House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) released his fiscal year 2014 budget yesterday. Once again, he offers a path to prosperity that is limited to corporate special interests like Big Oil.

Despite nearly two-thirds of Americans echoing President Obama’s push to tackle climate change through regulation, Ryan decided to concentrate his energy strategy on “restoring competition to the energy sector” and “stopping the government from buying up unnecessary land.” Unsurprisingly, Ryan has multiple cases of misinformation and at times, blatant lies.

Let’s break down the eight biggest falsehoods from Ryan’s energy vision:

1. “The construction of the Keystone XL Energy Pipeline would create more than 20,000 direct jobs and 118,000 indirect jobs while battling the high cost of gas.”

Contrary to Rep. Ryan’s claims, the Keystone XL pipeline would actually only support 35 permanent and 15 temporary jobs after construction is complete, with “negligible socioeconomic impacts,” according to the State Department’s revised draft environmental impact assessment.

2. “Once it was in operation, the pipeline would contribute an additional $5.2 billion in property taxes to communities along the route during the life of the pipeline.”

The TransCanada assessment that claims that the six states crossed by the pipeline would receive an additional $5.2 billion in property taxes fails to account for the likely damage caused by oil spills along the pipeline route. “In the past five years, more than half a million barrels of oil and other hazardous liquids have been spilled from U.S. pipelines, killing 76 people and causing some $2.4 billion in property damage, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation.”

3. “The administration continues to penalize economically competitive sources of energy and to reward their uncompetitive alternatives. On the one hand, it pours money into its favored industries.”

According to an analysis by DBL Investors, the oil and gas industry has received a total of $446 billion in government subsidies from 1918 through 2009. Meanwhile, the renewable energy industry received just $5.5 billion from 1994-2009. U.S. taxpayers have invested $80 in oil for every $1 invested in clean, renewable energy. Moreover, the big five oil companies –BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, and Shell — made a combined profit of $118 billion in 2012 while Reuters reported that the three American companies’ tax payments were “a far cry from the 35 percent top corporate tax rate.”

4. “In 2012, the Congressional Budget Office found total energy subsidies were $24 billion, of which $16 billion were spent on ‘green’ energy programs and $2.5 billion on fossil fuels.”

Ryan actually misquoted the report, which actually refers to subsidies from 2011. Furthermore, the Congressional Budget Office found that the government only spent $3.6 billion on energy efficiency and renewables in 2011.

5. “Many of the administration’s loan-guarantee projects have failed.”

Independent analysis of the Department of Energy’s loan guarantee program has shown that that these investments were not only successful, but cost-effective. Despite the hysteria behind Solyndra, the program will cost $2 billion less than initially expected, for a total cost of $2.7 billion. To put that in perspective, the fossil-fuel industry got a whopping $70 billion in government subsidies from 2002 to 2008. The Loan Guarantee Program has allowed extremely important projects to move forward, including the world’s largest wind farm and our country’s biggest concentrating solar power project. Critically, the program created jobs for nearly 60,000 people.

6. “Beyond Solyndra, the latest ill-fated ventures include a $737 million loan guarantee to Solar Reserve for a 110-megawatt solar tower on federal land in Nevada and a $337 million guarantee for Mesquite Solar 1 to develop a 150-megawatt solar plant in Arizona.”

Politico reported that both of these projects are either already generating power or are on schedule with construction.

SolarReserve’s 110-megawatt Crescent Dunes project, near Tonopah, Nev., has inked a 25-year agreement to sell electricity to the power company NV Energy. The project is on track for completion later this year…. Ryan’s other target, the Mesquite Solar 1 project west of Phoenix, flipped the switch to electricity generation earlier this year. Media reports described it at the time as a success story of the DOE loan guarantee program.

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A new report by Environmental Entrepreneurs (E2), flagged this past week by the San Antonio Business Journal, found that over 110,000 new clean energy jobs were announced in 2012. The group tracked over 300 project announcements across multiple sectors and in every region of the country.

A few of the noteworthy 2012 trends in E2′s report include:

• Public transportation drove clean job growth nationwide, clocking in at over 43,000 jobs over the course of the year. Power generation, most of which came from solar, wind, and geothermal, came in second with more than 30,000 jobs.
• Solar power was a strong and steady job creator throughout the year, and especially in the fourth quarter, providing over 19,000 jobs between the manufacturing and power generation sectors.
• Investment in energy efficiency hit a record high of $5.6 billion in 2012, according to E2′s analysis of government data, thanks to the announcement of as many as 9,000 new jobs.
• Uncertainty over the production tax credit hit wind energy, leading to a decline in job creation announcements in the fourth quarter, even as capacity installation ramped up at the end of the year to get in under the anticipated expiration. But now that the “fiscal cliff” deal has extended the credit for another year, 2013 expectations show wind energy regaining some of its momentum.

State-wise, California dominated 2012 with 26,354 jobs announced, and North Carolina came in second with 10,867 jobs. The latter state lead the way at years’s end, however, announcing 7,610 of its total jobs in the fourth quarter — over 6,000 more than any other state. Florida, Illinois, Connecticut, Arizona, New York, Michigan, Texas, and Oregon rounded out the rest of the top ten states for clean energy job creation, in that order.

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If the recent election taught us anything, it’s that we need to re-frame the politics of clean energy.

Sure, advocates celebrated a victory last November by keeping President Obama and many others who understand the importance of the clean energy economy in office. After more than a year of spurious political attacks against Solyndra, green jobs, and the clean energy stimulus, that was a considerable achievement.

But those victories have come at a considerable cost.

In Washington, some of the political hostility has died down after the election. However, as negotiations around raising the debt ceiling unfold, there are already renewed calls to cut federal funding for key programs supporting renewable energy, efficiency, and other cleantech industries. That’s because many Republicans see cleantech as just another special interest feeding off government — not as a core driver of environmentally-minded business in the 21st century.

A lot has changed since since the mid-2000′s when the sector had overwhelming bipartisan support in national politics. Two things happened: The cleantech sector got a considerable boost through the stimulus, making it a punching bag for conservatives targeting government spending; and the commercialization of fracking technologies caused a resurgence in the U.S. oil & gas sector, directly challenging clean energy.

As the editors of MIT’s Technology Review pointed out recently, making cleantech a part of the stimulus package was necessary and important for helping lay the foundation for a clean energy transition. But simply selling it as a short-term jobs creator did some damage to the political credibility of the sector.

“We cautioned against conflating economic stimulus with a sustainable and effective energy policy. Leading economists noted that job creation needed to happen quickly, while transforming our energy infrastructure would take decades,” wrote the editors.

Of course, there were a lot of real and undeniable successes spurred by the stimulus package that deserve to be mentioned. (Time Magazine’s Michael Grunwald does a great job reporting on the many success stories in clean energy and other sectors in his recent book on the stimulus).

Consider this: In 2006, wind turbine manufacturers were only able source 35 percent of components from American companies. Today, in large part due to the stimulus, there are now 500 manufacturing facilities in operation around the U.S. that supply nearly 70 percent of components for American wind farms. That’s a doubling of domestic sourcing in five years.

Since 2008, America’s production of renewable electricity has nearly doubled; we have increased home weatherization by 1,000 percent; the industry was saved from a complete financial collapse by a Treasury grant program that supported 75,000 jobs; the solar and wind industries now support nearly 200,000 American jobs combined; and economy-wide, there are roughly 2.7 million green jobs spread across a range of sectors.

We should embrace these successes. But when taking them in a broader economic context, we must also state the obvious: The green jobs revolution that was touted before the stimulus package passed did not fully emerge.

That’s because the economic revolution spurred by clean energy isn’t really a revolution — it’s a multi-decade evolution. While this sector will certainly continue to create good American jobs, they don’t just appear in a four-year political time frame. Combine these less-than-expected green jobs numbers with a few high-profile bankruptcies of flashy government-backed cleantech companies, and you get a toxic political result.

“The outcome, which we foresaw in our 2009 article, was an entirely unnecessary black eye for the clean-energy effort,” wrote the MIT Technology Review editors in their assessment of the stimulus.

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by Peter Bronksi, via the Rocky Mountain Institute

It’s that time of year when people make New Year’s resolutions, commitments to do things differently in the coming year that are going to have a positive impact on their lives. But what would New Year’s resolutions look like if the United States as a nation resolved to decrease its fossil fuel consumption and increase the adoption of efficiency and renewables?

I sat down with program director James Newcomb and principal Lena Hansen to find out. They offered up four New Year’s resolutions that can help make the United States’ electricity system more efficient, more resilient, and more planet-friendly sooner than later.

1. Invest further in end-use efficiency.

Energy efficiency is often considered one of the cheapest and most readily available energy sources. Investments in efficiency programs have been increasing around the country, but significant opportunity remains on the table and many utilities are still incentivized to sell more electricity, rather than to sell more efficiency. Taking end-use efficiency to the next level will require utilities and consumers to work more closely together than ever before. Utilities especially can take several steps to make that happen: a) improve efficiency program marketing to truly engage customers and increase participation, b) streamline program transaction costs, such as by implementing faster and simpler energy audits, c) adopt regulatory mechanisms that remove utilities’ disincentives and create incentives to sell efficiency, and d) embrace collaboration with other stakeholders, including regulators, NGOs, auditors, customers, and architectural and engineering firms.

2. Anticipate and head off friction over solar.

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by Richard W. Caperton

“How much is the production tax credit for wind worth?”  That sounds like an easy question to answer: 2.2 cents per kilowatt-hour.

The truth, however, is that the PTC is worth different things to different people, and that the 2.2 cents per kwh is just the amount that it costs taxpayers.  For wind turbine owners, the credit is sometimes worth far less than 2.2 cents.  This isn’t just true with wind.  Other renewable energy technologies have access to similar tax incentives, and also find that they are sometimes worth less to project developers than the cost to taxpayers.  To get the most bang for the buck (or, the most renewable energy for the taxpayers’ dollars), Congress should work to make sure renewable energy tax incentives are delivering value efficiently to wind project developers and owners.

As CAP has previously written, supporting renewable energy through the tax code has been beneficial for clean energy companies and for taxpayers.  The production tax credit for wind, for example, has been a tremendous success in building a thriving wind industry in the United States.  Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) recently said:

I’ve championed the wind energy tax credit as a way to provide a level playing field for a very clean, renewable resource. As a result, wind energy has become more efficient and cost-effective. The cost of wind energy has declined by 90% since the 1980’s. Wind has accounted for 35% of all new American electric generation in the last five years… As a result of the tax incentive, the wind energy has actually created new manufacturing jobs in the United States. Today 60% of the wind turbines’ value is now produced in the United States, compared with just 25% six years ago. There are now 400 facilities building wind components in 43 states. That is why a bill in the House of Representatives to extend the wind energy production tax credit has 80 cosponsors, including 18 Republicans.

At the same time, there is reason to believe that we could have even more wind power – and all the benefits that entails – if the PTC were fully optimized.  The issue is that not every wind project owner can use the tax credit.  The credit simply reduces the amount of taxes a company owes.  For many wind projects, the owners don’t actually owe taxes because they’ve just invested large amounts of money.  In other cases, a company may owe taxes, but not as much as the credit is worth.  As an illustration, if a company owes $1 in taxes but has a $2 credit, they can only use $1 worth of the credit.

Today, companies deal with this problem by bringing in a so-called “tax equity investor”.  The exact structure of these transactions is complex, because you’re not technically allowed to “sell” tax credits, but the gist of the transaction is that the tax equity owners pay to use the tax credits.  Of course, they buy the credits at a discount, in order to turn a profit on the deal.  That is, they may only pay 75 cents for a one dollar credit.

This discount is critical.  A middle-man has now entered the equation, and has reduced the value of the credit to the wind project developer, even though it still costs the taxpayers 2.2 cents per kwh.

Congress could address this issue by making minor changes to the PTC so that the discount the middle-man demands would be smaller.  One way to do this would be to make the rules for “tax equity” easier, so that more companies would want to participate in the tax equity market.  The problem with this is that it may have a negative side effect of increasing the use of money-losing ventures as tax shelters.  Fortunately, there’s another option: Decrease the uncertainty around whether or not a project will qualify for a tax credit.

Here is the key point: As the law is now written, a project is only eligible for a tax credit if it is “placed in service” by a certain date.  For wind projects, that date is December 31, 2012.  This means that a wind project will only qualify for the PTC if it begins generating and selling electricity by December 31.  This is the end of a very lengthy permitting, procurement, and construction process, any step of which can take longer than expected, and none of which can move forward without all of the financing in place.  This means that tax equity investors are expected to commit money to a project and allow much of that money to be spent, even though there is some risk that construction may not finish in time and the project may not be “placed in service” by the deadline.  Tax equity investors are aware of this risk, and account for it when figuring out how much they should discount the PTC when pricing the transaction.

This situation could be avoided if the law was changed so that a project is eligible for a tax credit if construction begins by a certain date.  Under this “commence construction” structure, there is no longer any risk that construction delays will make the project ineligible for the tax credit, which reduces the risk for tax equity investors.  This change has no effect on taxpayers, because under either structure the project can only claim the credit for electricity generated.

There’s another benefit to making this rule change.

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by Clint Wilder, via Clean Edge

“Clean tech is dead. The same way that the Internet was dead in 2000.”

To me, in assessing the state of the clean-tech industry in my final CE Views column of 2012, that may well be the quote of the year. Its source was Mitch Lowe, founder and managing partner of Greenstart, an incubator for software-based clean tech startups. Lowe’s sarcastic and insightful quip deftly describes the industry’s current condition: it’s transitional, challenging – and not going away anytime soon. Or ever.

Having covered the high tech and clean tech industries since 1985, I’ve seen countless hype waves come and go. The bursting of the Internet bubble around 2000 that Lowe referred to is still by far the biggest hype-and-crash that I’ve witnessed, Solyndra or no Solyndra. But in both high tech and clean tech, two things are always true. Hype about the latest new new thing (think Donald Trump exclaiming, “Huuuge!”) always exceeds the (long-term) business reality. And just as important to remember, what I will call the reverse hype – the naysaying and death knells from the doomsayers – always overstates reality as well. Remember, hype is not just buzz; it’s short for hyperbole, which means exaggeration. It may have been good for Internet stock valuations in 1999 or, I would argue, for shale-gas speculators today – but it’s not a long-term business strategy.

Mainstream media memes like “clean tech is dead” are understandable. They’re simple, easy to comprehend, and fit nicely into a Tweet, TV news chyron, or cocktail party conversation starter. But reality is always far more complex.

I don’t mean for one minute to minimize the obstacles faced by the clean-tech industry as we head into 2013. For most sectors and companies, 2012 has ranged somewhere between challenging and brutal. (Solar installation and deployment has been a notable exception, with the U.S. market on track for 50 percent growth in 2012 and SolarCity’s forthcoming IPO capping off the year). Public and private funding is hard to come by, policy is uncertain if not hostile, stock prices are battered, and low-cost natural gas has made the grid-parity game for renewables more daunting. It’s probably the most challenging environment for the industry since at least the Great Recession of 2008-09, if not the early 2000s when clean tech’s challenge was trying to get noticed at all.

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What did it feel like to publish a book on the future of cleantech in the U.S. just as the sector became a target in national politics?

“It was pretty tense there for a while. We were holding our breath,” says Ron Pernick, managing director of the market research firm Clean Edge and co-author of the new book, Cleantech Nation.

Forget about selling books. This is an industry that Pernick, along with his co-author and Clean Edge co-founder Clint Wilder, lives and breathes. And for people who’ve watched the industry grow from lab-scale tinkering to a full-on industrial powerhouse, the vicious attacks were, well, insulting.

“It was very disconcerting to all of us to watch the amount of money that came from entrenched interests and helped influence a very strong partisan line attacking and marginalizing the industry,” says Pernick. “But it backfired. It didn’t work.”

In 2007, about a year after I started covering this sector, Pernick and Wilder released their first book, Cleantech Revolution. It was one of the best resources out there on activity in the public and private sectors. At that time, cleantech was just becoming a mainstream term in investment circles. It was also right around the time when some of the biggest industrial companies started making strategic investments in renewables, smart grid technologies, and advanced transport.

Driven by concerns about climate and bi-partisan support for diversifying our energy mix, 2004 through 2011 was a period of incredible growth in cleantech. In 2004, global clean energy investments amounted to $53.5 billion. In 2011, global investments reached $260 billion — surpassing fossil fuel investments for the first time and marking the trillionth dollar put into the sector.

But in the last 18 months, the turbulence that has always defined the clean energy sector intensified: Countries have pulled back financial support due to economic struggles; venture capitalists have changed investment strategies after realizing the amount of capital required to scale; once-promising companies have fallen in dramatic fashion due to intensifying competition; and a new unconventional fossil fuel boom in the U.S. driven by fracking has deflated some of the bipartisan enthusiasm for renewables.

If Cleantech Revolution marked the first era of major growth, then Cleantech Nation marks the second: one filled with even greater political uncertainties and market risks, but even greater rewards as the sector continues to expand. For anyone who wants to understand the scope of investment activity underway in cleantech — along with the political imperative for encouraging growth in the sector — Cleantech Nation is a good read.

My biggest gripe with Pernick and Wilder’s new book is that it focuses almost entirely on the positive stories when there are so many important lessons to be learned from countries over-investing in certain sectors, companies being too optimistic in their technologies or market forecasts, and the realities of how political ideology can present enormous barriers. The authors touch on these a bit in the book, but mostly breeze over them in favor of success stories.

As a book designed to provide a forward-thinking framework for policy making and corporate planning, I suppose that makes sense. Indeed, it does provide a detailed look at the forces driving the sector — from CEOs, to mayors, to venture capitalists, to the biggest countries in the world — and wraps them together into an action plan for capturing the sector’s value in America.

Post-election, as we come out of an intense period defending the industry, it’s time for proponents to go on the offense. Cleantech Nation provides a blueprint for a potential game plan to get the job done.

I spoke with Ron Pernick about the post-election environment for cleantech and about what excites him about the next phase of growth. Below is an excerpt from our interview:

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The campaign to kill renewable energy, brought to you by the organization that gave you this billboard.

Six months after rolling out a disastrous billboard campaign that linked people who care about global warming to the Unabomber, the Heartland Institute is looking for another project to boost its profile.

And what better way for the organization to mend its tarnished image than to go after a policy that Americans overwhelmingly support?

The Heartland Institute, known for its campaigns to cast doubt about the science of climate change, is now teaming up with the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) to craft laws repealing state-level renewable energy targets. ALEC is best known as a “stealth business lobbyist” that helps corporate interests write and pass legislation friendly to their interests. This spring, the organization came under fire for its role in pushing Stand-Your-Ground laws that opponents blamed for the shooting death of Florida teenager Trayvon Martin. Both the Heartland Institute and ALEC lost major funders throughout the spring as a result of the separate controversies.

The campaign to dismantle these types of laws isn’t new. Last summer, Bloomberg News reported on tax documents showing that Koch Industries, Exxon Mobil and other energy companies paid membership fees to ALEC in order to help write legislation repealing carbon pollution reduction programs in states around country. But after getting beat on the issues in national elections earlier this month, these groups are doubling down on their efforts to kill clean energy on the state level.

The Washington Post reported this weekend on how the embattled Heartland Institute is joining the campaign:

The involvement of the Heartland Institute, which posted a billboard in May comparing those who believe in global warming to domestic terrorist Theodore J. Kaczynski, shows the breadth of conservatives’ efforts to undermine environmental initiatives on the state and federal level. In many cases, the groups involved accept money from oil, gas and coal companies that compete against renewable energy suppliers.

The Heartland Institute received $736,500 from Exxon Mobil between 1998 and 2006, according to the group’s spokesman Jim Lakely, and $25,000 in 2011 from foundations affiliated with Charles G. Koch and David H. Koch, whose firm Koch Industries has substantial oil and energy holdings. Lakely wrote in an e-mail that the Koch donation was “earmarked for our work on health care policy, not energy or environment policy.” He added the institute had received financial support from the Koch brothers before 2001, but did not specify how much.

James Taylor, the Heartland Institute’s senior fellow for environmental policy, said he was able to persuade most of ALEC’s state legislators and corporate members to push for a repeal of laws requiring more solar and wind power use on the basis of economics.

So far, 29 states have renewable energy targets in place. And with years of experience in these states, multiple analyses have shown that these laws have had virtually no impact on rate increases.

Heartland and ALEC are building their campaign around economic research from the Beacon Hill Institute, a free-market think tank that has received money from Koch-backed groups:

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by Matt Kasper and Kiley Kroh

This election season, groups promoting fossil fuels spent an incredible amount of money – $270 million in the last two months alone – on television ads to influence presidential and congressional races. But voters made it clear that they support candidates who understand the critical importance of transitioning away from fossil fuels and toward the renewable energy sources of the future.

A post-election energy survey released by the American Council on Renewable Energy (ACORE) and Advanced Energy Economy Ohio Institute (AEE Ohio Institute) confirmed that energy was a “very important” issue to the majority of voters in Virginia (60%), Ohio (57%), Iowa (58%), and Colorado (66%) in their vote decision:

These same voters also overwhelmingly expressed more support for candidates who want to move their states away from consuming coal and toward the production of cleaner sources of energy such as wind, solar, and natural gas. According to the survey, 75% of voters in Iowa, 72% of voters in Colorado and Virginia, and 69% of voters in Ohio said they wanted to transition away from fossil fuels.

The future embraced by the fossil fuel industry is one in where America is nothing more than a land of fossil-fuel extraction. But after November 6^th, it is clear that this vision does not align with the swing state voters.

The Center for American Progress recently released “Regional Energy, National Solutions: A Real Energy Vision for America,” a report that directly counters the vision for America offered by the American Petroleum Institute and highlights the current success and future potential of the clean economy across the country.

The U.S. military gets this. Realizing the critical need to enhance our energy security, the Department of Defense has become a major proponent of clean energy solutions. The world’s leading private investors, too, agree that long-term climate change and clean energy policy is a tremendous economic opportunity.  And the American people continue to show an increasing understanding of climate change and support for clean, secure and affordable energy.

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by Ron Pernick, via Clean Edge

The election is over and the people have spoken. After months of highly-charged attacks, lively and lackluster debate performances, and never-ending punches and counterpunches, Barack Obama has prevailed as the winner of the 2012 election. It won’t be an easy job. Mr. Obama will need to enable the creation of millions of new jobs, embolden U.S energy, environmental, and national security, and lead our country into a robust economic future – all while dealing with a sharply divided electorate.

Now that the election is over, what steps can the president and new Congress take to ensure our nation’s ongoing clean-energy leadership? Here are five actions for Mr. Obama that, if implemented, we believe would supercharge the U.S.’s clean-tech economy:

1) Open Up Master Limited Partnerships to Renewables and Efficiency

After the energy crisis of the 1970s, Congress created an effective investment structure to support domestic oil, natural gas, coal extraction, and pipeline projects called Master Limited Partnerships (MLPs). These tax-advantaged structures now comprise more than $220 billion in assets, and on average return between five and 12 percent annually to their investors. The president should call on Congress, in a bipartisan manner, to open up these same investment tools to renewables as soon as possible. There’s no reason that fossil fuels should get special treatment, and this effective investment structure is well suited to renewables which have their own built-in annuity streams (electricity generation from a solar, wind, or geothermal installation, for example, could provide a regular revenue stream to investors). U.S. Senator Chris Coons (D-Delaware) has written a bill entitled the MLP Parity Act, which if enacted, could level the playing field and open up critical financing to the renewables sector.

2) Leverage the Nation’s Abundant Natural Gas, Renewables, and Energy Efficiency Resources

The U.S. is blessed with perhaps the most abundant natural gas and renewable sources of any nation on the planet, along with being a global leader in energy efficiency and green building technologies. While the U.S. will continue to use oil and burn coal, the future needs to be built on cleaner, less environmentally destructive, less volatile sources of energy. Based on its unprecedented natural advantage, we believe the U.S. should focus new generation assets on environmentally responsible natural gas, renewables, and energy efficiency-based “negawatts.” To a great extent that’s already been happening, with the majority of new generation assets in 2011 and 2012 coming from new natural gas and wind power plants. The president should further leverage these resources by supporting policies and building bridges between renewables, efficiency, and natural gas interests – and highlighting how these industries can work together to enable true U.S. energy independence and security.

3) Establish a National Renewable Portfolio Standard of 30 Percent by 2030

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