The Experts: What Renewable Energy Source Has the Most Promise?

Kate Gordon: It Depends Where You Are This is one situation where the right answer really is "All of the above." Energy issues are inherently regional: Different parts of the country have different natural resources and energy needs. We see that in the oil-and-gas sector, with big new discoveries in North Dakota and California, but no major resources in the upper Midwest and Pacific Northwest, for example. Same goes for renewables: Some parts of the U.S. are windier than others, some are sunnier, some have better access to hydroelectricity or geothermal resources…. You get the point. But unlike traditional energy sources like oil, gas and coal, renewable energy can be "extracted" in every single state in the nation. In a paper I co-wrote last year for Next Generation and the Center for American Progress, we identified six distinct advanced energy regions in the U.S., each with its own unique strength in a particular form of clean energy. These regions have found competitive advantage in their ability to build on these strengths to innovate, manufacture, and deploy clean energy for their own residents, and for export to other regions. As for the time frame: Renewable energy is already a major energy source. Even here in the U.S., where we have yet to make a national policy commitment to renewable energy (and where fossil fuels are still heavily subsidized), we're still deploying enough to make these technologies cost-competitive. Wind energy, for example, is already the cheapest new source of electricity in many parts of the country, and in fact more megawatts of wind energy were installed in 2012 than any other kind of generation, including natural gas. Solar, too, is booming: Citigroup C +1.66% recently reported that rooftop solar has already reached residential "grid parity" in California. And just imagine how cheap these renewable technologies would become if we decided to charge the real social cost of burning fossil fuels, which would add between 14 and 35 cents per kilowatt-hour. We're beyond talking about the promise of renewable energy. It's a reality. It's time now to talk about how to make it a far bigger part of our nation's energy future. Kate Gordon (@katenrg) is vice president and director of the energy and climate program at Next Generation. She previously served as vice president for energy and environment at the Center for American Progress.

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Darrell McCutchen, Independent Associate
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