As the Price of Oil Soars, Many Turn to Renewables

Thomas M. Rainwater spent 25 years in what people today call the traditional, old-fashioned energy business. An engineer by training, he worked at nuclear and coal-fired power stations, was a marketing executive for a natural gas producer and pipeline, and finally a top strategist for a Canadian power-generation company with a market capitalization of $5.5 billion.

Then in July Rainwater moved to the Washington area to become chief executive of SunEdison, a Beltsville company that is building and servicing solar panels on the rooftops of warehouses, supermarkets and other commercial buildings around the country. SunEdison is a tiny fraction of the size of his former employer, but Rainwater said “there is growing recognition across the land, across the globe, that we need to do something different to fire the economy.”
More and more people like Rainwater are joining the emerging green economy — and many of them are doing it in the Washington area. While many companies in this region are doing small things to burnish their environmental credentials, a few companies like SunEdison are inventing new business models, coming up with new technology or arranging new financing on a large scale.

Doing that is not easy. Green businesses face many hurdles — regulatory obstacles, technology limitations, high costs or simply old habits that prevent firms from thinking in new ways. But with the price of crude oil above $95 a barrel and worries about climate change mounting, there is more interest than ever in the field.

At its core, the business of climate change — at least the really big business of climate change — is an energy business. The United States in 2006 produced 5.9 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide by burning oil, natural gas and coal for energy. Finding ways to use those sources more efficiently or to replace them with energy generated by solar, wind or other renewables is the key to bringing greenhouse-gas emissions down to a level that will slow global warming.

The Washington Post