Green Wombat

I wrote this story for Grist, where it first appeared.

The people want to topple the petro-energy regime.

Former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on Tuesday all but called for a Tunisian-style revolution to overturn the United States’ old energy order.

“It is breathtaking to see: people by the hundreds of thousands who want change … who want to throw off the old order and subvert the status quo. It is fascinating to me how rapidly the debate in the Middle East shifted from — could the people rise up to could the rulers hang on?” Scharzenegger said at the United States Department of Energy’s ARPA-E Energy Innovation Summit in National Harbor, Md., according to his prepared remarks. “And then when the demonstrations reached a critical mass, the old structures gave way. They could not stand up to the momentum of the future.”

“All of which brings me to you here today,” the governator continued. “What you in this room also are saying by the work that you do is: We want to subvert the status quo. We want change. Innovation. We want to overturn the old energy order.”

Schwarzenegger, of course, made climate change and green energy cornerstones of his administration. But in his speech Tuesday before policymakers and politicians gathered at the ARPA-E (Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy) he offered a full-throated call to move beyond the tired climate change debate and get on with the job of building a renewable energy economy.

Echoing the themes of last year’s successful campaign to crush Proposition 23, a ballot measure that would have derailed California’s landmark global warming law, Schwarzenegger linked green technology to the creation of jobs, a healthier environment, and international competitiveness.

“We have about 100,000 premature deaths in the U.S. each year from petroleum-related air pollution, and we have 6.5 million annual hospital visits by people with respiratory illnesses caused by the same thing,” Schwarzenegger said. “These deaths are far greater in number than the combined deaths from car accidents, drunk drivers, gang wars, suicides or Iraq and Afghanistan.”

“The suffering and expense of these petro-deaths needs to be recognized,” he added. “Think what it means when in the Central Valley of California one in six children use an inhaler. People need to think about that.”

Schwarzenegger also repeated warnings that other countries threaten to leave the U.S. in the coal dust.

“China has made the decision, backed by billions of dollars, that green is where the economic action is going to be. China is an ancient culture with new ideas,” he added. “We cannot let America be a young culture with old ideas.”

As is his wont, the former governor recalled his bodybuilding days to compare the negative perception of the sport in its early days to views of alternative energy today.

“We needed to change bodybuilding’s whole perception, so it wouldn’t simply be equated with men in skimpy bathing suits,” said Schwarzenegger.  “We began using different names — pumping up, working out, fitness training, weight resistance training. We started talking about health benefits and how it improves your performance in sports and how it keeps you younger.

“And now weight training has become an integral part of millions of people’s lives,” he continued. “Today totally normal people talk about their abs and their pecs. Today, in the same way, we are stuck on global climate change.  Let’s face it … if we haven’t convinced the skeptics by now, we aren’t going to. So, unless the North Pole breaks off this spring and floats up onto the north shore of Long Island, let’s move past the old arguments.”

I wrote this story for Grist, where it first appeared.

Another Silicon Valley startup is planting a tree in Portlandia’s solar forest, thanks to a United States Department of Energy loan guarantee.

SoloPower, a San Jose, Calif., company that makes thin-film photovoltaic models, on Thursday snagged a $197 million federal loan guarantee to build a factory in Wilson, Ore., about 25 miles southwest of Portland.

The startup is the second Silicon Valley thin-film solar startup to make the move north over the past year. Last July, San Jose’s Solexant announced it would build a factory in Gresham east of Portland to make photovoltaic modules based on its nanocrystal technology.

Germany’s SolarWorld started blazing the Oregon solar trail in 2008 when it built the United States’ largest photovoltaic factory in Hillsboro, retooling an old semiconductor plant to make solar modules.

SoloPower will also revamp an existing industrial facility to install assembly lines. When completed, they’ll  that will have the capacity to produce 400 megawatts of photovoltaic modules a year.

“The project in Wilsonville will hire hundreds of highly skilled, highly paid Oregonians to manufacture the latest in renewable energy technology”, Sen. Ron Wyden, (D-Ore.), said in a statement. “Oregon is already an epicenter for renewable energy projects.”

SoloPower is the latest Silicon Valley thin-film solar company to export manufacturing to Oregon. But the deal is most notable for the Obama administration’s gamble on a cutting-edge solar technology, one that faces challenges from Chinese competitors that have driven down the once-high cost of conventional solar modules.

While standard crystalline solar cells are made from silicon wafers, thin-film solar cells are essentially printed on flexible metal or other materials. Although such technology is less efficient at converting sunlight into electricity than crystalline silicon cells made by companies like SolarWorld, thin-film solar’s great promise is that solar cells can be made cheaper, which will lower the cost of photovoltaic power.

But the rapid expansion of low-cost manufacturers and the resulting steep plunge in photovoltaic module prices has forced Silicon Valley thin-film manufacturers to innovate faster and revamp their strategies. In November, for instance, Solyndra, which scored a $535 million federal loan guarantee to build a thin-film solar factory in Fremont, Calif., announced it would shut down an older plant and delay expansion of a new facility in an effort to lower its costs to compete against of Chinese manufacturers.

Still, the Department of Energy in December granted a $400 million to Colorado’s Abound Solar to expand production in its home state and in Indiana of an older thin-film technology called cadmium telluride.

“Investments like these are going to help America become a world leader again in clean energy manufacturing,” Energy Secretary Steven Chu said in a statement.

Now let’s see how many of those solar panels end up on Oregon roofs