewable energy but doesn’t commit anywhere near the amount necessary to help the industry compete with fossil fuels, critics say.

J.P. Morgan analyst Christopher Blansett made that point to Reuters this morning and Dot Earth blogger Andrew Revkin said effectively the same thing, in a slightly different context, to us a few weeks ago.

The industry needs sustained government support on the order of hundreds of billions to create a renewable energy standard. That would require funding roughly equal to the 2009 green energy stimulus every year for a decade and beyond. 

That is not likely to happen given the budget constraints caused by two wars, a recession and the previous stimulus package.

Blansett puts the cost of funding a national electricity standard that requires 15 percent of all electricity to come from renewable resources by 2020 at $158 billion to $445 billion.

A quick look at the budget’s investment in energy programs, to take one area of funding, shows that money just isn’t there.

For example, $500 million in credit subsidies would go to support $3 to $5 billion in loan guarantees for energy efficiency and renewable energy projects, but the support is still indirect support and won’t likely provide enough incentive for a large scale build out.

Likewise, the $300 million slated for Advanced Research Project Agency – Energy (ARPA-E) will up the funding for whiz-bang technologies but not anywhere near enough.

Finally, there’s the question of doing away with $38.8 billion in tax subsidies for oil, coal and gas industries.

Grist’s David Roberts was pleased but realistic about the fossil fuels losing out, noting that “such efforts have failed in congress many times before, so this one gets filed under… aspirational.”

But FT’s Energy Source blasted Obama for short sightedness in the move.

While there is clearly an important role for start-ups and pure-play companies, the chances of getting truly scalable clean energy would be boosted by partnership with the fossil fuel industry.

Of course, this argument holds a lot less force when, as we wrote this morning, BP is cutting $4 billion out of its Renewable Energy Unit.

Ed Miliband, Britain’s energy and climate change secretary, has announced generous feed-in tariffs for small scale producers of renewable energy.

The tariffs, which are slated to begin in April, are meant to help the country achieve its goal of meeting 2 percent of electricity demand from small scale renewable installations by 2020.

The government’s release reads:

From 1 April householders and communities who install low carbon electricity technology such as solar photovoltaic (pv) panels and wind turbines up to 5 megawatts will be paid for the electricity they generate, even if they use it themselves.

The Guardian notes, however, that the 2 percent goal for small-scale renewable still falls short of the 6 percent that environmental groups are pushing for. The country has a target of 30 percent of electricity generated from renewable sources by 2020.

However, the tariffs will be indexed to inflation.

A 2.5KW PV system could earn a family £900 a year and save them £140 on their annual electricity bill, according to the scheme.

Bloomberg notes that that the higher cost for renewable energy in Germany and Spain has led to consumer backlash, though the tariffs have spurred strong growth in renewables in both countries. Germany is currently considering cuts to its rates.

Follow the money, goes the old journalistic saw. And behold, Obama’s budget has shown us that there is no projected revenue from a cap and trade program in his latest budget proposal.

This is a departure from last year’s revenue forecast for 2012-2019, which showed revenues of $646 billion from cap and trade, according to Reuters.

Does this mean cap and trade is dead?

An unnamed administration source won’t commit either way, saying “the exact nature of the legislation remains in flux.”

Stay tuned.

If Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty thought he was going to be garlanded with praise for his $7 billion, 2,500-megawatt wind and solar deal with Samsung, the last 24 hours must have been disappointing.

Critics of the deal, particularly Tim Hudak of the opposition Progressive Conservative party, have lashed McGuinty for the “sweetheart” and “secret” deal.

Sweetheart because the consortium, which includes Korean Electric Power Corp., will get $437 million Canadian dollars in incentive payments over the 25-year life of the deal if it creates 16,000 jobs.

The incentive payment is over and above the feed-in tariffs for wind and solar that the consortium will receive.

Hudak also notes that there are no specific job guarantees in the contract and of the 16,000 jobs, only 1,440 will be permanent. Hudak’s press people help out with the math –  that’s $303,000 per permanent new job.

The deal was secret because McGuinty negotiated it behind closed doors, according to David Butters of the Association of Power Producers of Ontario.

Butters notes that the deal undercuts other projects because the government has set aside 500 megawatts of the limited transmission capacity for the consortium.

McGuinty has brushed past the criticism and stuck to his key message: the project will be the nucleus of Ontario’s green energy industry. The deal calls for Samsung to bring other manufacturers into the region to tap the American market.

McGuinty said:

Above all this means that Ontario is officially the place to be for green energy manufacturing in North America… During the next several years the U.S. is going to build many many thousand of megawatts of energy from renewables. Someone is going to have to supply that technology.

It’s not going to be China if McGuinty has his way.

Samsung C&T Corp. and Korea Electric Power Corp. has signed an agreement with the government of Ontario to develop a $7 billion wind and solar project, according to reports.

The government’s official release is here.

The 2,500 megawatt project will include 1,000 wind turbines that will provide 80 percent of the power for the project. The project will create 16,000 jobs over six years, according to The Toronto Star.

Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty said,

With this step, Ontario is becoming the place to be for green energy manufacturing in North America.

Korea Electric will design the transmission system and operate the project, which is tentatively slated for completion by 2016. The first phases of the five-part project will be located in Haldimand County and Chatham Kent.

Samsung will also receive an “economic development adder” incentive in addition to the feed-in tariff for green energy, which has prompted criticism from McGuinty’s own government that ratepayers will subsidize the consortium.

Critics also say the consortium will have an unfair advantage over local wind producers.

Could new research that shows fish and crabs thrive around offshore wind turbines be a game changer for an industry that’s (ironically) struggling with its eco-image?

The Swedish scientist who conducted the research, Dan Wilhelmsson, won’t go that far, but his research is encouraging to developers, who, he says, have already started citing the studies of the “artificial reefs.”

In an email to GER, Wilhelmsson writes that certain species’ use of turbine foundations as an artificial reef habitat could open up “’a demographic bottleneck” for bottom dwelling species that have limited habitat.

By how much?

Wilhelmsson writes that densities of adult, bottom-dwelling fish were twice as high on the wind turbine foundations and 1 to 5 meters away from the foundations compared with areas 20 meters away and reference areas up to 1 km away.

Including juvenile fish, the densities were 100 times higher on the turbines then in reference areas.

He found similar results for wave energy foundations.

His research, which was based in the Kalmar Strait of the Baltic Sea off of Southeastern Sweden – among other areas – comes as large offshore wind farms such as Cape Wind’s 420-megawatt project in Nantucket Sound have come under increasing attack.

Critics of the Cape Wind project have many issues with the project, including a claim that the turbines will hurt commercial fisheries.

Wilhelmsson’s research does not directly address the issues of Cape Wind, but he writes that wind platforms could serve as a tool for fisheries management, particularly if trawling is forbidden in the area.

He writes,

“The combination of ‘no-take zones’ and artificial reefs is a fisheries management/conservation tool in other regions and parallels to wind/wave farms can definitely be drawn.”

Several species, including crabs and blue mussels, thrive around the foundations because “hard surfaces are often hard currency in the ocean and these foundations can function as artificial reefs,” Wilhelmsson writes in his dissertation for Stockholm University.

The research is based on six studies that were published in journals between 2006 and 2009, so these conclusions have some basis, Wilhelmsson writes.

He cautions that some of the fish and crabs living on the foundations would be predators to other species on the surrounding seabed so the “reef effects may not always be wanted.”

Still, expect to see the idea that wind turbines could be good for fisheries gain currency amongst green energy developers.

Photo: Arnstein Bjone/Wikimedia Commons

The foundations of structures for offshore wind and wave energy projects can serve as artificial reefs and boost local populations of fish, crabs and blue mussels, according to a recently published dissertation.

Dan Wilhelmsson of Stockholm University’s Zoology Department found that the seabed around wind turbines had higher densities of fish compared with areas further from the turbines and in reference areas, according to the report in Science News.

Wilhelmsson says,

Hard surfaces are often hard currency in the ocean, and these foundations can function as artificial reefs. Rock boulders are often placed around the structures to prevent erosion (scouring) around these, and this strengthens the reef function.

Wave power foundations also attract fish and large crabs and lobsters settle under the foundations. When holes are drilled in the foundations, the crab population increased dramatically.

Still, the predatory animals that are attracted by the artificial reefs can significantly decrease, and even wipe out, other species nearby. Wilhelmsson believes that the foundations can even be designed to favor certain species or to reduce reef effects in certain area.

Siemens Venture Capital has announced that it will invest $50 million in the DB Masdar Clean Tech Fund, a joint collaboration between Deustche Bank Climate Change Advisors and Masdar.

The fund, which raised a total of $265 million, will focus on late stage companies and expansion, environmental resources and energy and efficiency sectors, according to the release.

The investment team will be based in Abu Dhabi, New York and London and is already looking at investment opportunities with an eye toward announcing new deals in the coming year. Other investors in the fund include the Japan Bank for International Cooperation, INPEX Corp., Nippon Oil Corporation the Development Bank of Japan and General Electric.

Kevin Parker, global head of Deutsche Asset Management told businessGreen.com that the scale of the fundraising and involvement of high-profile backers 

demonstrates a profound confidence in climate change investing and in the joint DBCCA and Masdar investment team.

Masdar already operates a $250 million clean tech fund, in which Siemens invested $25 million.

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The U.S. Department of Energy is taking steps to prevent earthquakes caused by drilling for geothermal projects, according to a report in The New York Times.

The move comes weeks after AltaRock Energy abandoned its Geysers project near San Francisco because of concerns that the company played down earthquake risks – a claim AltaRock has denied.The new measures would require companies to keep an eye on ground-motion sensors and have a plan to shut down if the drilling causes significant earthquakes. Companies would also have to provide expectations of earthquake activity and submit to outside review of the process.

Geothermal energy has come under increased scrutiny as regulators and the public worry about the risks associated with drilling into the earth’s core.

Geothermal companies seek to drill holes deep into the earth to access hot bedrocks, then pump water into the holes to create steam, which drives turbine to create electricity. The technology has been proven for small-scale application but developers have not been able successful in utility-scale projects.

Duke Energy Generation Services has appointed Tony Dorazio as senior vice president for wind energy development, according to a company release.

Dorazio will lead project development for the Duke Energy unit, which owns and operates 733 megawatts of power generation at seven wind farms in Pennsylvania, Texas and Wyoming.

Dorazio served briefly as chief operating officer at Tessera Solar in 2009. Prior to that he worked for BP Alternative Energy’s wind power business, where he put together a portfolio of 15,000 megawatts of potential wind power projects. As GER previously reported, BP scaled back its investments in renewables after Chief Executive Officer Tony Hayward took over in March 2009.

He was also previously a vice president of Vestas-American Wind Technology in Portland, Ore.

He will be managing development of the unit’s projects, including site selection, permit application processes and marketing projects to electricity buyers.

Duke plans to bring 251 megawatts online in 2010 with the construction of farms in Wyoming and Colorado and 200-300 megawatts online annually for the next several years.

WSJ.com’s Environmental Capital has posted its last post.

Lead writer Keith Johnson blogs:

After more than two years and over 2,000 posts, Environmental Capital is closing its virtual doors.

It’s been, in equal measure, a fun, grueling, and educational ride.

Special thanks are owed to the folks who got it all started and kept it going—Mark Gongloff, Jeff Ball, and Russell Gold—not to mention all the Dow Jones and Wall Street Journal folks who fed the beast so well all this time.

Of course, the biggest thanks of all goes to our readers—both of you. You’re what got us out of bed in the wee hours every morning. Well, that–and the paycheck.

We didn’t have any warning about the blog’s demise and Johnson declined comment on it, though his quip about “our readers – both of you”  suggests that the central brains weren’t sufficiently impressed with the traffic.

Too bad, it was our first read in the morning. Not sure if NYTimes.com’s Green, Inc., is going the way of the Dodo too. A mass extinction of green energy, policy and finance blogs.

Right-wing firebrand Rush Limbaugh thinks the planet would be better with former New York Times climate reporter Andrew Revkin dead and Climate Progress blogger Joe Romm wants him to get something (anything) right. Being the target of these two flamethrowers, in addition to writing Page One stories for The Times from the Copenhagen climate summit, running the Dot Earth blog and writing books would wear anyone down. On Dec. 21, Revkin packed it in and left The Times, where he had been a staff writer since 1995. Not, mind you, to run and hide, but to begin the next phase of his career as a senior fellow at Pace University’s new interdiscplinary program for applied environmental studies. We caught up with Revkin to talk about Copenhagen and the future of the climate for our Cornerstone Conservations series with leading executives and thinkers in clean tech and green energy.

GER: What was the Copenhagen climate summit like to cover?

Andrew Revkin: I’m sure everyone over there had a different perspective based on their experience.  I was seeing some really bad signs early on; it was kind of like watching a truck you know is going too fast miss the intersection. There was just no way you were going to get any substantive breakthroughs coming out of something like that.

There was also the chaos factor. The manager of the treaty process admitted they had 45,000 people registered and they figured at any particular hour they’d only have 15,000 people in the hall. Also, having so many heads of state come, you’re superimposing all of those protocols and priorities over a process normally run by functionaries. Which led to some of the fun stuff towards the end.

GER: You’re referring to President Barack Obama barging in on a meeting between negotiators from China and Brazil, among other countries. Did that really happen?

AR: From what I understand, it really did happen There were some private consultations China had arranged with other countries and there was this pattern of China sending some low level functionaries to bilateral talks.

There were hazards here for the president here, since he committed so early on to showing up on the final day. What the outcome illustrated was that there were gambles there. The Obama administration did not have everything in control.

GER: What did you think of the outcome?

AR: The bigger accomplishment of this conference was the things that happened in the months leading up to it. A bunch of countries that had never come close to setting firm targets did so. Brazil, for example, just turned into law their reductions plan. I think we’ll look back 10-20 years from now and see the curve of emissions will have moved away from business as usual. It wouldn’t have happened without the conference.

No venture capital group is going to finance the first gigawatt carbon capture plant because that’s something only governments do.

GER: Did you get a new sense of hope from Copenhagen?

AR: I don’t think, in the end, that’s where you’re going to find it. The thing that will change our energy norms won’t come out of a diplomatic process so much as out of innovations in technology and social innovations. There’s those who still think the business world will still be that place. But from the stories that The Times and I have done on these things – there aren’t really the Bell Labs out there.

I just don’t see Copenhagen as being the game changer. Maybe we need a framework conference on technology change as much as we need a framework on climate change.We need new ways to get energy and the services it provides to people.

GER: Have you seen the discussion on climate shift, over the years, from the scientific to the economic aspects of combating climate change?

AR: Once Kyoto took effect, from 1997 until the mid 2000s, there was an expectation that there would be a grand and ever-growing market for carbon and technology. But with 190 countries – the money flows to the easiest things. My guess is where that’s going to end up is much more like the voluntary carbon market that we see now. I may be cynical but I don’t see the signs of progress toward that.

The whole philosophy, from early on was, let’s build a global scheme and drive the change. The IEA came out with a report that said until even if you get the carbon markets, it wouldn’t make a dent until 2025. You have to go direct at the basic R and D and the large-scale demonstration. No venture capital group is going to finance the first gigawatt carbon capture plant because that’s something only governments do.

GER: Do you think California’s venture capitalists can drive the change as they did for the Web in the 1990s?

AR: I interviewed Vinod Khosla when I was doing a piece on declining R and D (story here), and I quoted him saying that, in the end, the solar push will not save the climate. It just doesn’t come anywhere near matching the scale of supplanting coal that you would need to stabilize the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

I have yet to see anyone prove to me that the emperor has any clothes and this has been part of the dynamic tension between me and Joseph Romm. His big thing is deployment of technology. Frankly, I just don’t see the solid case for that, looking at energy trends. It’s not like Moore’s Law – it’s getting harder and harder to push gains in photovoltaic cells.

As for the idea of a grand buildout, I see scant evidence that can happen even with the stimulus money. I’m still kind of in show-me mode. I saw [Energy Secretary] Steven Chu give a presentation and he said we’re up to the levels of R and D that had been the norm back in the oil crisis days, but what he didn’t say was that’s a one-time thing. If you talk to historians, you need a sustained priming of the pump.

GER: Why did you leave The Times?

AR: I’m now 53. You get to the point in your career where you say, ‘I’ve got a good 30-35 years left.’  I did a thought experiment – I got in a lot of trouble with Rush Limbaugh for doing public thought experiments – what if I do this for the rest of my career, will I look back and be happy. A lot of newspaper coverage isn’t going to change things if people’s attitudes are ingrained. Already as of 2007 I was fishing around for a possibility. It just all came together Pace University was very excited about what I was doing. The sense of the grind also is there.

GER: Can conventional media hold onto multimedia brands like you and New York Times scribes David Pogue and Andrew Ross Sorkin?

AR: That’s not really the way that I framed my thinking at all. I’m part of a family of driven people; my grandparents are driven people. They always instilled in us this drive. Its about efficacy. I just want to do things that matter and not just do things because I’m good at them. I’m going to keep writing for print, that’s part of my personal culture. Whether I keep blogging for The Times after the next month or so that’s not clear. We’re still discussing what the long term plan would be.

GER: Did you consider going to industry?

AR: In trying to figure out the next platform I explored everything from Google to Pace University. I had very low key conversastion with people I’ve known for a very long time who ended up at Google. But there wasn’t an offer on the table.

Interview conducted and condensed by Matthew Van Dusen.

Native Americans who have opposed Cape Wind’s 420-megawatt wind farm in Nantucket Sound are meeting with officials from the Department of the Interior today to push an alternate site for the project, according to a press release.

The privately-owned Cape Wind will also be meeting with Interior Department officials and will likely oppose the re-siting of the project, claiming that it will have to start the approval process over again, according to this article in The Boston Globe. Instead, they have offered to look for native artifacts on the seabed before they begin construction.

The dispute has becomes an important test of how the Obama Administration will balance cultural and ecological sensitivities against its green energy goals.

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said last week that he wants the parties – the private Cape Wind on one side, conservation groups and several tribes on the other – to come to an agreement by March 1 or he will “take the steps necessary to bring the permit process to conclusion.”

The proposal brought by various groups, including the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound, would place the project at a location called South of Tuckernuck Island, which they claim has the water depth and area to accommodate the project.

The groups claim the new site will have less impact than the Horseshoe Shoal site on boat traffic, commercial fishing and endangered species and also limit impacts on tourism and the viewshed that the tribes consider sacred.

Audra Parker, the president of the Alliance to Protect Nantuck Sound, also has an op-ed in The Boston Globe today taking some shots at Cape Wind.

She writes:

Because Cape Wind is a profit-driven private development and has been given a no-bid no compete deal for 25 square miles of Nantucket Sound, its owners will almost certainly object to the new site as harder to build, and thus less profitable. But Cape Wind will gain something in the waters south of Tuckernuck Island that it does not have within sight of Cape Cod and the Islands: strong public support.

Should be interesting.

Asset managers for large investment funds are not taking climate risks into account in their investment strategies, according to a new report from Ceres.

The failure of the managers to factor climate trends into their decisions exposes their multitrillion dollar portfolios to “hidden risks.”

The survey was sent to the world’s 500 largest asset managers and 84 managers, with $8.6 trillion under management, responded. Nearly half said they did not consider climate risks at all.

Mindy S. Lubber, president of Ceres and director of the Investor Network on Climate Risk, said.

Despite the growing recognition of the far-reaching impacts climate change will have on the global economy, only a handful of asset managers are integrating climate risks and opportunities throughout their investment practices.

The report recommends that institutional investors push asset managers to pay more attention to climate-issues.

Belgian prosecutors have charged three Britons and a Dutchman with failing to pay 3 million Euros on carbon trading transactions, according to a report in The Guardian.

This fraud is terrible news for supporters of a U.S. cap-and-trade system.

The “carousel fraud” involves buying credits in one country that allows credits to be sold without charging Value Added Tax (VAT) then selling to buyers in another country that requires VAT to be collected.

The sellers then disappear without forwarding the tax to the government. Similar fraud has cost the European Union an estimated 5 billion euros in the last 18 months.

The problem is unique to the EU’s Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) because the taxation regimes are not harmonized across different countries. Thus, fraudsters can exploit differences in the taxation rules.

This would not necessarily be a problem if the U.S. introduced a cap and trade plan – which would be governed by one set of taxation rules – but could create enormous problems in an international scheme.

More to the point, gaming of the system also validates the anxiety many people feel about creating a huge, new financial market to curb emissions.

Public trust in Wall Street is at a low-ebb and voters are wary of giving financial firms an entire new market to manipulate in both legal and illegal ways.

The EU believes it has found a way to stop the VAT fraud. But the damage to the EU’s coffers, and cap and trade’s image, has been done.

China is dropping a requirement that 70 percent of wind turbines used in the country be made domestically, according to Bloomberg.

The decision was apparently driven by a desire to get the best turbine technology, which generally comes from Europe, into the country.

Is there a political angle here too?

Sen. Charles Schumer, D-NY, made a splash in November when he asked the Obama administration to block stimulus funding for a Chinese-backed 800-megawatt wind farm in Texas because the components would be made in China.

It’s difficult for Chinese companies to cry foul about protectionism when they have home-made restrictions of their own.

Still, big wind companies, like the Danish Vestas Wind Systems A/S shrugged at today’s news.

A spokesman said, “The ruling will make no difference to our operations, as 70 percent to 80 percent of our turbines are already made in China,”

eSolar and Chinese-owned Penglai Electric announced over the weekend a licensing agreement to build 2 gigawatts of solar thermal power plants in China over 10 years. (Hat tip: earth2tech)

The project will be China’s largest concentrated solar power (CSP) installation, with installation of the first 92 megawatts slated for 2010.

The eSolar project should be complete by 2021 and will be co-located with biomass electricity generation facilities, according to the release. It will be located in the 170-square-kilometer Yulin Alterrnative Energy Park and owned by China Shaanxi Yulin Huayang New Energy Co.

eSolar’s technology uses mirrors to direct sunlight and turn liquid to steam, which drives turbines.

China is a leader in photovoltaic (PV) manufacturing but has not done much in the CSP arena until now, the release notes.

The Google-backed company has been going gangbusters in recent months, providing the technology for NRG Energy’s Alpine SunTower near Los Angeles, among several other deals. It also got a new CEO, John Van Scoter, last month.

What has Google done to win the love of green energy geeks?

The company is all over the place today, with an extensive Q and A with company green energy czar Bill Weihl in Green, Inc., and a piece in Green Tech about the company’s new Google Energy subsidiary.

The search giant’s devotion to sourcing affordable green energy for its data centers and venture capital investments in eSolar, BrightSource and geothermal interest AltaRock Energy are all mentioned at length.

Weihl also talks about the company’s 70-20-10 approach to its internal investments on technology, from search to energy. He says.

Seventy percent is the main core services, 20 percent is the next layer of things right around the corner, and 10 percent is just wacky stuff. Some people might look at that and say, ‘I don’t see any relationship between that and Google’s business.’ And then maybe five years later they’ll say, ‘Whoa, it’s a good thing you guys thought about that.’

This seems great, because Google is a highly successful business that has transformed advertising, email and the Web in general.

But does the company’s track record in its core businesses give us any reason to believe it can do the same to green energy?

Weihl seems to think so, citing the company’s “culture of innovation.”

But some of this talk just smacks of hubris: If Google built a better search engine, why can’t it also develop a cure for cancer or make renewable energy scalable and affordable? Because success in one area does not guarantee, or even correlate with, success in the other.

One need only recall Google-backed AltaRock Energy’s recent abandonment of its Geysers drilling project to see how green energy can go wrong.

Green Tech’s story is a more measured account of the company’s attempts to pursue carbon neutrality and be able to buy green energy on the wholesale market, with approval from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

But this program too, smacks of overreach.

The company has invested about $50 million since 2007 in internal and external investments to make renewable energy cheaper than coal. Officials have lots more money to spend but they can’t find enough good projects out there.

Frankly, Google’s investments in this area are just too small for it to become, or to be a support hub for, the new Bell Labs of green energy.