Better Red Than Dead, but Not Red Yet (on Solar Power)

In her New York Times Economix column Nancy Folbre recently said (“The Red Faces of the Solar Skeptics,” March 10, 2014):

If the faces of renewable energy critics are not red yet, they soon will be. For years, these critics — of solar photovoltaics in particular — have called renewable energy a boutique fantasy. A recent Wall Street Journal blog post continues the trend, asserting that solar subsidies take money from the poor to benefit the rich.

But solar-generated electricity is turning into a powerful environmental and economic success story. It’s also threatening the balance sheets of electric utility companies that continue to rely heavily on fossil fuels and nuclear energy.

I don’t count myself a renewable energy critic, but I do find myself as a critic of most renewable energy policies and so feel a bit like Folbre is addressing her points to me. In response I’ll say my face isn’t red yet, and I’m not expecting it to turn red anytime soon.

Folbre is a distinguished economist at the Univ. of Massachusetts, but she isn’t a specialist in environmental or energy economics, and I think her thinking here is a little muddled. (In this muddling through she has similarly distinguished company–consider this response to a Nobel prize winner.)

So a sample of my complaints: She trumpets the fast declining price of solar panels by picking a factoid out of a story in ComputerWorld: “declined an estimated 60 percent since the beginning of 2011!” ComputerWorld? Maybe the work of the U.S. Department of Energy or other more traditional information sources wasn’t sensational enough (claiming as it does, merely that “U.S. solar industry is more than 60 percent of the way to achieving cost-competitive utility-scale solar photovoltaic electricity”).

An investment company would have to acknowledge that cherry-picked past results are no guarantee of future performance, but it isn’t even clear that she is firm on the idea of “cost.” Folbre declares that generous subsidies and feed-in tariffs have “allowed solar photovoltaics to achieve vastly lower unit costs.” Really? Well maybe if we subsidize it a little harder, it will become free for everyone!

C’mon professor, get serious! Perhaps it is true that generous subsidies and feed-in tariffs have allowed owners of solar PV systems to experience lower out-of-pocket expenses, but it is a little embarrassing to see a distinguished economist make this mistake about costs. Should we conclude congressional junkets overseas don’t cost anything because the government foots the bill?

Not until the penultimate paragraph does Folbre get back on firm ground, talking about renewable energy policy rather than technology:

Subsidies are not the ideal public policy for promoting clean energy. As a recent analysis by the Carbon Tax Center points out, a carbon tax devised to protect low-income households from bearing a disproportionate share of higher energy prices would yield more efficient overall results, as well as encouraging solar power.

But in our subsidy-encrusted energy economy, some subsidies are better than others. As farmers say, make hay while the sun shines.

Yes, as any economist ought to say, “subsidies are not the ideal public policy for promoting clean energy.” In fact, it’s been said here a time or two.

[HT to Environmental Economics.]