Transition to low carbon energy will be “extremely difficult,” energy official says
Wednesday February 3, 2016
Two months after world leaders made a historic pact in Paris to try and limit climate change comes the work of figuring out how.
The shift from a fossil-fuel intensive energy sector to a low-carbon one — without disrupting the flow of energy upon which the world turns — is going to be extremely critical and extremely difficult,†Melanie Kenderdine, U.S. Department of Energy director of energy policy and systems analysis, warned Wednesday.
I have always worried about the transition space,†she said during a talk at the Atlantic Institute. You've got to be very careful about the policy, so you're incentivizing the right things.â€
The comments come as the United States and countries around the world work on cutting greenhouse gas emissions to the point the earth's temperature does not rise more than two degrees Celsius.
Kenderdine pointed to how the U.S. power sector shifted heavily to coal in the 1970s  following a nuclear meltdown at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant and a U.S. ban on building natural-gas fired plants — prefaced on what turned out to be an incorrect belief the country was running out of gas.
This time, federal policy makers worry about what mechanism to use in pricing carbon and how developing countries with abundant coal resources will comply with the Paris agreement when they're rushing to expand their electricity grids.
David Eyton, BP's head of technology, who also spoke at the talk, opined that at least for oil companies like his  the mechanism is not as important as consistency within countries.
If you put lots of different prices on carbon within a national economy, you just created an arbitrage,†he said.
At the same time, 20 countries committed in Paris to doubling their research funding for clean energy technology by 2021 — at the same time billionaires led by Bill Gates committed billions of dollars to the effort. The U.S. Department of Energy is budgeted to spend $6.4 billion on clean energy research this year. But expect that to change, Kenderdine said.
We're probably going to exceed that commitm...