Fortunes wax and wane in the renewable energy sector

Various : As the global recession deepens, and the price of oil remains around $40 per barrel compared with $150 per barrel last summer, the renewable energy sector is in crisis as it awaits the impact of the Obama administration’s stimulus bill and the 2010 budget , which has yet to pass Congress. Both bills include heavy investment in or subsidies to the renewable energy sector. However, as Reuters reporter Ayesha Rascoe has discovered , although the US solar energy industry expanded in 2008 by more than 1200 MW (9%), the housing crisis has led to a 3 % decline in solar pool heating systems , the main-stay of the consumer solar market. Despite tax credits worth 30% of the cost of installing solar equipment in a home, the collapse of the credit market and falling house prices means that consumers can’t afford the $10,000 –$75,000 it costs to install such a system. Shell Oil , which has invested a considerable number of resources into wind, solar, and hydro power technologies announced on Tuesday that it was pulling out of these sectors because they are not economic. Instead it plans to invest in biofuels, says the Guardian’s Tim Webb . Shell, already the world’s largest buyer and blender of crop-based biofuels, would use the extra resources to invest in developing a new generation of biofuels that are less harmful to the environment, and in carbon capture andsequestration technologies to make energy-intensive projects such as extracting oil from the oil sands in Canada more environmentally friendly (see this month’s Physics Today ). Biofuels are seen as one way oil-resource-poor countries can become energy producers. NPR Marketplace reporter Gretchen Wilson looks at some of the local skepticism in Africa that biofuel investment could improve their lives.It is not all doom and gloom for the renewable energy sector. California utility PG&E is still committed to investing heavily in two competing forms of solar energy: photovoltaic and concentrating solar power (CSP) systems. CNet’s Martin LaMonica writes that the utility is still committed to “a five-year program to install 500 megawatts worth of solar power in California, one of the biggest programs in the country.” The state has mandates that require utilities to get 20% of their electricity from renewable sources by 2010, which could be increased to 33% by 2020. Related Link Physics in the oil sands of Alberta