By Jessica Goad

Speaking yesterday at the National Clean Energy Summit in Las Vegas, Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar highlighted the importance of using public lands in our nation’s transition to a green economy.

“We can’t afford to turn the clock of progress back to the past,” he said.

Salazar discussed a number of accomplishments that the administration has achieved in promoting renewable energy on public lands, including expediting seven projects worth 5,000 megawatts and unveiling of the first wind energy project on public lands in Nevada.  Altogether, he said, the Obama Administration has permitted 31 solar, wind, and geothermal projects on public lands.

Also on Monday, the Departments of Defense and Interior signed a memorandum of understanding outlining a new partnership to encourage the development of renewable energy for military installations on lands managed by the Interior Department that had been previously used for defense purposes.

In a report released earlier this week, the Center for American Progress found that there is vast potential for renewable energy development on federal lands in the West.  In total, about 34 gigawatts of renewable energy — enough to power 7 million homes — could be sited on public lands in six western states over the next two decades.

Salazar also used his keynote speech as an opportunity to urge Congress to extend the wind energy production tax credit, which he said “ought not be a Republican or Democratic issue, but an American issue.”  Last week, a spokesperson for presumptive presidential nominee Mitt Romney noted that the candidate would allow the tax credit to expire, putting 37,000 American jobs at risk.

Jessica is the Manager of Research and Outreach for the Public Lands Project at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Lawmakers and business leaders need to rekindle a spirit of cooperation if the U.S. wants to lead in clean energy and address climate change, says Former President Bill Clinton.

Speaking at the National Clean Energy Summit in Las Vegas, President Clinton attempted to cut through the contentious political fights picked by the “denialists in Congress” and highlight the importance of cooperation in fostering smart, forward-thinking clean energy policy.

“The great winners of the world are the cooperators. Why is this important? Because cooperation gets lousy news coverage and people don’t know about it. We have to both think large and have a bias for action even if it’s small,” said Clinton.

He also encouraged the industry to continuing telling local stories of successful projects around the U.S., which he believes can diminish some of the political push-back against clean energy policy.

“If we want to do these projects, we need to make sure that more people know. Even in this highly partisan time we need to struggle for public-private cooperation. Even if the news in Washington might be disheartening because of the denialists in Congress. But across the rest of the country, the news isn’t so bad.”

Clinton outlined efficiency and renewable energy projects around the country, including the efficiency retrofit of the Empire State Building and the Ivahpah concentrating solar power project, which cumulatively created thousands of green jobs.

“Every place people do things the power of example changes consciousness,” said Clinton.

He pointed to all the construction workers he met in California working on building the 392-megawatt Ivanpah solar project — people of “all races” with some of the “best tattoos” he’d ever seen. Those construction workers are the people who are going to make the difference in moving the clean energy industry forward, said Clinton.

“Think about the tattoos. You win the tattoo vote, we’ll have the damnedest environmental policy you ever saw.”

When asked about the partisan politics stalling comprehensive climate and energy policy, Clinton said he believes that some of it will pass after November. “I think people will start thinking instead of just trying to tear the house down.”

In his final statement, Clinton encouraged people on the local level to continue working for a bipartisan consensus.

“Where ever you live, find something to do. Keep working until you find somebody of a different political persuasion with the same goal, and then figure out how to achieve it. So while you lobby for political change on the national level, it’s important to do something. Even if it seems small, it will have a big impact. Differences of opinion are important. If your purpose is to reach an agreement than your disagreements become much more valuable. We are going to have to become a stakeholder society again — that’s the only thing that works.”

Sen. Reid: “… deniers still exist, fueled and funded by dirty energy profits. These people aren’t just on the other side of this debate. They’re on the other side of reality.”

It appears that advocates of clean energy are getting the message: If you want to talk about clean energy in a political context, you must talk about the environmental imperative.

In a speech opening up this year’s 5th National Clean Energy Summit in Las Vegas, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid gave one of the most powerful public speeches on climate that any national policymaker has made in years.

Reid joins Senators Al Franken, John Kerry, Bernie Sanders, and Sheldon Whitehouse, all of whom have made excellent climate speeches on the Senate floor in the last year. However, today’s speech was done in a much more prominent public forum in front of top journalists, regulatory officials, and policymakers.

Here’s the climate portion of the speech, which was used to set up the pressing need to develop more renewable energy and efficiency:

Twenty-five years ago, President George H.W. Bush promised to use the “White House effect” to combat the “greenhouse effect.” Yet a quarter century later, too many elected officials in Washington are still calling climate change a liberal hoax. They falsely claim scientists are still debating whether carbon pollution is warming the planet.

Of course, if those skeptics had taken a stroll along the Potomac River on a 70-degree day this February, they would have seen cherry trees blossoming earlier than at any time since they were planted 100 years ago. Washington experienced its warmest spring since record keeping began in 1895.

And back in the skeptics’ home states, the harbingers of a changing climate are just as clear as those delicate February blossoms – and infinitely more perilous.

This year alone, the United States has seen unparalleled extreme weather events – events scientists say are exactly what is expected as the earth’s climate changes.

The Midwest is experiencing its most crushing drought in more than half a century – or maybe ever. Presently, disasters have been declared in the majority of U.S. counties. More than half the country is experiencing drought, and seventy-five percent of the nation is abnormally dry this year.

Corn crops are withering and livestock are dying – or going to slaughter early – as heat waves parch America’s breadbasket, breaking records set during the Woody Guthrie Dust Bowl years.

Now ravaging wildfires have replaced the dust storms of the 1930′s. Devastating fires have swept New Mexico, Idaho, Colorado, Nevada and other parts of the Mountain West, destroying hundreds of homes and burning millions of trees. These fires are fed in part by vast areas of dead forest ravaged by beetles and other pests that now survive through warmer winters.

On the East Coast, extreme thunderstorms and high winds called “derechos” – literally meaning straight-line storms – have eliminated power for 4.3 million customers in 10 states in the mid-Atlantic region. One 38-year veteran of the utility industry told the New York Times this: “We’ve got the ‘storm of the century’ every year now.” At the height of this storm – while the power was out and the air conditioning wasn’t working – the East Coast experienced record high temperatures.

Down south, the Mississippi River is nearly dry in various places, with shipping barges operating in only 5 feet of water. Just Friday, barges were grounded because the water level was so low. And New Orleans’ water supply is now being threatened by salt water moving up the Mississippi due to extremely low water.

But while record drought has struck many parts of the United States, torrential rains have poured down in others. In June, the fourth tropical storm of the hurricane season – a season which typically begins in the fall – dropped 20 inches of rain on Florida.

And our nation’s infrastructure is literally falling apart because it wasn’t designed to withstand these conditions. Runways are melting, trapping planes. Train tracks are bending, derailing subways. Highways are cracking, buckling and breaking open. The water used to cool power plants – including nuclear power plants – has either run dry or reached dangerously high temperatures.

And that’s just in the United States – just through the month of July.

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by Jessica Goad, Daniel J. Weiss, and Richard W. Caperton

Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, and Utah—the “Four Corners” states plus their western neighbors—are home to some of the best renewable electricity potential in the country. These states have consistently sunny skies for solar power, wind-blown plains and deserts for turbines, and underground heat perfect for geothermal energy. They also have incredible potential for smaller-scale technologies like rooftop solar panels and energy efficiency improvements.

Our analysis shows these states can house clean energy projects that could realistically provide more than 34 gigawatts of solar, wind, and geothermal energy over the next two decades. This development could stimulate more than $137 billion in investment in the renewable energy sector, create more than 209,000 direct jobs, and provide electricity for 7 million homes. With supportive federal policies, these renewable electricity goals can be met and surpassed.

Already, the American West leads the way in construction of clean and renewable electricity projects on the ground, spurred forward by policies including state renewable electricity standards and government investments in clean technologies. A recent Bureau of Labor Statistics study reflects this success, determining that in 2010, “green goods and services” accounted for:

• 49,717 jobs in Arizona
• 338,445 jobs in California
• 72,452 jobs in Colorado
• 17,254 jobs in Nevada
• 21,267 jobs in New Mexico
• 27,948 jobs in Utah

This comes to 527,083 jobs altogether in these six states.

Such projects and employment reinforce westerners’ perspective that renewable energy is a key component of their states’ economic future. A poll this year by the Colorado College “State of the Rockies Project” found that two-thirds of voters polled said “increasing the use of renewable energy sources like wind and solar power will create new jobs” in their states.

And when it came to comparing fossil fuels and renewables, western voters were far more likely to encourage more wind and solar power over coal and oil. In response to the question “which one of the following sources of energy would you want to encourage the use of here in [your state]?”, respondents answered overwhelmingly in favor of clean energy. (see Figure 1)

The clean energy revolution in these western states is already under way, and federal lands offer significant opportunity for continued and increased investment in clean electricity. The West is home to hundreds of millions of acres of federally managed public lands, which are mostly under the purview of the Department of the Interior and the Forest Service. Lands open for energy development do not include millions of acres of national parks, national monuments, wilderness areas, and other places protected by law.

Much of the energy development on public lands occurs on areas managed by the Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Land Management. This agency oversees a large amount of the acreage in all six states: about 17 percent of Arizona, 15 percent of California, 12 percent of Colorado, 68 percent of Nevada, 17 percent of New Mexico, and 43 percent of Utah.

Taxpayer-owned lands are already a part of our country’s clean energy revolution. In fact, dozens of solar, wind, and geothermal projects sited on public lands are either currently providing electricity or have been permitted to do so and are ready to be built. A report from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory elaborated that:

With 5,200 MW of [renewable energy] authorized or approved [on Bureau of Land Management Land], and approximately 8,000 MW of additional 2011 and 2012 high priority projects, the BLM appears to be on track to meet the [Energy Policy Act of 2005] requirement of approving 10,000 MW of RE on public lands by 2012.

This is just the beginning, and many more installations could be responsibly sited and built in these states over the next 20 years, bringing economic development and job creation to the West. Additional policies are essential to turn these opportunities into reality.

To capture the full economic, energy, and public health benefits from this opportunity, the federal government should adopt four essential policies:

• A national clean energy standard of 80 percent by 2035, with 35 percent for renewables
• A clean resources standard for public lands and waters
• Renewable energy zones
• Comprehensive electricity transmission reforms to rehabilitate our aging system

Our report identifies the vast opportunities for renewable energy installations on public lands in the West, but this does not imply that we endorse their deployment on every acre. Some places are not appropriate for energy development, and instead should be managed for multiple uses including hunting, fishing, recreation, wildlife, and other such essential values. Read more

AP Photo/Julie Jacobson

In a call to arms this afternoon at the National Clean Energy Summit, Vice President Joe Biden made the case for continued investments in renewable energy, explaining that “we have to unleash” innovation in the sector to stay competitive and rise to the environmental and economic challenges of the day.

“If we don’t develop renewable energy, we will make the biggest mistake in this nation’s history,” he explained a crowd of over 700 policymakers, investors, students and other business professionals in Las Vegas.

He also criticized political opponents of clean energy investments who have fought to de-fund major R&D and deployment programs, explaining “the President and I are not going to listen to those voices.”

Biden did not lay out any new policy priorities in today’s speech. Instead, he used the platform to reiterate the Obama Administration’s support for investing in renewable electricity and fuels. In his January State of the Union Address, Obama called this period of history “our generation’s Sputnik moment,” and outlined a broad plan to get 80% of the nation’s energy from clean resources by 2035.

With the potential for significant reductions in long-term spending on certain energy programs, the Administration may find it difficult to make the investments needed to come close to achieving that goal. While Biden didn’t address those specific challenges, he did make it clear that that the White House was at least standing behind the goal rhetorically.

“I have one specific message. Our country has a choice. Are we going to rise to the challenges like our grandfathers and grandmothers did? Or are we going to be a follower?”

Budget negotiations this fall will be a true test.

To see the rest of today’s speeches and roundtables at NCES, you can watch the live streaming here.

In 2009, the world’s largest geothermal developer, Ormat, moved into the solar market – using its power plant construction expertise to build solar PV and CSP plants in Israel.

And in the last couple of years, a number of CSP developers have partnered with natural gas and coal operators to create hybrid solar/fossil plants in an effort to lower the installed cost of solar and make fossil generation more efficient.

It was only a matter of time before we saw the hybrid geothermal-solar plant.

A group of business and policy leaders were in Las Vegas at the National Clean Energy Summit this morning announcing the groundbreaking of the world’s first solar-geothermal power plant – a 24-MW facility that will combine 80,000 polycrystalline PV modules with traditional hydrothermal technology.

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Click Here to Watch Clean Energy Summit Webcast Starting 9 am PST

Reid, Chu and Biden Kick Off the Day, Climate Progress Will Have Exclusive Interterviews

Politico opens its Morning Energy briefing:

TODAY’S MAIN EVENT: The big happening in energy this week is the fourth annual Clean Energy Summit today in Las Vegas, where Vice President Joe Biden, Energy Secretary Steven Chu, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval, California Gov. Jerry Brown and Washington Gov. Chris Gregoire are headlining.

Senate majority leader Harry Reid released highlights from his opening remarks:

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White House green jobs advisor Van Jones is under attack from Fox News as an “avowed radical revolutionary communist” and from ABC News as a “truther” with a “history of incendiary and provocative remarks.” In an attempt to assassinate the character of Van Jones, the right-wing media are distorting his past political activism and cherry-picking Jones’s critiques of the pollution and injustice that still haunt this nation. However, Jones’s true record is one of turning away from anger and finding hope, abandoning division and seeking consensus.

Speaking at the National Clean Energy Summit 2.0 in Las Vegas this August, Van Jones argued that “for all of the battleground politics that’s going on,” energy policy should be “the one place that should be a safe harbor for all of us.” Van Jones praised the “bipartisanship” of Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis, who as a representative from Los Angeles succeeded in getting “the first president ever to sign into law a green jobs act, President George W. Bush.” He recognized that the summit participants came to find a “healing for our politics” in a “common ground agenda”:

Many of you have taken chances to start companies, you’ve written books, you’ve been grassroots champions for the change that we need. And I think you’re seeking not just a healing for our economy or a healing for our planet, but a healing for our politics. And I want to acknowledge that many of us are here because we are seeking something deeper. This is the common ground agenda. It should be the common ground agenda. We should be able to come together as a country on this one. Finally.

Watch it:

Jones then explained that “the values that underlie this clean energy conversation” are “the common ground values of America.” Underlying the call for clean energy is the value that “clean air is better than dirty air for the health of our children.” Underlying the call for energy efficiency is that value that treating our country’s resources “with wisdom and respect is more important than wasting them.” And “if we have the opportunity to fight both poverty and pollution by putting people to work in these new industries, we would be wise as a country to do that.”

To extended applause, Van Jones explained that the Obama administration has committed $5 billion to improving the energy efficiency of low-income households because the same investment “that cut unemployment and cut an energy bill and cuts greenhouse gases is also going to cut asthma, and take asthma inhalers out of little girls’ and boys’ pockets.”

Jones discussed in further detail how President Obama’s clean energy agenda tears down traditional ideological divides by “asking questions progressives like” but “giving answers that conservatives should like”:

We’re asking questions progressives like but we’re giving answers that conservatives should like. We’re asking questions about how to move the needle on poverty and pollution and how we create more economic opportunity especially for people in the lower part of our economy. But the answers are answers that conservatives should like. We’re not talking about expanding welfare, we’re talking about expanding work. We’re not talking about expanding entitlements, we’re talking about expanding enterprise and investments. We’re not talking about redistributing existing wealth, we’re talking about reinventing an existing sector, and creating new wealth by unleashing innovation and entrepeneurship. This should be common ground. We should be able to stand together and be one country on this.

Jones concluded by again making the call for us to “be one country” and connect “the people that most need work” to the “work that most needs to be done”:

There is so much work that needs to be done in this country to retrofit America, to cut these energy bills. And there are so many people who need work. This is our opportunity as a country — and it comes around very rarely — to take the people that most need work, and connect them to the work that most needs to be done, to fight pollution and poverty at the same time, and be one country. Let’s be one country.

During the applause at the conclusion of Jones’s speech, prominent Republican oil tycoon T. Boone Pickens — who in 2004 funded the Swift Boat attacks on Sen. John Kerry — turned to Jones and shook his hand.

Transcript: Read more