Q and A: The Clean-Energy Czar – Last week the World Bank announced that it had appointed Daniel M. Kammen, an energy policy expert who heads up the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, as the organization’s first clean-energy czar. We spoke with Mr. Kammen about his new mission, which will involve leading the bank’s efforts to boost renewable energy production and improve energy efficiency in developing countries.
Daniel Kammen
Q – You’ve been a crucial player in shaping climate change and energy policy in California and on the national level. How will this experience translate to the work you will do for the World Bank, where your focus will be on developing economies?
A – My laboratory and personal experience has actually been equally divided between work in the U.S. and research programs in Central America, East Africa and China, where the emerging energy economy is growing faster than it is in the U.S. So I’m hoping that, while the different technologies are often useful in poor and more rural communities, the balance of experience I’ve got in both locations will actually really assist things at the World Bank.
Q – Part of your role will be to come up with an energy strategy that addresses everything from pollution from primitive cooking stoves in rural villages to industrial pollution in China. Where do you start?
A. I think the energy economy has become so complicated that you really start with the whole package. There are individual rich and poor nations around the world that have everything in common: advanced smart grids, the highest-tech solar, wind and nuclear power plants, the use of traditional biofuels. So I think that doing this job anywhere, not just at the World Bank, really involves embracing all ends of that spectrum.
So what I’m hoping, again, is that my work on everything from rural cookstoves in East Africa and Ethiopia, to advanced smart grid technologies, will all come into play and that I won’t forget one because of the other. And in fact I’m very confident that my colleagues at the World Bank are going to ensure that we don’t forget those things because there’s just such a diversity of needs and also of interests.
Q – More than 1.5 billion people live without access to electricity and, as you’ve noted in your research, another billion have energy services that are either sporadic or cost-prohibitive. How do you improve energy access for the rural poor – and economic and educational opportunities – without a substantial increase in carbon emissions?
A. Thankfully we know a lot about rural mini-grids and ways to build infrastructure that utilizes existing sawmills, power plants, local gas turbines, wind farms. All of those things are really the cornerstones of sustainable energy systems at the rural and the distributed scale. So I do think we have a wide range of technologies ready to go. We’re not as far advanced on the policy side. We certainly have those tools available, and so part of what I want to do is to really integrate the lessons across hardware, software, financing and human capacity-building/knowledge-building into a strategy.
Q. What are some of the hurdles on the policy side?
A. The biggest hurdle is we still don’t value financially the environmental and social damage we’re doing with our current fossil-fuel economy. The economist’s term for that is “the externalities” – the things we’re not including in our calculus. Everything from the negative impacts of floods, sea-level rise, drought. I would like to think that at a place like the World Bank, which is focused on the bottom line, we have a natural advantage in terms of putting a price on many of these social and environmental damages. And, after all, if a banker can’t focus on the bottom line, who can?
Q. That was my next question. Why hasn’t the World Bank yet assigned a monetary value to those things?
A. The world economists don’t put a value on all of those social and environmental goods, partially because they’re hard to quantify, but also partially because our economy is fixated on one metric, which is money. But as we get closer to humans dominating the planet, if we’re not there already, we need to put a value on the quality of our energy systems, the ability to preserve nature, to preserve the oceans and the rivers.
So I strongly believe that the World Bank, which is a bank first and foremost, is the right place to build that next economy. I sort of liken this to the invention of money. We now need to beyond our single currency value to one where the social and environmental parts of the story are equally represented. That’s the next challenge.
Q. One of the chief criticisms of the World Bank is that, even as it has increased funding for renewable energy and energy efficiency projects in developing countries to $3.3 billion annually, it continues to provide significant funding for carbon-intensive projects like coal-fired power plants. Do you see a need for the bank to maintain financing for those projects?
A. This is really at the heart of the tension between traditional development — meaning more energy, more access, irrespective of environmental damage — and the emerging environmental mandate that we’ve got to cut our greenhouse gas emissions so dramatically. So you get cases like the very controversial $3.5 billion investment in coal in South Africa, and at the same time, how to build the emerging economies around solar, biofuels, wind, etc.
There is no “either or” answer here. It’s got to be a combination. My hope is by doing better more improved assessment of technology – analysis of how much we impact rural and urban communities – and increasing understanding of how much we are hurting ourselves by damaging the planet, that we can actually come up with a portfolio that isn’t a black-and-white overnight step: we were a coal and fossil economy and now we’re suddenly renewables. An evolution from one to the other, just as fast as we can technologically and economically, but that respects nature in a way that we haven’t done yet — so that over the next several decades we’ve completed this huge switch in our energy economy.
That’s really my goal, to set up the framework so that transition can happen as quickly as possible, but not so quickly that we bankrupt ourselves in the very very short term.
Q. Is there any place that’s doing that right now, even on a small scale?
A. We have Japan and California and Costa Rica and several Scandinavian nations and Portugal, all transitioning their economies to more and more renewables. The problem, of course, is that as quickly as these few leaders do these experiments, we are growing the fossil-fuel economy even more quickly. So really it behooves us to do everything we can so that the largest economies on earth can make this transition, and that process has been maddeningly slow.
Q. Can you tick off some specific clean-energy projects that you’d like to see the World Bank finance?
A. We’ve got a lot emerging right now. There are large-scale wind farms going in. We’re seeing in Inner Mongolia and China whole communities’ being refocused around a combination of wind and solar power. We’ve seen large-scale use of distributed energy in parts of East Africa. Kenya, for example, has more solar installed per capita than any other country. That’s a remarkable thing for a poor nation. It’s not total megawatts that are installed, it’s solar per capita.
So I would like to see a diverse portfolio of clean-energy technologies emerging, not a focus on one or two. I really do think we need technologies that fit lots and lots of different local situations, and we need diverse sets of case studies.
http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/09/14/no-either-or-the-clean-energy-czar/
