Advanced Energy Perspectives

In his State of the Union Address on Tuesday, President Barack Obama said, “the all-of-the-above energy strategy I announced a few years ago is working” and asked Congress to “continue that progress with a smarter tax policy.” Meanwhile, AEE delivered a letter signed by 60 advanced energy business leaders from across the country calling for Congress to extend critical tax credits that expired January 1.

In 2008, Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick signed the Green Communities Act, a comprehensive energy reform law. Six years later, Massachusetts has enjoyed the fruits of that leadership, being cited three years in a row as the top-rated state in the country for energy efficiency by the American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy.

At the end of December, the Patrick administration delivered another energy-policy tour de force.  The Department of Public Utilities (DPU) – the Commonwealth’s public utility commission – issued a sweeping order to modernize the utility system. The impact of that order in changing the way electricity is distributed and the way investments in the power grid are authorized may ultimately be as great as the Green Communities Act itself. 

The big advanced energy news this week broke early: on Monday morning Google announced plans to acquire Nest Labs for $3.2 billion. The most famous product from Nest Labs is the Nest Thermostat, which allowed a home’s “learning” HVAC control system to be remotely controlled and networked with smoke and carbon monoxide alarms.

Katie Fehrenbacher, writing in GigaOM, noted some of the “winners and losers” from the deal. Winners include Nest investors (who saw significant returns on their investments), advanced energy investors overall, and the home energy management market, “which just hit the big time.” Losers included Apple (from which Nest execs were drawn), traditional thermostat makers, and privacy advocates, who wonder where all that home energy data is going. Fehrenbacher specifically noted the irony in one of Apple’s iPhone designers getting snatched up by Google, “Apple’s arch rival.”

As 2014 kicks off, federal lawmakers are putting their stakes in the ground around both advanced energy tax credits and the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) work to rein in greenhouse gas emissions from the power sector.

In a blog published by The Hill, AEE’s Malcolm Woolf called for a retroactive extension of tax credits that expired at the end of 2013. AEE’s partner organization in Illinois, Clean Energy Trust, also penned a letter to the editor of the Chicago Tribune countering that paper’s attack on the PTC. While the outlook for credits remains uncertain, some analysts believe a bill in March to extend the debt ceiling could be the legislative vehicle for their revival.

This piece was originally published in Energy Biz Magazine's print edition.

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