We’ve had eight Presidents since Richard Nixon promoting energy independence, and 19 congresses have supported each president’s intentions to achieve energy independence, said Hofmeister (The Daily Show made the same argument in this hilarious clip). But we are more dependent on foreign sourced energy now then when we started this conversation in 1973 on the heels of the first oil embargo, he said. While we have 2-year and 4-year mental models for how public policy should be organized and presented, the reality is that “energy extends over decades. It’s a critical problem,” said Hofmeister.

For example, just look at the recent decision of solar manufacturer Evergreen Solar to move its manufacturing to China, pointed out Hofmeister. Evergreen had been building a tax payer-subsidized manufacturing plant in Massachusetts, with an allocated $58 million aid package, until it decided to move its plant plans to China because of cheaper labor costs. The state reportedly invested $31 million directly in Evergreen and hopes to ‘clawback’ about $13 million of that, reports the Boston Herald. Hofmeister said that the U.S.’s short term policy led to Evergreen leaving for China because China’s policies are “more predictable, more understood and more supported.”

The U.S. needs a long term plan that looks at the short, medium and long term, said Hofmeister, and if it’s not it’s just “wishing into the wind.” And actually Hofmeister does have a suggestion for a solution for a long term plan that he thinks will help with the U.S. 2 and 4-year political cycles. Hofmeister wants the creation of an Energy Resources Board, that would be an independent regulatory commission and would set the parameters of the energy supply system over the next 50 years.

In terms of the stimulus package, Hofmeister said the $80 billion for green energy was “brilliant, and execution was good,” but that for the world’s largest economy with the oldest energy infrastructure, that’s a “frittering number,” which is “directional,” but “not material.”

However we solve the problem, Hofemister pointed out that we need to remember the sheer economics and volumes of the dependence on fossil fuels in the U.S.:

• The U.S. consumes 20 million barrels of crude oil to get through the day.
• That’s the consumption of 10,000 gallons of oil a second to get through the day.
• The U.S. uses 60 million cubic feet of natural gas per day.
• If we stack the cubic feet of natural gas on top of each other we’d go to the moon and back 25 times every day.
• We use 1200 train car loads of coal every hour.
• That’s one train car load of coal every three seconds, producing 49 percent of our electrons every day.

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Well, now that we’ve entered into 2011, oil prices have shot back up, and are hovering once again around $100 a barrel, at their highest level in two years. The oft-cited oil benchmarks the West Texas Intermediate and Brent have yet to hit $100, but some of the more under the radar crudes are already trading above $100, points out the Financial Times. Other indicators are that hedge funds have raised bets on rising oil prices.

While oil prices are infamously volatile — by the end of 2008 oil prices had dropped back down to $37 a barrel — it will be important to see if average oil prices remain above, or around $100, in 2011. In 2008, average annual oil prices were at $99.7 a barrel. Oil prices could easily drop back down in the next few weeks or months.

The oil price prediction game looks a lot like drunken darts: it’s often all over the board, with numerous reasons and explanations (Ford Chairman Bill Ford made that analogy at a conference in 2009). In terms of the economy, high oil prices make consumers nervous, and spend less. Nobua Tanaka, president of the International Energy Agency, has already called the current high oil prices of 2011 “alarming.”

But high oil prices will actually be rather good for the green car sector. All-EV companies like Tesla, and Coda will feel a boost from high oil prices, and big automakers that have been aggressive on EVs and hybrids, like Nissan, GM, and Toyota, could reap rewards as well.

Even automakers that have a solidly mixed car portfolio, like Ford, will benefit from less volatility in oil prices. As Ford Chairman Bill Ford put it in a speech in 2009, he actually endorses a gas tax, to keep prices at a certain level. “If prices are gyrating wildly,” it becomes extremely difficult to know whether the company is planning the right vehicle or technology.

Oil prices seem to be headed upward over the long term. As Department of Energy Chief Steven Chu has put it: “I don’t know what it [oil prices] will do next year or in the next two years,” Chu said, but “the price of oil will go up in 10 or 20 years.” Chu says high oil prices and living in a “carbon constrained world,” means we should take a cue from Wayne Gretzky in terms of low carbon infrastructure: “skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it’s been.”

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That global slowed fertility rate is due to a variety of things. One of them is China’s one-child per person mandate. Another is planned parenting, education, and economic growth efforts under way in India, the country that is set to exceed China’s population by 2030.

At that replacement fertility rate, the world will reach a 9 billion population by 2045, which will deliver a world population density that will be a little more than half of that of France today, notes National Geographic. In theory, that doesn’t sound too bad. The current world population could actually fit inside Texas … if Texas had the same population density as New York City.

So we clearly have the space. The biggest problem associated with the coming population growth is that by 2030, 1 billion people in the developing world will join the world’s middle class, up from 400 million in 2005, notes the article. Those people in the middle class will naturally consume energy, food, water and other resources at a much higher rate than the rest of the developing world, and closer to that of Americans, Canadians, and Europeans.

The key to global sustainability of this population growth will be figuring out resource management and city planning. As all you greentech entrepreneurs and investors know, delivering resource management is really what is at the heart of the industry’s innovations and technology.

The coming massive energy consumption boom from this middle class will, in particular, be the sticking point, and the biggest opportunity, for energy efficiency and clean power-focused entrepreneurs. A substantial jump in the daily energy consumption of so many people could push us over a tipping point in terms of climate change.

Todd Woody predicts that early stage energy efficiency plays will be big in 2011. Greentech investors seem to have taken some big risks — and failed to generate substantial returns in the near term — in terms of clean power over the past few years. But energy efficiency can be low-capital-intensive (software, behavior change, wireless networks) and is widely available now.

Water technology — from desalination to water metering — will also be a big opportunity for sustainably managing this population growth, as will food and agriculture-base technologies, like biotechnology, and new forms of farming.

It will be city planning and these types of innovations that will help determine what a population of 7 billion, and then 9 billion, will look like. The National Geographic article points out that in Collapse, author Jared Diamond argues the Rwandan genocide was partly a result of too many farmers dividing up a too small a space of land — basically, overpopulation. Some researchers think there will be a global food shortage at 9 billion people.

The 9 billion person world doesn’t have to be some apocalyptic urban jungle; it can be managed sustainably with smart resource management and technology. It’s a massive problem, and an opportunity. And we really don’t have a choice.

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Positing global warming as the primary reason for renewable energy adoption has effectively polarized the Republicans and Democrats and their respective constituents into two predictable and unmovable camps. In order to cross the aisle and get consensus, we need to shift the message over to national security.

Even politicians beholden to big oil companies don’t want to be perceived as supporting America’s enemies in these dangerous times. Both parties can agree that even more than the economy, national security is of paramount importance to America.

What has been made apparent, via leaked State Department cables distributed by Wikileaks, is that oil-rich countries in the Persian Gulf either directly or indirectly sponsor terrorism against the U.S., Israel and the West. In other words, when the U.S. buys oil from these countries, we are bankrolling the very same enemies we proclaim to be fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, and more broadly, in the West’s collective battle against fundamentalist Islamic terror groups.

The leaked cables have shown how the governments of nearly every Arabian Peninsula state have done little to stop the tremendous amount of funding going to terrorist groups from their countries, mostly from private citizens. One cable originating from the Secretary of State and addressed to various Middle Eastern embassies expressed U.S. frustration over the Gulf states’ relative inaction regarding the funding of international terrorism. From another angle, other cables have shown that Iran, possessing the second-largest amount of oil reserves in the world, is viewed as a true nuclear threat, in addition to directly funding Hezbollah and other terrorist regimes.

But wait, there’s more: For anyone in the U.S. claiming that energy independence can occur through domestic and neighboring oil, Wikileaks seems to have an answer to that, too. Wikileaks founder Julian Assange claims to have some damning reports against BP, the company responsible for the disastrous Gulf of Mexico oil leak. Another leaked cable shows that both Canada and the U.S. are very aware of the highly destructive effects of Alberta’s tar sands oil, despite the governments’ public claims that the damage would be minor.

Two things: In light of these very real threats, a push for alternative energy is absolutely necessary, and this should be apparent to everyone now. But perhaps even more important is that Wikileaks has given all of us in the renewable energy and cleantech world ammunition with which to make the case that our industry deserves public support and assistance from governments around the world.

The right strategy for all of us is to focus on how the cleantech sector offers a solution to our extremely unstable world. Not because they make the world a cleaner place, or a cooler place, but because they make our world a safer place.

So let’s really try to know our audience and tailor our messages. While the climate change message might work in Brussels, London and Barcelona, as they say in the movie business, “…it’ll never fly in Peoria.” Wikileaks may have already revealed that there are much more “pressing” issues at hand than even climate change.

Shifting the message over to national security is the smartest way to win our ongoing war against terror groups and those who support it. This strategy attacks the source of the conflict before it has a chance to rise against us. Rocky Mountain Institute founder, Amory Lovins likes to say about the “negawatt”: “The cheapest watt is the one that’s never created.” In a similar vein, the safest wars are the ones you never have to fight.

David Andrew Goldman is director of global communications at Expansion Media, an integrated PR/SEO firm that focuses on clean technology clients including AeroFarms, Entech Solar, BioPetroClean, ThermoEnergy Water, Airdye Solutions, Advanced Telemetry, Variable Wind Solutions, GreenRay Inc, Silentium, Phoebus-Energy, Solergy, Inc, and  Bandgap Engineering.

Image courtesy of Takver.

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1. DOE Secretary Steven Chu. An obvious one, but Department of Energy Secretary Steven Chu had arguably the biggest influence on the greentech sector in 2010. The DOE has funneled billions from the stimulus package into greentech sectors across the smart grid, green cars, energy efficiency, carbon capture and sequestration, and clean power. As a scientist he “gets” the issues, and also is on the cutting edge calling for open research and collaboration. I’m clearly a fan.

2. Bloom Energy CEO KR Sridhar. While it’s not entirely clear how successful the oh-so-buzzy fuel cell company Bloom Energy will be in the long run, it’s clear that in 2010 Bloom Energy ruled the mainstream green tech news. Heck, the company’s launch dominated our top 10 most read stories of 2010. The combo of the eight years of stealth mode, the Kleiner Perkins backing, the Colin Powell connection, the 60 Minutes launch and the high-profile first customers blew the rest of the green tech industry’s PR attempts out of the water. To me, that says the greentech industry is still very small, and is craving a success story.

3. Tesla CEO Elon Musk. Another easy choice. Tesla CEO Elon Musk helped the Silicon Valley electric car startup climb a mountain in 2010. The company had one of the only successful greentech IPOs out there; it scored a key OEM deal with Toyota; it bought the NUMMI plant for cheap, and its stock keeps climbing (above $30 today). Now about those two more years ’til the Model S comes out…

4. Kleiner Perkins Caufield, Byers Partner John Doerr. While Kleiner seems to be pulling back a bit from its greentech ambitions, the Valley’s most well-known venture firm shaped the greentech investing landscape of 2010. In particular, Doerr commonly spoke throughout the year about the massive market size of greentech and the importance of federal energy R&D. If the firm does pull back significantly from greentech, it will also have wide influence on the rest of its greentech VC peers.

5. Philanthropist Bill Gates. For the first time, the Microsoft founder and billionaire philanthropist took an interest in energy and green tech in 2010. Gates’ coming out party to greentech was his TED speech in February 2010, and since that time, he’s unveiled investments in startups like nuclear firm TerraPower and efficient engine tech EcoMotors. He’s also put money in Vinod Khosla’s fund. The technologist brings a new perspective to the industry, pointing out Moore’s Law doesn’t apply to batteries and the pace of innovation in the sector has been very slow.

6. Nissan CEO Carlos Ghosn. Ghosn has been one of the most outspoken and aggressive auto CEOs when it comes to electric cars. He sees “a big future” for the company’s upcoming electric car, the LEAF sedan, and has also partnered with Silicon Valley EV infrastructure company Better Place. Ghosn said this summer that Nissan was in “crisis mode” and the company’s future looks to be resting on EVs.

7. DOE’s Loan Chief Jonathan Silver. Just about one year into his role heading up the Department of Energy’s loan program office, former venture capitalist Jonathan Silver believes the agency has come a long way from its first few years of neglect and delays. He told us in a recent interview that the loan program functions “as well as, and possibly better” than private counterparts, when you consider the scale and complexity of the projects it’s meant to support. Not that there haven’t been hiccups and hurdles in the process.

8. GE’s CEO Jeff Immelt. GE has made one of the biggest bets on clean power and energy efficiency products with its Ecomagination line. Whether it’s wind turbines, smart meters, energy efficiency technology, power grid batteries, or its new electric car charger, GE has its fingers across the greentech sector. The company even got creative this year with its launch of a smart grid fund, where companies can compete for funding from GE and a group of venture capitalists.

9. NRG Energy CEO David Crane. The CEO of power company NRG Energy, David Crane, led the company to make massive investments in solar projects, including its most recent plan to spend up to $450 million in equity over four years on a 250-megawatt project being developed by SunPower. NRG Energy is also building what it says is the first privately funded electric vehicle infrastructure project. Crane was also a regular on the greentech speaking circuit in 2010.

10. Executive Secretary for the UNFCCC Christiana Figueres. After a disastrous U.N. climate meeting in Copenhagen in 2009, the Cancun negotiations in 2010 were able to complete one task: They saved face for the UNFCCC process. That’s actually a pretty big deal. Thanks can go in part to Christiana Figueres, who held the negotiations together and rallied the troops. Now we’ll see if she can push for an actual agreement from countries before the Kyoto Protocol expires in 2012. While the greentech industry tends to feel disconnected from this process, the agreement (or lack there of) that will come out of these negotiations will be fundamental to greentech business.

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The so-called Energy Literacy guiding document, as the organizers of the meeting were calling it, will be modeled on the Climate Literacy and Ocean Literacy projects, and will be a dozen or so pages of text and images that lay out the context, background and definitions of energy consumption, put energy in the context of global warming and explain what it means and why it’s important to be energy literate.

As most people know who read this site know, the average American knows very little about personal energy consumption and energy savings. According to a survey published in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Americans overestimate the energy savings of actions like turning off lights, and riding public transportation, but underestimate the energy consumption of other things like using central air conditioning. A key to guiding people to make better decisions about their own energy usage, will be establishing the knowledge about how energy flows work at an earlier age.

This brings us back to the document that will be the reference point for this energy education revolution (hey, sometimes revolutions start out in very boring ways). While a dozen-page document might sound like something you could punch out in a couple of weeks, the idea is to draw feedback from across the various interested groups and create something that can be used as a single reference point. The project, led by Matthew Inman, an Albert Einstein Distinguished Educator Fellow with the DOE (who is the embodiment of your favorite high school teacher), will use a wiki to draw feedback from interested parties over the next few months, and will hopefully deliver the first version of the document by the summer, 2011.

A project with so much potential input, and with such lofty goals, is bound to face that classic problem: way to many cooks in the kitchen. As an outsider to most policy and academic discussions, and as the only journalist at the meeting last week, I was overwhelmed by all the various opinions thrown out about what words to use and avoid by the end of the meeting.

For example, Inman presented some of his first thoughts on wording for definitions of energy use that sounded like a physics lesson, while some in the group thought the definitions should be connected more to climate change from the start. Still, others in the group thought aligning the energy discussion too strongly to climate change would politicize the document. Sometimes a democracy isn’t always the cleanest and fastest way to reach a conclusion.

For me, I was asked to join the discussion mostly as a way to help the language and the document be more accessible to the public. I can envision a document that’s also easy to digest by the average reader, not just by academic leaders and policy makers. If you’re interested in giving input to this document, stay tuned, and I’ll send out the wiki when it goes online.

Beyond the nitty-gritty of the wording of this baseline document, it’s clear more than ever that we need to become much more energy literate by whatever means necessary. Technology can be one tool. Some think a sort of sixth sense for energy, in the form of design elements in buildings, appliances and gadgets, will be a key. Griffith spent time putting together his own energy footprint of a year of his life, and after realizing he had no idea he was consuming so much energy, helped launch the energy tracking website Wattzon.com.

What about you? Are you energy literate?

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Schwarzenegger told the L.A. Times that when he leaves office, he plans:

[T]o go back to Washington with Secretary [George] Schultz and others” to push for a new approach to energy policy. He said the country needs to bring Democrats and Republicans together on energy policies that both sides can agree on in order to reduce dependence on foreign oil and become competitive, “rather than always talking about global warming, which turns some people off.

Schwarzenegger also said he would consider a position with the Obama administration. On Schwarzenegger’s official website, he identifies California’s Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006 as one of his “most notable accomplishments in his first six years in office.”

Note to Department of Energy Secretary Steven Chu: Perhaps Schwarzenegger, a longtime, moderate Republican, could help reach across the aisle and help maintain aggressive energy policies in the face of the recent political shift.

When Jerry Brown takes the gubernatorial office, he’ll have sizable green shoes to fill. Brown (who spoke at our Green:Net event in 2010) has a plan to create a half a million green jobs in California and also plans to appoint a “Renewable Energy Jobs Czar.”

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Image courtesy of the Schwarzenegger administration, signing legislation at Nanosolar.

The idea behind the exemptions are that the benefits of projects that lead to more clean power, energy efficiency and green jobs outweighs the environmental drawbacks. But The Center for Public Integrity points out that a variety of the green projects funded by the stimulus package are being developed by companies with significant records of being polluters, including Duke Energy, Westar Energy, DuPont, and ethanol maker Didion Milling.

The administration told the researchers that it didn’t have time to review companies’ previous pollution records in accordance to awarding stimulus funds, and also the administration doesn’t think that pollution violations in general should affect stimulus funding. However, the report points out some more egregious examples, including how Didion Milling was awarded a stimulus grant a month after a federal judge ruled its plant had violated the clean-water law many times.

When it comes to certain sensitive cases like biofuel plants or massive solar farms, I think the report has many valid points. At the same time, there are already many critics that say that the greentech stimulus funds haven’t been allocated fast enough, and NEPA reviews would have added months, if not years, to the process.

The report also lumps in smart grid stimulus funds along with other more environmentally-sensitive clean power projects. Yet adding IT — wireless networks, software, sensors systems — won’t have much more environmental impact than the power grids that the smart grid tech is updating, so I’m not sure how helpful a lengthy environmental review would be. And the smart grid industry would certainly argue with long environmental reviews. What do you think?

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Image courtesy of Brooke Anderson.

The tees are courtesy of designer Martin Hsu, and you can buy your own here for $28. Because the DOE, led by Chu, has been majorly supporting the greentech industry over the past year. A good way to say thanks!

For those not familiar with Chu, he previously won the Nobel Prize in Physics, supports open collaboration in science, and also has a sense of humor.

• Dark roofs can heat up to 50 degrees hotter than light roofs.
• Dark roofs in the U.S. have delivered at least a billion dollars a year in extra power bills.
• Cities are often 2 to 5 degrees hotter than less urban areas due to dark surfaces.
• A cool roof can lead to 10 to 15 percent lower energy bills.
• If a little more than 3/4 of commercial buildings in the U.S. got a cool roof, the U.S. would save enough energy via air-conditioning to reduce carbon emissions by about 6 million metric tons each year.

Chu is calling for more buildings owners to opt for cooler roofs, as a way to reduce carbon emissions, but also to save money on air conditioning bills:

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