By Julie Wernau
| In speech today at the Pew Center for Global Climate Change conference
at the downtown Chicago Marriott, John Rowe, chairman and CEO of
Chicago-based Exelon, spoke in favor of a market-based approach to
greening the nation’s energy sources, saying that energy policy can only
move forward once a price is set for on carbon emissions.
As things stand, Rowe said, energy sources like wind, solar and nuclear
are not the cheapest to build and produce, he said, and the current
subsidies and incentives that exist to try encourage companies to
produce energy from renewable sources are part of a system that is
inefficient, expensive and piecemeal.
“The market’s a funny thing. It doesn’t always tell you what you want to hear,” he said.
Rowe, CEO of the nation’s largest operator of nuclear power plants, has been making three or four lobbying trips per month in support of energy legislation that would put a price on carbon emissions.
Rowe argued that without legislative action, the market will not move in the direction of rational energy policy on its own because there is no economic incentive to move in that direction. A market for carbon, he said, would also correct any wrong-based assumptions about greening the nation’s energy sources. While Exelon is one of a number of partner’s working on the FutureGen project in Mattoon, a $1.5 billion public-private partnership to build a first-of-its-kind coal-fueled, near-zero-emissions power plant, Rowe admitted it may be difficult to convince the public that carbon sequestration and capture is plausible.
“The idea that we’ll be able to convince the public that lakes of carbon dioxide the size of states will stay underground forever still kind of boggles my mind,” he said. “I’m too old to start selling that one.”
The process, which has been touted as a way to convert the nation’s cheapest, most available and most polluting form of energy — coal — into a zero-emissions game, has still not been tried on a large scale and tested and is likely many years away from becoming an answer to the nation’s climate change needs, he said.
Mr. Rowe’s comments are right on. The way we subsidize fossil fuels and favor them through our tax structure, renewables will never see the massive investment they deserve unless we level the playing field. And given that clean energy is already a booming industry, even without any federal action, there’s no reason to think it wouldn’t expand enormously with a legislated cap on carbon emissions. We should trust the opinions of our business leaders on this issue. They’ve seen clean energy’s potential to create jobs and make money while providing consumers with access to superior energy options. I hope Senators Burris and Durbin will take Rowe’s ideas into account when voting on future energy policy. We need a national clean energy bill passed as soon as possible.
yea nice Work