Jigar Shah

Which side are you on? The solar trade wars

January 8, 2012

Should we worry about Chinese government subsidies to its solar industry? Or send the Chinese a thank-you note?

A group of seven US-based manufacturers of solar panels is alarmed. These manufacturers, led by Solar World, a German firm with a plant in Oregon, filed a complaint with the United States International Trade Commission, which reached a preliminary conclusion in December that US companies were, in fact, being harmed by subsidized imports. If the Commerce Department goes on to find that Chinese firms have been dumping solar panels on the US market at prices below their costs, it could impose steep tariffs of 50 to 250% on Chinese panels, according to this report in The Times by Matt Wald. The Chinese government provides billions of dollars of low-cost financing and free or cheap land to Chinese solar firms.

Jigar Shah

But much of the solar industry–led by Jigar Shah, the founder of Sun Edison, entrepreneur and environmental advocate–thinks this complaint is a terrible idea. Tariffs  would raise the costs of solar power to US business and consumers, at a time when those are coming down; they could also set off a solar trade war that would harm other US solar companies.

As it happens, the U.S. had a trade surplus of nearly $1.9 billion in the solar sector with China in 2010, as exports of raw material and factory equipment more than offset imports of finished solar panels, according to the Solar Electric Industries Association,. What’s more, Jigar says, most of the 100,000 or so jobs in the US solar industry — he says as much as 97-98% — are downstream of the manufacturing business in project development, logistics, construction and installation.

“SolarWorld’s petition will do far more damage than good to the U.S. solar industry as a whole,” Jigar wrote in this letter to Gordon Brinser of Solar World. “Every morning, thousands of hard-working Americans put on their tool belts and go build solar power plants. Our country needs more of those jobs, not fewer.”

What got me thinking about this brouhaha was an email the other day from a California company called Solar Power Inc., or SPI, that underscored for me just how committed the Chinese are to getting their solar panels onto rooftops in the US.  SPI said it had secured construction financing worth $44 million from the state-owned China Development Bank to fund construction of solar projects in New Jersey. [click to continue…]

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Fixing older buildings…and market failures

September 20, 2011

Markets promote efficiency and drive out waste…

Except when they don’t.

A glaring example of market failure in the U.S. economy is the energy wasted in buildings. When the Empire State Building renovated its heating and cooling system, upgraded its lighting and installed new windows, the owners cut their energy bills by 40%. Think about it—a 40% cost savings. That’s big.

Today, at an event called Business Climate 2011 in New York, a group of cities and companies and a nonprofit called the Carbon War Room announced a plan to curb wasted energy and unecessary pollution—importantly, at no taxpayer cost.

Jigar Shah of the Carbon War Room, which put the group together, said this is a very big deal. “I think this is the most important climate announcement in the last five years,” he said.

“Building retrofits have been a colossal failure,” Jigar said, and that’s about to change. [click to continue…]

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Up on the roof: Vegetables!

June 2, 2011

The bagged organic baby mixed greens on sale in my local Whole Foods Market in Bethesda, MD, are not very “green” at all. To grow the lettuce, vast amounts of water must be moved from the Colorado River to California, the most hydrologically altered landmass on the planet. The lettuce is picked, packaged, washed and shipped in refrigerated trucks (because it’s perishable) roughly 2,800 miles across America. The cost? $3.99.  If you believe, as I do, that the demand for water and oil are going to grow, this five oz. bag of greens will only get more expensive.

There ought to be a better way of getting lettuce into the hands of supermarket shoppers.

Paul Lightfoot, the chief executive of BrightFarms, a New York City-based startup, thinks he has found one: His company is planning to design, build, finance and operate hydroponic greenhouse farms on supermarket rooftops, eliminating time, distance and cost from the food supply chain.

 

A mockup of a BrightFarm on a roof

You can’t get more local than that unless you grow vegetables in your own backyard. [click to continue…]

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In this contest, everyone wins

November 3, 2010

Today’s guest blogpost comes from Ian Fisk, who is executive director of the William James Foundation, which promotes responsible business. Ian also has been active for many years in Net Impact,  leading both the Yale chapter and the professional chapter here in Washington, D.C. Over the years, he has founded or helped to found more than a dozen ventures, some non-profit, some for-profit, and some that, he quips, did not last long enough to have an official tax status at all! He’s writing today about the Foundation’s Socially Responsible Business Plan Competition–one of a growing number of competitions intended to promote and reward startups with an expansive view of their responsibility to the greater good.

Late on the afternoon of Friday, December 3rd, the team responsible for the William James Foundation’s Socially Responsible Business Plan Competition will find its email inbox full of socially responsible business plans from around the world. While we work with entrepreneurs of any age, educational level, and country, we are confident that one thing will be true for all entrants: a just-under-the-wire approach to deadlines. Typically, half of the business plans we all year come in during the hour before the deadline, and the WJF has an annual office pool as to how many plans will arrive at 5:00 PM eastern time exactly. (Last year’s winner was six.) Procrastination, it seems, is alive and well.

Maybe that’s because our competitors are spreading their bets. Multiple-bottom-line business plan competitions like ours are proliferting. Here is a list of about 50 of them.

But the WJF team has an unusual message for our entrants: don’t enter to win. Enter to improve your plan.

Sure, we offer a prize pool of around $100,000 worth of in-kind prizes and cash (mostly in-kind) that is divided amongst the top teams in the competition. But our primary focus is on helping the entrepreneurs get to their next stage through detailed and constructive feedback on their business plans.

The WJF’s goal is to support as many entrants as we can. So while last year’s winner Nuru Light, which makes LED lights to replace kerosene in Africa, received around 40 pages of  feedback, as well as $7,000 in cash and $25,000 worth of professional services from such multiple bottom line thought leaders like BBMG and Free Range Studios, the team that finished 150th received around 20 pages of feedback as well. It came from such world-class judges such as our friends Mark Albion, author of Making a Life, Making a Living; entrepreneur Jigar Shah who now leads the Carbon War Room; and social enterprise pioneer Chuck Lief of Greyston Bakery and Intervale. [click to continue…]

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Shipping: It’s time to rock the boat

March 11, 2010

Look around you–the furniture in your office or house, the electronics, the clothes you are wearing, mostly likely some of your dinner–chances are these things moved by boat. About 85% of worldwide cargo travels by ship, and so it’s no surprise that shipping is a major contributor to climate change.

According to Richard Branson’s new NGO, which is called the Carbon War Room, the global shipping fleet is the equivalent on the sixth most polluting country in the world:

Annual CO2e emissions currently exceed one billion tons and are projected to grow to 18% of all manmade CO2e emissions by 2050. Yet existing technology presents an opportunity for up to 75% gains in efficiency, with required investments repaid in just a few years.

belugaFixing shipping will take bold ideas — see the ship at left, which is equipped with a kite from a company called SkySails — and it will take simple ones, like slowing ships down a little, adopting the equivalent of a 55 mph limit on the open seas. (See this New York Times story, which is literally about a slow boat to China.) And it will require bringing shipping companies, customers, regulators and others to work together to attack the problem.

Opportunities like these interest the Carbon War Room, which says its focus is to harness the power of business to bring about market-driven solutions to climate change.

“We believe that climate change is the greatest challenge facing humankind,” says Jigar Shah, the CEO of the Carbon War Room. “And we need a war room-like effort to combat it.”

I spoke recently with Jigar at the NGO’s new offices in downtown Washington. [click to continue…]

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