Feel-Good Government Grants Leading Cleantech Astray

Grants for smart grid projects.  Grants for battery manufacturing lines.  Loan guarantees for renewable energy project development.  Grants to private companies for energy efficiency projects.  And with each it seems that the cleantech world cheers.  Yet for all our desire to create sustainability in our consumption and use of energy, this model of getting us there is not only unsustainable but is of questionable value. 

I want to  emphasize that I am speaking about government grants to the private sector where the government is not the end customer and where the grants are for implementation of projects that businesses may (or may not) have done otherwise as opposed to grants to conduct basic R&D. Projects like smart grid implementations, battery manufacturing lines,  biofuels plants or  industrial energy efficiency implementations that have represented the bulk of cleantech grants to the private sector this year.  Instead of focusing on cultivating businesses that can sustain themselves via customers, government handouts have focused company time and money on lobbyists and grant writers.  And if you haven’t noticed, the handouts are huge, with many in the tens of millions and even hundreds of millions of dollars for a single award.  Some award winners, like ECOtality, are honest enough to admit that their efforts to secure government funding directly attributed to a drop in their revenues. For every company that wins a cleantech grant, there are as many as 10 times the companies that applied and lost.  All those losers spent significant time and money chasing those funds and, in the process, neglecting their real business and real customers.   Lately the discussion in board rooms often has concentrated more on how to win the next government grant and which lobbyist to hire than on how to build a successful and sustainable business. 

At the most basic level, the goal of current U.S. energy policy should be to speed our transition to sustainable domestic energy consumption – a transition that would occur naturally as carbon-based energy sources declined but likely too slowly to avoid the environmental, economic and national security implications.   Presumably, the concept behind hundreds of billions of dollars in grants to the private sector is to enable and encourage acceleration of this change.  As such, it also must presume that government employees can select winners better than the private sector, do so without political influence, and that the projects being funded are absolutely ones that would not have occurred without government funding.  Finally, those same government employees; 1) must be able to select projects that will help accomplish our goal and; 2) must either be able to continue to fund those projects or have effectively analyzed that a one-time grant will be sufficient to incentivize the private sector to take over from there. My Democratic friends may scream at me, but those are an awful lot of largely unrealistic presumptions that defy the history of government grant programs to the private sector. (Synfuels and the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s Advanced Technology Program are just two examples.)  And to add insult to injury, large amounts of the recent cleantech grants will help the competitiveness of foreign corporations as it was awarded to U.S. subsidiaries or joint ventures of those companies (for example, hundreds of millions in battery grants involving LG Chem, Kokam, Itochu Corporation, BASF and Saft).  While the government has long had a role in advancing basic R&D, the concept that the U.S. will jump-start, let alone build, a sustainable energy economy through  government handouts for implementation of manufacturing plants, production facilities or enhanced utility grids is, quite simply, ludicrous.

Government grants to the private sector are great PR and make the cleantech public feel good.  But they don’t provide quick economic stimulus to the economy (see Cleantech Stimulus Not Very Stimulating) and will not provide meaningful acceleration on the path to sustainable domestic energy consumption.  In the end, the only way to have sustainable change is to have a change in the fundamental economics of energy – both in the cost of non-sustainable sources and in the regulatory infrastructure through which carbon based energy companies and utilities earn money. We all saw how quickly things began to change when oil hit $100 a barrel and how quickly they reverted when prices went back down.  Reform the regulatory environment so that utilities can profit from conserving energy instead of from building power plants and watch how things change.   In my home state of Colorado, wind turbine manufacturer Vestas just announced it is furloughing all 500 workers at the plant it built not long ago.  Why?  Vestas notes the challenge of natural gas prices being so low that wind turbines can’t compete.  I guess we need to borrow more money from the Chinese and other foreign governments to further increase our grants to the wind turbine market…or, we can focus on a sustainable solution.