Commentary

Al Gore, in his recent New York Times op-ed titled "The Climate for Change," calls for a "$400 billion investment over ten years to construct a national smart grid to distribute renewable energy." Echelon supports these proposed investments. We also believe the answer is not just in constructing something new but in transforming the existing […]

President Obama’s recent comments to the Business Roundtable included two blunders that showed his misunderstanding of the fundamentals of the cap-and-trade approach to reducing carbon emissions that is the centerpiece of his 2010 budget request.

Can clean energy investments carry their important share of the U.S. Recovery and Reinvestment Act load? Here’s a contrarian answer: It’s up to the utility industry and its regulators.

The Obama administration’s energy secretary, Dr. Steven Chu, has quickly become Dr. Who. As a recent New York Times article noted, Chu has repeatedly stumbled politically, demonstrating that being a Nobelist in physics is no qualification for the bumps-and-grinds of energy politics in Washington.

For decades, it’s been well-known in the country and western (C&W) music industry that "if you’re gonna play in Texas, you gotta have a fiddle in the band." The guitars, drums, harmonicas, and piano — they’re all expected on stage. But as the legendary C&W group Alabama recognized, a fiddle is a must when performing […]

As the Obama administration takes office, energy resource allocation is both the most critical national security issue and the most critical economic issue facing us. It will be difficult to sustain and improve economic growth unless we implement policies that result in the more rational use of energy resources, especially those for which there is a finite supply.

The new U.S. president will have a new set of priorities and regulatory policies that will affect the production and generation of electricity. The specifics of the new administration’s energy policy priorities were scant when this article was written, pre-inauguration, but the industry’s challenges are fairly well defined.

By Roger Feldman
Public-private partnerships are a key to preventing a chill from settling over the green ambitions of the newly capital-strapped state and municipal public sectors.

Dr. Robert Peltier, PE
One of the key campaign promises made by our new president was that his administration would create five million new “green” jobs by spending $150 billion dollars over the next 10 years. There are serious and substantial reasons that this level of job creation won’t happen in the near future.

By Kennedy Maize
Congress will make a big mistake if it provides money for accelerated wind power development as part of the Obama administration’s new economic stimulus program, according to veteran energy analyst Glenn Schleede. Instead, he says in a recent privately-published paper, “Investment in energy efficient light bulbs would save more than five times as much electricity in five years as an equal dollar investment in wind turbine would produce in 20 years.”