Federal Election poses huge opportunity for sustainability

With the federal election just a few days away, world oil prices dropping dramtically, and only short term incentives in place to foster an environment for future expansion of wind and solar power, it is imperative that the short term economic drive is to increase both production of infrastructure, but incentives to include non-firm power in to established grids are increased long term.

It will be all too easy to go back to driving the gas guzzler cars we already own, and to build more coal fired generators if our legislators don't stop and take a hard look. The US ( and world ) , for that matter need the manufacturing jobs and the whole world needs start reducing our carbon footprint.

The Feds could produce model legislation to give state, and local communities guidelines and incentives to work with local and regional utilities to provide greater incentives to invest long term capital into the infrastruture right now. Our Federal government may well be faced with a WPA type of environment very soon. What better way to employ the unemployed than to put them to work on energy self-sufficiency.

The next step is to be able to affordably allow each individual to install wind and solar power generation on their own homes to offset their on the grid consumption. A huge part of the success of this program will to create local net metering laws that force the utilities to re-purchase all of the excess power generated , even by small producers, so that the focus on central, huge power generation stations is off-set to a larger degree with a distributed generation system all connected to the same grid.

Living in Hawaii, on any given day, at any location in the islands, the sun is shining and the tradewinds are blowing. That is a lot of juice going to waste !

In Hawaii, we need to push our legislators this year to extend the solar credit for individual homeowners, not just new construction. We need to push Hawaii Electric to modify their tariff to allow the individual producers to recover some of their investment for excess production and allow a greater avoided cost payback and to actually become a net producer to the grid with the right to make a little money.

Take a look at what my friend Michaelangelo Leone is doing with wind for individual homeowners and businesses at http://www.hiwindpower.com/

Tracy Stice Tracy@SellDirt.com Maui's Sustainable Real Estate Broker