Energy Goals a Moving Target for States

In hopes of slowing global warming and creating “green jobs,” Congress and the incoming administration may soon impose a mandate that the nation get 10 or 15 percent of its electricity from renewable sources within a few years.

Yet the experience of states that have adopted similar goals suggests that passing that requirement could be a lot easier than achieving it. The record so far is decidedly mixed: some states appear to be on track to meet energy targets, but others have fallen behind on the aggressive goals they set several years ago.

The state goals have contributed to rapid growth of wind turbines and solar power stations in some areas, notably the West, but that growth has come on a minuscule base. Nationwide, the hard numbers provide a sobering counterpoint to the green-energy enthusiasm sweeping Washington.

Al Gore is running advertisements claiming the nation could switch entirely to renewable power within a decade. But most experts do not see how. Even with the fast growth of recent years, less than 3 percent of the nation’s electricity is coming from renewable sources, excepting dams.

“I think we are really overselling how quick, how easy and how complete the transition can be,” said George Sterzinger, executive director of the Renewable Energy Policy Project, a Washington advocacy group.

More than half the states have adopted formal green-energy goals. In many states the policies, known as renewable portfolio standards, are too new to be evaluated. But so far the number of successes and failures is “sort of a 50-50 kind of affair,” said Ryan Wiser, a scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and co-author of a recent report on the targets.

Connecticut and Massachusetts have made their utilities pay for missing targets, and utilities in Arizona and Nevada are lagging. California and New York appear almost certain to miss deadlines that are looming in the next few years.

A few states have met their goals, or even exceeded them. One big success has been Texas, which has capitalized on a wind power boom and already exceeded its 2015 goal. The state gets 4.5 percent of its electricity from the turbines. New Mexico’s big utilities are at 6 percent renewable power, within striking distance of the state’s 10 percent goal by 2011.

The structure and aggressiveness of the targets varies widely among states — some have been able to meet their goals because they set relatively modest ones in the first place.

For instance, Maine set a goal of 30 percent renewable power by 2000 — an impressive-sounding target that was essentially meaningless because the state was already getting close to half its electricity from sources that counted against the goal, including dams. (A more recent law requires development of new renewables in Maine.)

In those states that set aggressive goals and have had trouble meeting them, a big hurdle has been building power lines that could transmit the electricity, Mr. Wiser said. Another has been the utilities’ inability to secure enough long-term contracts to buy renewable power.

While the country has no shortage of entrepreneurs hoping to build wind turbines and solar arrays, they have been slowed by problems like finding suitable sites, overcoming local political opposition and securing financing. In a few cases, including some in upstate New York, allegations have been made that the developers bribed officials to win approval of their projects.

Many energy experts embrace renewable power standards as a policy mechanism to promote green energy, but with a nationwide standard starting to seem likely once Barack Obama and the new Congress take power, these experts are ratcheting down expectations of what can be achieved in the near term.

In fact, as utilities seek to meet growing electricity demand, they still turn most often to fossil fuels, rather than the sun or wind.

In New England, the trend is to build more plants that run on natural gas and oil, not wind, said Gordon van Welie, chief executive of the entity that operates New England’s power grid.

Similarly in California, John White, executive director of the Center for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Technology in Sacramento, noted that since 2002, when state legislators passed a renewables requirement, the state has installed 16 times as much capacity from natural gas plants than from renewable energy.

CONTINUED : Reaching high, falling short

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