Is the Clinton Solar Initiative Too Aggressive?

On August 3, 2015, President Obama and EPA announced the Clean Power Plan – a historic and important step in reducing carbon pollution from power plants to make a positive impact on climate change.

The Clean Power Plan aims to reduce U.S. demand for fossil fuel energies, encouraging the consumption of renewable sources of energy and spurring the nascent green jobs market in the U.S.

Proponents of the plan hope that it would have a halo effect on green building efforts, such as Net Zero buildings, while demonstrating that the United States is committed to leading global efforts to address climate change.

Hillary Clinton, the would-be democratic presidential front-runner, unveiled her aggressive plan for “deep decarbonization by 2050” including installing enough solar energy to power every American home with renewable energy by 2027, or within roughly 10 years of her taking office.

The United States currently has approximately 21.3 gigawatts of solar capacity, or the equivalent energy production needed to support 4.3 million American homes from renewable, carbon-free sources.

Tom Steyer Backing

With her plan, Clinton is aiming to get us closer to the goal of having 50% of the United States’ power come from carbon-free sources by 2030.

This ambitious target is the aim of Tom Steyer, a billionaire climate change activist and leader of the NextGen Climate Action political action committee (PAC).

Mr. Steyer is calling on all presidential candidates, both Democrat and Republican, to openly commit to it.

In some ways, Mr. Steyer could be thought of as the “Anti-Koch Brother”.

He opposes the Keyston XL pipeline and some perspective on him can be gained in a very interesting TV interview with Gwen Ifill from PBS (below).

Steyer has openly announced that he is backing Hillary Clinton's run for the presidency. He believes that Clinton's plan could potentially create millions of jobs in the U.S. while simultaneously making positive progress toward addressing climate change.

Could the Clinton Solar Plan Backfire?

However, an article in MIT Technology Review suggests that achieving Clinton’s objectives could actually have the unintended consequence of reducing the incentive for additional renewable energy by flooding the market with inexpensive electric power.

In effect, the success of solar and other renewables could undercut the attractive economics of solar energy, when compared to conventional power plants.

This could reduce overall interest in investing in new solar power generation, therefore harming the solar industry and the growth of jobs.

However, this perspective ignores that we do not know what the economics for solar will be in 10-15 years.

As advances are made in new carbon-free renewable energy technologies such as lightweight, transparent solar stickers, and advances in abundant, cheap solar materials such as perovskites.

The U.S. has gained traction in creating a domestic solar industry of late. The Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) reports that Q1 2015 was the first time that 51% of new electric generating capacity came from solar.