DENVER -- State lawmakers laid out an ambitious plan this week to fund renewable energy development through a new Clean Energy Development Authority with the power to issue bonds.and:
"We'd love to see this become the Silicon Valley of renewable energy,"Colorado needs to move fast if it wants to be a player.[...]
Sen. Ken Kester, R-Las Animas, said the plan could provide virtually unlimited funds for renewable energy projects. The tax-free bonds could be backed by the state if the Legislature and voters approve. The authority could also issue bonds without state backing.
"Some of those transmission lines cost $1 million a mile," Kester said.
Kester said Texas, Wyoming and New Mexico are already ahead of Colorado in the race to build a new energy economy.
James Tarpey, a member of the Wyoming Infrastructure Authority Board, said his board has the authority to fund projects that cost $1 billion or more.[...]
Gardner said there would be no limit on the amount of bonds the authority could issue.
"The capital infusion as a result of this bill is unlimited," he said.
Sen. Chris Romer, D-Denver, said Colorado has the renewable energy assets and can't afford to squander them.
"We are clearly the Saudi Arabia of wind, solar and carbon assets," he said.[...]
Colorado lays out ambitious energy plan
BP Solar is a part of BP Alternative Energy, which over the next 10 years aims to invest $8 billion globally in solar, wind, hydrogen and natural gas power technology. BP’s investments in India include Castrol India and Tata BP Solar. Speaking to ET, Lee Edwards, president & CEO, BP Solar said,
“The JV with Tata Power has huge potential, therefore, we could look at more opportunities in other alternative energy sources. Tata BP Solar has been witnessing around 40% growth in India over the last two years.” The company has recorded revenue of Rs 650 crore this fiscal. Currently, 60% of the solar cell produced in Bangalore is exported to Europe.
Tata BP Solar has added 36mw solar photovoltaic production line capacity with an investment of $22 million to the existing 16 mw taking the total cell manufacturing capacity to 52 mw per annum. The board has also approved of $100 million investment for the next phase of expansion, which will see an additional 128 mw of cell manufacturing capacity to be added during 2007-08, taking the total capacity to 180 mw. This is a part of the planned 300 mw cell manufacturing plant.
The big deal here is two-fold.
First US politicians talking about the new energy economy in the terms of a race: "Kester said Texas, Wyoming and New Mexico are already ahead of Colorado in the race to build a new energy economy." And the talk of "unlimited funds", "virtually unlimited capital infusions", "the Silicion Valley of renewable energy", "move fast if it wants to become a player" - the competitive spirit is being cheer-leaded here with great vigour. "You're behind, get moving!" and the pom-poms and short skirts of capital are undulating and shimmying, arousing the sluggards to perform.
Texas and California have been jousting for months now about who's leading the wind generation league. So now solar is coming in too, and Colorado is piling into the ruck. As is Arizona in other news. This indicates that not only will all pessimistic forecasts for the growth of renewable energy in the next decade or so be trampled in the rush and forgotten, but that big oil and nuclear will have to shift their active capital and effort fast to stay in the game.
And blow me down if the Indian news doesn't underline this very thing. Everyone knows BP is big oil, but TATA INDUSTRIES is not at all well known. It is basically Manufacturing India, Inc. So with Big Oil and India Inc starting to move (and the figures aren't quite peanuts), the game is going to be sweatier for the US would-be players to thrust their way into than they might imagine.
Add to these very empirical signs the new emphasis on energy conservation in heating and lighting, moves to bio-fuels (ethanol, bio-diesel, wood pellets), and the still a bit speculative and research-based work on geo-thermal (heat pumps), tidal and wave energy, not to mention the revamped ideas about harvesting solar energy from space, and there's something spectacular under way.
Simply put, even under the warped and repressive social relations of capitalism (with its undemocratic and conflict-ridden monopoly ownership of resources, production facilities and what we might call Big Knowledge - the kind that gets patented and copyrighted out of the public domain and hidden away in corporate R&D or narrow specialist publications) the forces of production (technology and the demands of technology in relation to human social needs at this level of technological development) are forcing us into the realm of socialist (non-capitalist, cooperative, internationally coordinated) development.
Like a giant modern Prometheus in its boyhood growing into adolescence, human productive potential is right now being forced to contain its bulging body in the rigid childhood suit of armour provided for it by its wicked capitalist guardian. The spectacle is ridiculous - Li'l Abneresque (Li'l Abner) - shmoos are popping up everywhere ("shmoos is bad fo people" ), and yet "we" have to exterminate them for the "good of society" ("ah loves the law").
Marx wrote well over a century ago that finance capital (as a fully developed bank and credit system):
The banking system, so far as its formal organization and centralization is concerned, is the most artificial and most developed product turned out by the capitalist mode of production, a fact already expressed in 1697 in Some Thoughts of the Interests of England. This accounts for the immense power of an institution such as the Bank of England over commerce and industry, although their actual movements remain completely beyond its province and it is passive toward them. The banking system possesses indeed the form of universal book-keeping and distribution of means of production on a social scale, but solely the form. We have seen that the average profit of the individual capitalist, or of every individual capital, is determined not by the surplus-labour appropriated at first hand by each capital, but by the quantity of total surplus-labour appropriated by the total capital, from which each individual capital receives its dividend only proportional to its aliquot part of the total capital. This social character of capital is first promoted and wholly realized through the full development of the credit and banking system. On the other hand this goes farther. It places all the available and even potential capital of society that is not already actively employed at the disposal of the industrial and commercial capitalists so that neither the lenders nor users of this capital are its real owners or producers. It thus does away with the private character of capital and thus contains in itself, but only in itself, the abolition of capital itself. By means of the banking system the distribution of capital as a special business, a social function, is taken out of the hands of the private capitalists and usurers. But at the same time, banking and credit thus become the most potent means of driving capitalist production beyond its own limits, and one of the most effective vehicles of crises and swindle.
Capital III Part V (Division of Profit) Chapter 36 (Precapitalist relationships) (a few pages before the end of the chapter)
So a world controlled by a fully developed banking and credit system (imperialism) is ready for the next "generation" of human society, socialism. Imperialism is capitalism pregnant with socialism, as Marx shows here and Lenin and Trotsky reiterated.
The problem is really more about politics and power than about economics - how can the majority of human beings, locked up as they are in their individual imperialist states, wrest control of the world economy and world power structure(s) from their current pro-monopoly, pro-banking-and-credit, pro-"capitalist" governors?
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