The event is entitled Gray Is the New Green: How Energy Recycling Curbs Both Global Warming and Power Costs. It will take place February 21 at 8:30am in San Diego.

The panelists include several renowned energy experts:

• Tom, who will discuss the economics of clean energy by comparing the costs of 14 clean energy options such as wind, solar, nuclear, and cogeneration. Casten will argue that improving “generation efficiency” has the greatest potential to benefit the economy while reducing greenhouse gas pollution.
• Lester Lave, professor at Carnegie Mellon University and co-director of the Carnegie Mellon Electricity Industry Center. He will report on the work of a committee on energy efficiency that he recently chaired for the National Academy of Sciences. Among other things, Lave will report that the U.S. could bring total energy use back to mid-1980s levels simply through energy efficiency.
• Marilyn Brown, professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology and former leader at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. She will discuss the many policy barriers to energy efficiency and present policy suggestions to help overcome these barriers. Her recommendations will be based on her own research and emphasize the imperative of serving current economic needs without blocking efficiency investments.
• Lawrence Ambs, professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and co-director of the Northeast Regional Combined Heat & Power Application Center. He will serve as the symposium’s discussant, or moderator.

Those who are familiar with RED’s work know the basic contours of Tom’s argument, which is this. The U.S. energy system is grossly inefficient. The typical power plant throws away two-thirds of its energy, largely in the form of waste heat, when producing electricity. This abysmal rate, while tragic, presents an opportunity: increasing the efficiency of our energy system would help enable us to stave off the catastrophic effects of climate change while increasing national income and improving the quality of life.

Tom has never before presented to the AAAS, so this is an exciting opportunity.

In the meantime, we have to start making big reductions in our greenhouse gas emissions so we can avoid the worst effects of catastrophic climate change. Energy efficiency, Melissa says—especially through technologies like combined heat and power (aka cogeneration)—is the best way to get here.

The nature of the magazine publishing this piece bears reflection. The Nation, the journalistic standard-bearer of American progressivism, is extolling the virtues of energy recycling about two weeks after Chief Executive, one of the country’s ultimate capitalist publications, has done the same. Two publications with very different views of the world are coming to similar conclusions on one issue, at least: that by generating energy more efficiently, we can fight global warming while bolstering the economy.

These two magazines aren’t the only unlikely pairs to point out the benefits of this work. The moderate-liberal New Republic has highlighted the potential of energy recycling, as has the business-friendly Forbes. So have the libertarian Lynne Kiesling and the environmental lion Al Gore. So, indeed, have apolitical science outlets ranging from Nature to Orion to American Scientist.

I recite this list not simply to advertise good writing about the issues near and dear to my heart, though there is that. My point is that energy recycling is an issue that could transcend our nation’s partisan divide and provide a path forward on finally tackling climate change. It’s not the only solution. But it’s a big one. It’s what makes the RED team get up in the morning. And I believe it’s an idea whose time has come.

In 2006, CHP produced more than 12 percent of total U.S. power generation. The report calls for high-deployment policies that would generate $234 billion in new investments and create nearly 1 million new highly-skilled, technical jobs throughout the U.S. In this scenario, more than 60 percent of the projected increase in CO2 emissions between now and 2030 would be avoided.

Read more about how CHP can help create jobs and decrease global warming.

1. 50% of U.S. power generation (in MWh) comes from coal, while only 20% comes from natural gas.
2. 32% of total U.S. power generation capacity (in MW) is coal-fired, while 42% is gas-fired.

When it runs, the natural gas fleet emits just 50% of the CO2 of the coal fleet, which raises a rather interesting question: what would we have to do to make it run harder? And how big a difference would that make in our national CO2 footprint?

MW vs. MWh

So why, if we have more natural gas generation capacity, do we get more of our power from coal?

Simple: we have a lot of gas-fired generation (449 GW, as of 2007), it doesn’t run very often. The coal fleet is comparatively smaller (336 GW), but runs a lot more frequently. It is as if our vehicle fleet were dominated by Priuses, but they stayed parked while we drove our Escalades to work.

We have a huge resource that is already built that could massively lower CO2 emissions. Taking a page from the NRA, what if the problem isn’t that we need to build more low-carbon generation, but that we just need to make better use of what we have?

Environmental potential

To understand the opportunity, let’s look at a bit of simple math.

In 2006, the gas fleet generated 816,441,000 MWh, or 20% of what it could have produced if it had run 24/7/365.

The coal fleet, by contrast, generated 1,990,551,000 MWh, or 68% of what it could have generated if it had run 24/7/365.

If we never built another gas-fired power plant, but simply increased the annual capacity factor of the gas fleet up to the coal fleet’s 68% capacity factor, it would generate an additional 1,845,485,000 MWh, effectively displacing 93% of our coal fleet without the construction of a single new power plant.

Looking at the comparative CO2-signatures of those two fleets, that would reduce total power sector CO2 emissions by 37%. Since the power sector is responsible for 42% of U.S. CO2 emissions, that implies a 16% reduction in total U.S. CO2 emissions, just from changing generator dispatch order.

That’s a massive opportunity. What would it take to get there?

Economic considerations

There is an obvious limitation to the Prius/Escalade analogy: it’s cheaper to drive a Prius per mile, but it’s more expensive to generate a MWh of power from a gas plant than a coal plant. That, after all, is why the gas fleet doesn’t run as often.

But historic dispatch choices were made in a world in which the costs of CO2 pollution were not monetized. So the real question becomes: how big a CO2 price would be required to change dispatch order?

Intriguingly, while the environmental potential is huge, the economic cost to realize that potential turns out to be quite small.

The great economic disadvantage of gas-fired generation relative to coal is that gas is more expensive per unit of energy. The great economic advantage of gas-fired generation relative to coal is that it is more fuel efficient: while the U.S. coal fleet has an average generation efficiency of about 27%, the gas fleet has an average efficiency of about 38%.

The gas fleet also tends to have much lower non-fuel operating costs (less $ for fuel handling, fewer moving parts, etc.). Taking these factors into consideration—and assuming $2.50/MMBtu coal vs. $6/MMBtu natural gas—the variable costs (e.g., exclusive of capital recovery) of a coal plant are about $18/MWh lower than a gas plant (1.8 cents/kWh). Obviously, that is very sensitive to fuel price assumptions, but this range is hardly unreasonable for current markets.

But remember, the gas fleet has a much lower CO2 signature than the coal fleet. On a fleet average basis, every MWh shifted from coal to gas reduces CO2 emissions by 0.56 tons. So if we look at a $18/MWh cost differential to achieve 0.56 tons/MWh of CO2 reduction, that implies a (18/.56) = $32/ton CO2 price would be sufficient to tip the scales. That’s not insignificant—but not implausible either. And—here’s the key point—massively less than what any reasonable person might think it would take to shutter most of the coal industry.

Finally, note that this doesn’t require a carbon price of $32/ton to happen; it simply requires a net change in the relative costs of coal and gas-fired generation equal to $32/ton. You could get there by giving the gas guys nothing and hitting the coal plants with a $32 fine, but you could also get there by giving the gas guys $10 and hitting the coal guys with a $22 fine. A functioning cap-and-trade with bilateral rights will allow some sort of transaction between those two parties and—without speculating on those specific rules—one can assert with confidence that a $32 delta between coal and gas does not need anyone to buy or sell carbon credits at a $32/ton price.

Practical constraints

To be sure, we’re never going to shut down 93% of the coal fleet just by running gas harder. There are parts of the grid (like West Virginia) so devoid of gas assets that there’s no way to maintain voltage stability if you rely on far-away gas. And of course, there is the supply and demand issue (booming gas demand + slumping coal demand is almost certainly incompatible with $6 gas and $2.50 coal).

On the other hand, the gas fleet is hardly capped out at 68% capacity factor. Moreover, if we started the switch, we’d start by running the most efficient gas plants harder and the least efficient coal plants less so the first 20% is much cheaper, per ton of CO2 reduction, than the last 20%.

Of course this isn’t a panacea. You can’t get to the end game only with gas any more than you can get to the end game only with solar. It’ll take a lot of steps. But what’s fascinating about this analysis is that the gas fleet is uniquely able to quickly and—at least initially—quite cheaply make a huge dent in our CO2 emissions. It’s a tool we ought to use, and we ought to examine our proposed CO2 regulations carefully to make sure it gets put to use. Free allowances to coal plants don’t get you there …

Note: This first appeared on Grist.

Carbon prices v. use of carbon proceeds

Let’s review the electric sector math. In 2006, the sector was responsible for some 2,784,805,000 tons of fossil fuel-derived CO2 emissions. If we had a carbon policy in place at that time charging $20/ton of emissions,  electricity generators would have had to pay some $56 billion in pollution fees. Which is a big number. But, as noted previously, that works out to about 1.4 cents/kWh. A small number.

But that math was sloppy, as it violated my own insistence that we not confuse taxes and wealth transfers. After all, $56 billion only works out to a 1.4 cent rate increase to the degree that (a) it all gets passed along to consumers and (b) the government uses that $56 billion for a great big Money Fire. After all, even if you have a deeply cynical view of government and presume that only 25% of all the money government spends goes to a useful purpose, you’d still have to conclude that the total “cost” to the rate payer from that policy is just 75% x 1.4 cents, or 1 cent/kWh.

Conversely, even if you have a really charitable view of government, you probably still don’t believe that every dollar government spends accrues to the benefit of tax payer. (Salaries for certain members of Congress come to mind. Or, on a larger scale, tax breaks for domestic oil production, certain pentagon line items, etc.) The point here isn’t to be political, but simply to note that if every dollar paid to pollute goes back to DC for redistribution, both sides of the aisle would probably agree that the electricity consumer realizes less than a dollar worth of offsetting benefit.

There are many ideas about how to fix this. Cap & dividend and/or payroll tax reductions are probably the most widely noted, but those both have their flaws as well—most notably in the way that they sever cause from effect. (What after all, is the logic for providing the same $ to individuals with wildly different carbon footprints if the fundamental purpose of that $ is to provide an economic signal to reduce carbon emissions?)

Same math, with output-based standards

My personal preference, as regular readers know, is output-based standards, in which an allowance is only provided up to some level of emissions per MWh (set to something < the current 0.68 ton/MWh average, so as to create an implicit cap) and anyone who emits above that level is required to procure credits from anyone below. No federal intermediary, and no dilution of impact. If you emit a ton, you have to pay a $/ton rate that is identical the revenue realized by those who are acting to lower the CO2 intensivity of the grid. Many more details in the hyperlink above, but here’s the point on the math:

If coal plants have to buy credits from nuclear plants (or any other high/low carbon combo you’d like), the net increase in cost to the coal plant is exactly matched by a net reduction in cost to the nuke. Societally, no change in overall power prices, unless two conditions are met:

• The allowance level is set below the current average (as it must be, to drive the overall emission down), and
• markets are totally static (e.g., there is no shift in generation patterns as a result of the new economic paradigm).

The first item is a necessity of good policy, and always true, but the second is an impossibility given human behavior. As a result, it is almost certainly true that a properly designed output-based system with full economic participation leads to no net change in energy costs. (It might even lower them.)

That said—and as I noted before—no one can accurately model a dynamic world. So let’s just look at the math in a static world, and assume we set an output-based allowance at 0.6 tons/MWh. We’ll again assume a $20/ton pollution price, but applied only to pollution above the allowance level (and paid to those below the allowance level, pro rata to their benefit).

First, the coal industry pays less. They emitted some 2.2 billion tons of CO2 in 2006, but—since they get an allowance for the first 0.6 tons—only have to pay for 1.06 billion tons worth of pollution. So instead of seeing a $23/MWh increase in their operating cost, they see a $11/MWh increase in their operating cost. In total, that’s a $21 billion payment they have to make. Not to the government though: to zero/low carbon sources, pro rata with their carbon benefit. In other words, that’s a $21 billion stimulus package to the clean energy sector, exactly offsetting the increase in power prices that would otherwise have to be passed onto rate payers and/or divvied up in DC.

For a zero carbon source, that works out to a net reduction in their operating costs of $12/MWh. And at an aggregate level (since we are assuming a static world), the overall impact to all US rate payers is an increase in power prices by just $1.72/MWh, or 0.2 cents/kWh.

The point here is not to suggest that output-based standards are a panacea to all the world’s woes (although it’s hard to argue for any non-political reason that they aren’t miles better than everything else on offer). Rather, it’s to point out that if we insist on carbon policy that transfers wealth from the dirty to the clean, we can create massive economic incentives to lower carbon without economic pain. Why shouldn’t we set that as a goal?

Note: This first appeared on Grist.

The recently approved stimulus package – aka, America Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) – offers several initiatives to advance combined-heat-and-power and waste-energy-recovery projects. Capturing and recycling energy certainly makes economic and environmental sense, but these new government incentives help reduce the initial capital costs, making now a great time to invest in clean energy. Here are just a few highlights of what ARRA will do:

• Creates a new grant program that provides “refundability” for the investment tax credit for combined heat and power (CHP) projects.
• Enables recycled energy developers to obtain direct loans through the Federal Financing Bank.
• Offers bonus depreciation for CHP, allowing 50% of the deprecation value to be taken in the first year.
• Allows businesses to use the CHP investment tax credit even if projects are financed with local development bonds or other subsidized energy financing.
• Allows biomass CHP developers to obtain a 30% investment tax credit instead of existing production tax credits.

Read a more detailed review of these provisions.

I recently interviewed a guy who explained his approach to long-term contracting to me as follows: “always structure your contracts to ensure that your counter-party makes money, and you’ll never have a bad contract negotiation.” It’s a great point, too often lost by those who are convinced that all negotiations are zero-sum games.

Lest one think that hard-nosed, selfish negotiating is limited to greedy financial types, I bring you this story from South Carolina, where a change in utility regulation to incentivize energy efficiency was blocked by environmentalists and consumer advocates on the grounds that it would give too much money to utilities. It seems to me that they have made a big mistake.

Regulated utilities have no incentive to invest in energy conservation or generation efficiency. Moreover, they have no incentive to encourage their customers to make investments that would save them money, since the standard guaranteed-return + cost-pass-through pricing model doesn’t let them keep the gain.

This doesn’t make utility managers bad guys; it just means that they are responding to a bad set of signals. If your parents give your big brother a cookie every time he punches you, your big brother is not entirely to blame for the welts on your arm.

Jim Rogers knows this, and proposed his Save-A-Watt program to give his company, Duke Energy, a financial incentive to encourage their customers to conserve. Consumer advocates and environmentalists opposed, broadly on the basis that we shouldn’t pay utilities to do things they’re supposed to do anyway. The South Carolina utility commission agreed:

… they objected specifically to the heart of the plan: Duke’s request to get a financial return for power plants it doesn’t have to build.

To be quite clear, Duke has many flaws. They like expensive coal plants. They’ve tried to do some things that look an awful lot like gaming carbon markets. And they are a card-carrying, dues-paying member of the BS-machine that is ACCCE.

But that doesn’t mean we can’t give them credit for trying to reform the rules, so that they can sever (however partially) the disconnect between the interests of their shareholders and their customers (not to mention the environment). It seems a shame to me that those efforts were blocked in the name of the environment and consumer.

Ultimately, this issue is much bigger than Save-a-Watt, Duke, and South Carolina. Our regulatory system desperately needs reform, and effective reform will necessarily create massive wealth transfers away from those who benefit from the status quo. It was ever thus, and is why vested interests are always so conservative. Those who seek reform therefore have four choices:

1. Give up. It’s simply too hard to change the status quo, they’re too powerful, so quit.
2. Bribe. Buy off enough people to get diluted reform passed. Pay some people to do the wrong thing, others do to the right thing and tell yourself that you’re net better off if it helps you sleep at night. (See: grandfathering, allocation of CO2 emissions permits.)
3. Get naive. Insist on intellectual purity, and pretend you’re politically strong enough to get it done on your own. You’re either with us or against us. Gonna get me some evil-doers. No more coal. Che Guevara kicks ass.
4. Change the rules so that everyone makes money from doing the right thing.

When it comes to carbon policy, most legislative bodies seem to favor option No. 2, in part because ideological purists on both sides of the aisle can’t find middle ground in option No. 3. But real, lasting reform inevitably comes out of that fourth approach, finding ways not to penalize those who benefited from the old status quo, but rather to give everyone an incentive in a better future. (Think Mandela.)

To be sure, the Save-A-Watt program doesn’t really deserve to be mentioned in the same breath with Nelson Mandela. But it is cut from the same cloth, fixing a lousy rule to give everyone a profit in a better future. And it seems awfully tragic that it was killed by ideologues whose success will come at the expense of the very interests they claim to represent.

Note: This first appeared on Grist.

Here are some thoughts on the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act recently unveiled by House leaders — specifically, the appropriation of Section 451 (aka “Subtitle E”) from the 2007 Energy Bill.

For obvious reasons, we’ve been following this bill very closely, which not only provides $10 per MWh to waste heat recovery and high-efficiency cogeneration projects, but it also provides a nice suite of carrots to induce the states to reform their paleolithic electricity regulatory laws. Often these laws have long been perhaps the biggest barrier to reducing the carbon footprint of U.S. electricity generation and distribution.

For less obvious reasons, it’s hard to get programs like this through the Congress. This is the result of some peculiarities of the way the federal government makes decisions to spend money:

1. Tax bills require one vote to enact (OK, technically three, since they have to be approved by both houses and then signed by the President, but it is a single vote on a single decision throughout). All other fiscal bills require two votes: the first authorizes the funding, and the second appropriates the money through the budget process. Since no vote is certain, this makes it much easier for regulators to get things done by tinkering with tax policy than through any other measure. In no small part, this is why the tax code is so full of complexity, loopholes, and social-engineering run amok. But I digress.
2. Any appropriation process must be “scored.” This is the process by which the Congressional Budget Office estimates the cost of the legislation to the Treasury for the purpose of figuring out whether we can afford it. That’s quite reasonable, but the nature of the process is such that it tends to ignore most of the upside because it does not readily differentiate between good and bad investments. (It is as if you made a decision to buy a stock based on the price per share without any consideration of whether it was likely to rise or sink in the future.) This becomes especially problematic when the economy sours, as the stimulative effects of investments are not readily quantified or evaluated precisely at the time when they are most needed.

Frustrating as this may be, the good news is that the limitations are well-understood by those inside the Beltway. Setting aside what the scoring rules say, here is what Section 451 will actually do for the U.S. economy … with lessons broadly applicable to investments in all flavors of enhanced resource efficiency.

Section 451 will stimulate private-sector lending.

In the current liquidity-constrained environment, manufacturers and clean-energy developers are finding it difficult, in some cases impossible, to secure debt against their investments, driven in no small part by lenders’ concerns about borrowers’ long-term solvency. This grant effectively provides $166 million per year of revenue from a triple-A credit offtaker (the federal government). Banks like that, which means that the individual investing in that power plant immediately can borrow more money from his bank than he otherwise would, even in the current environment. Based on current debt markets, this program will pull something on the order of $200-450 million of debt into the economy. Or, if you prefer, $0.40-0.90 of private sector stimulus for every $1.00 of federal stimulus. (Note that this cash will support hard assets generating clean energy, which are much healthier places for the U.S. to be investing its cash than dodgy financial instruments!)

Section 451 will install additional (and cleaner) U.S. electricity generation.

We are facing a train-wreck in the U.S. power system, caused by the fact that while electricity consumption has grown inexorably at 1-2 percent per year, we haven’t invested in the baseload generation needed to keep up. Outside of the Luddite community, setting aside the environmental consequences of certain types of generation, this is a really bad situation, which can lead to blackouts and economic crises if not addressed. Along came the economic crisis, which effectively accelerated the unraveling process by limiting people’s ability to obtain the capital necessary to build new generation.

By paying an incentive for power generation that is at a minimum twice as fuel efficient as the U.S. grid, Section 451 not only provides an added inducement for new generation, but also provides an inducement for clean generation. From an economic perspective, it only gets spent if the generation gets built, which creates some rather interesting economics:

• $500 million, spread over three years and paid out in $10 per MWh units, will bring onstream an additional 16.7 million MWh per year of clean generation. This implies an additional construction of 2,000-3,000 new MW of generation capacity.
• On average, these projects cost about $2,500 per kW to install. This means that our $500-million federal investment will bring about $6.25 billion of private sector investment in the U.S. economy. That’s a hell of a leverage ratio!
• One of the requirements of Section 451 is that these projects be economically viable, so we do not simply throw federal money after boondoggles. This is accomplished by requiring that any eligible project demonstrate a simple payback of no more than five years in order to qualify. In turn, it means that this $6.25 billion worth of private sector capital is generating at least $1.25 billion in annual cash for U.S. energy consumers.
• Here’s the neat part: Those $1.25 billion in annual cash flows are ultimately taxable. Clearly, not every beneficiary will be a taxpayer. Equally clearly, there will be tax offsets in the early years from depreciation and interest payments. But these investments are long-lasting, typically operating for 20 years or more, which means that the federal government will get its money back many, many times over from its initial $500 million investment.

Section 451 will create targeted green and gray jobs.

This bill provides highly targeted funding directly to those organizations who are investing in clean energy resources. Not only does it facilitate the installation of green power sources, but it also (a) provides employment to the manufacturers and installers of those technologies, and (b) provides additional income to those organizations who install these technologies from the innate savings (the five-year payback) and from the grant itself.

Unlike tax credits which on average only provide about 70 percent of the federal payment to the asset owner (with the balance going to the transaction fees common to tax equity markets), this revenue-driven grant provides 100 percent of the federal investment directly to those who are investing in clean technology.

The short summary: Section 451 is really good.

The takeaway lesson: so is any investment in U.S. energy efficiency, despite what the fiscal scoring process may say!

The bill still needs to be passed and signed into law, of course. But we’re close to something really good: This bill represents the beginnings of an economic policy that stimulates by reforming our energy sector.

Note: This first appeared on Grist.

There is a tendency to frame the politics of clean energy as a debate between the enlightened, forward thinkers on the coasts and the paleolithic, environment-hating coal barons in the Southeast and Midwest. It makes a good sound bite, but confuses the ends and the means. Yes, there are strong vested interests in the coal belt and the rust belt that consistently resist GHG caps and clean energy policy. But so long as we frame the clean energy conversation as a wealth transfer from dirty states to clean states, our success will remain contingent upon our ability to get senators, representatives, and voters in those states to act against their near-term economic self interest.

Three maps below clarify the problem, and suggest a solution.

The first map is from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory; it shows the potential for wind and solar energy across the country.

Figure one: U.S. wind and solar potential

Not surprisingly, wind and solar potential is heavily concentrated in the windy and sunny states of the Northwest and Southwest respectively. This means that any policy path which preferentially funnels resources towards wind and solar projects is a wealth transfer from east to west across the dotted line showed on this map.

This, in essence, explains the mathematical reality that has historically bedeviled every effort over the last decade to create a national Renewable Portfolio Standard: Any such bill has to be passed by the Senate. If we assume that all Senators vote with their economic interests, any clean energy policy needs to create economic benefit for at least 30 states in order to secure the 60 Senate votes needed to avoid a filibuster. A clean energy policy dominated by wind and solar cannot secure these votes. There will of course be state-level policies supporting these technologies, but — not surprisingly — the state’s appetite for renewable energy support maps fairly closely to the map above.

But if we want a national clean energy bill, the definition of clean energy has to be embiggened. Note also that this isn’t just limited to RPS. As long as conventional wisdom is that clean energy = wind+solar, conventional wisdom will keep a clean energy bill from getting through the Senate.

So how do we fix? As I’ve noted before, an RPS works a heck of a lot better if it frames its objectives in terms of goals rather than paths. But now I have maps.

Let’s first simply look at what happens if we include power generation from industrial waste heat recovery in our list of clean technologies. Not because the best way to fix path-based legislation is to add more paths, but rather because in a goal-driven legislative approach, these zero-emission technologies will also be incentivized.

Figure two: U.S. recycled energy potential

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All the sudden, we see huge potential in the rust belt and gulf coast — not surprisingly, in the areas where industrial sites are concentrated. These data are crude, but the figure serves as our current best guess at the national potential for recycled energy, based on data we’ve extracted from EPA databases and various Census reports on industrial distribution. This inclusion alone balances the wind/solar potential in the west, and almost certainly gets a couple Senators to shift their votes, solely out of economic self-interest.

Note that this also pulls a couple swing states into the clean energy camp, suggesting a way for Obama (or McCain, for that matter) to use an enlightened energy policy to pull Pa., Mich., Ohio and other critical electoral states closer to their camp.

Now let’s take one closer look and see what would happen if we really went to a goal-driven clean energy policy. Don’t stipulate technologies, but stipulate that the cleaner your technology is, the greater the incentive you get, whether through an RPS, an output-based standard, or any other technology-agnostic, goal-driven approach to clean energy policy. A big beneficiary of such an approach would be fueled combined heat and power plants which — while not up to the same zero-emission standard as renewables and waste-heat recovery — are still demonstrably cleaner than the grid power they displace. The third figure comes from colleagues at Energy and Environmental Analysis, who monitor the total installed and potential CHP capacity in the U.S. for the Department of Energy.

Figure three: U.S. CHP potential

Again, we see a bias toward the Eastern states for the same reasons of industrial concentration. However, we also see net gains in the Carolinas and upper Midwest, where there are thermally-intensive industries (grain processing, sugar mills, etc.) that are good sites for combined heat and power, but do not produce as much recoverable waste energy like that found in the chemical, steel, and “rustier” industries seen in Figure Two.

This suggests a way forward for clean energy policy. Focus on goals rather than paths. But articulate those technologies that will benefit from a goal-driven approach, so that senators, representatives, and voters in Pa., La., Ohio and other Southeastern/Midwestern states recognize that such a bill is no less in their economic self-interest than it is for those in the West. Make it economically irresponsible for senators not to vote in support of clean energy, regardless of what they think about the environment, science, or moral obligations to future generations.

Note: This first appeared on Grist.