“A chicken in every pot and a car in every garage,” promised President Herbert Hoover during his 1928 bid for the nation’s top office. He guaranteed prosperity for all Americans, not just those who were flying high on the stock market the year before the Great Depression.
In her bid for the presidency, Hillary Clinton has promised to put solar panels on every roof.
“One day as president, I will set two ambitious national goals that will test our capacities. First, I will ensure we hit a target of having more than a half-billion solar panels installed across the country by the end of my first term. We’ll set a 10-year goal of generating enough renewable energy to power every single home in America,” Clinton said.
Nearly a century after Hoover conjured the combustion engine as a metaphor for prosperity and security, the photovoltaic panel is poised to take its place. With climate change well underway and the threat of sea levels rising 12 feet in the next 50 years as the Western Antarctic ice sheet melts, solar and other renewables will take hold across the globe.
Hawaii is already among the national leaders in photovoltaic power. The lightning speed of growth in the number and size of companies during the past several years was stimulated by a combination of substantial federal and state credits plus two instruments for accelerated depreciation. The controversial and dramatic slowdown in clearing permits by Hawaiian Electric Co. has eased up, some believe to set a more favorable atmosphere for its proposed acquisition by NextEra Energy Inc.
Today there is unprecedented competition among investors to purchase new commercial solar systems with a standard 20-year power purchase agreement. Private investors are beginning to be overwhelmed by institutional investors and funds that package these annuities in what amounts to a faux bond market.
Yet the local economic theater in recent years is but a small, early blip of an industry in renewables that is just beginning to take off. Actionable, global consensus is building around the impact of fossil fuels that produce greenhouse gases and warm the planet, acidifying the oceans and melting ice at the poles. Hurricanes, floods, drought and searing temperatures are increasingly demonstrable, as is the associated human suffering.
President Barack Obama has now more definitively shown his hand on climate change. It is among his three or four signature issues during the final years of his final term, but Clinton has been most vocal: “A lot of these changes will pay for themselves. There will be front-end money needed, but there are ways of making those investments and getting a big return on those investments that will be to the benefit of the American taxpayer.” At the end of the day, the climate case will be understood, even by the most mercenary, like Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, as a business case.
In contrast, oil prices are dragging the bottom of an unprecedented low of recent years as the result of a mounting oversupply. This is the result of declining growth and waning confidence in China and its far-reaching ripple effects. It is also the result of the Saudis, who are dead set on continuing to pump, despite plummeting profits, in order to drown out competition and gain market share in the long term. The transient spikes in oil prices from the unrest in the Middle East will only steel global resolve to install financial structures that point the world away from oil and toward renewables.
There are potential instruments that can be brought to bear to give renewables the edge over fossil fuels: tax credits, accelerated depreciation, electric vehicle incentives, carbon taxes and paying at the pump, to name just a few.
Just as the information age transformed the way we think, work and relate and shaped the worldview of the millennial generation, so too will the brave new world where the electron edges out the hydrocarbon chain.
Ira “Kawika” Zunin, M.D., M.P.H., M.B.A., is a practicing physician. He is medical director of Manakai o Malama Integrative Healthcare Group and Rehabilitation Center and CEO of Global Advisory Services Inc. Please submit your questions to info@manakaiomalama.com.
