ArticleWe can't do economic stimulus around the 20th century ideas -- Bill Ritter, Governor, State of Colorado (3)
Colorado's Green Efforts
In mid November 2008, Bill Ritter led a trade delegation to China and Japan in order to promote renewable energy, bioscience and tourism. Although no significant deals were signed, the trip was a positive step towards winning investment from companies in the two countries.
B: The purpose of our trip is to encourage economic ties between the state of Colorado and Japan and China. We have, in Colorado, a very highly educated population. We are doing important work in both renewable energy research and also in biosciences, and so our hope is to encourage Japanese and Chinese companies to invest in Colorado to come there and be a part of the economy we’re creating that we think is very much a 21-century economy.
Q: What kind of projects are you bringing into China, what kind of partners are you looking for here?
B: One of the things we’ve done in both China and Japan is to sign memorandums of understanding for some shared research and exchange. We signed a memorandum of understanding with East China Normal University. It’s one of the high quality universities in the Shanghai area and our Colorado State University, we have already been participating in some shared science, and we wanted to formalize this relationship by signing a memorandum of understanding. That’s just in the academic field, so there’s what’s happening in the academic research. There are also things happening in the private sector. I had a meeting with a company that’s a Chinese company, and we’re hoping they come to Colorado and they invest in Colorado.
Q: What kind of company is it?
B: It is a company that actually manufactures thin film photovoltaic systems, but they manufacture the modules as well, and so they will probably continue to manufacture the film here in China, but the module can be manufactured, and is best manufactured closest to where they are going to install it. And so, it’s our hope that would be in Colorado. Colorado is a very sunny state. It is a windy state. It has a good geothermal. But maybe most importantly it has one of the best research and development quarters for renewable energy.
Q: Colorado is really a leading state in the United States in terms of the promotion, the use of renewable energy. Can you talk about that a little bit? And you are a strong promoter of using renewable energy as well.
B: I’m a strong promoter. I’m native of Colorado. I was born and raised there. And when I ran for governor, what I said is, I thought, we as a state should be a leader. We have some of the best scientists in the world working on renewable energy, and we had not done, I think, enough in utilizing our natural resources, the wind and the sun in combining it with the science to really create an economy. We began talking about a new energy economy in Colorado. And now even Barack Obama speaks about a new energy economy.
Q: What is really a new energy economy? Are we talking about job opportunities?
B: Many people believe that we should change the way we produce and consume energy because of climate change. And they are afraid of climate change and maybe rightly so. But we are talking about creating economic development. You can actually do job creation, because you, at the end of the day, have better opportunities, manufacturing opportunities, and production opportunities utilizing renewable energy. As soon as I became governor, we began really promoting this idea.
Q: How expensive is it to use these renewable energies?
B: Well, what we’ve found is that wind energy is getting very close to being the same price as coal, coal-fired energy. Interestingly, Barack Obama also says that he’s looking at a national cap-and-trade program. If you put a carbon tax on emitters or if you put in place a cap-and-trade program that really looks at emissions and cost out the externalities of emissions, then you’ll see coal will become more expensive then wind. I think the most important thing is, well, is that the price of solar is getting cheaper and cheaper as the technologies improve.
Q: How do you compare that price to coal price today?
B: That’s still 3 times what the price of coal is. But again, wind, we have plenty of wind in Colorado, wind is getting very much to parity. I think that there will be a day in the near future, maybe even 2015, where you’ll see parity between coal and solar, that the price of solar comes down because of the technology, the price of coal goes up because of the externalities involved in with both of that. Wind will be the cheapest, solar will be cheap. And also, we have in Colorado abundant natural gas. So if you take all of that together, you can actually put a portfolio of energy resources together that’s diverse, that can be cheap enough to remain certainly affordable for people who live at the margins.
Q: Are renewable energy businesses going to be impacted as the economic crises expanded to the real economy?
B: The renewable energy will be one of the healthiest sectors in America. In Colorado, we had seen job creation for 25 or 26 months in a row, so that was positive job creation. Our state was not in a recession.
Whether the grim US economy will be translated into an opportunity or a nightmare will depend a lot on how Obama is going to revive it. Regardless, the U.S economy has a lot to improve upon and the following year should prove as a test to their resilience.
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