Odds and ends

India: the tidal power power? Huh. Okay. This article does provide a stellar demonstration of a problem news articles often have in talking about renewable energy, which is that they like to throw around the term "leadership" when talking about installed capacity of various forms of energy. To me, this isn't a very useful form of "leadership" (particularly when it's an industry with very low levels of installed capacity in general - declaring leadership on the basis of one installation is sort of silly). I wish news articles would focus more on leadership in terms of creating technology or selling product; that can be related to installed capacity, if you make a point of buying domestically, or if you're very good at bringing new technologies inside your borders and stripping the knowledge from them to provide the basis for a domestic industry, but it's not directly connected.

News articles tend to conflate, the two, I think; hence this one, which concludes, "And with that, the country hopes to make its mark on the renewable energy sector globally – deemed important to an emerging superpower as it seems that present-day global supremacy wars are being fought on the alternative energy pitch." The plant's being built by a British company. It may well help India develop a domestic tidal power industry in the long run, but it's not "making a mark" on the renewable energy sector in an economic competition sense.

I hear President Obama talked a lot about clean energy in the SotU! Points for effort, Mr. President, but sadly, if you have to tell people it's a Sputnik moment, it's not a Sputnik moment. Would that it were. Am I pleased that he made it a priority? Huh. From a saving the planet point of view, of course. More investment is an absolute good from that perspective, and of course I think it will benefit the US in general to not screw up the planet. But from a narrower national strategy perspective? I'm not sure. If I thought we had the political will to go whole hog on it, I would be thrilled. But with China having a stronger set of built-in incentives to push hard on this already, and our tendency to be comparatively half-hearted on this sort of thing, the heretic in me wonders if maybe we should be focusing our tech investment somewhere with less international competition that could still have high payoffs in terms of growth. Let's say I hope we find the political will to really follow through on this one, because it would be better for us and everyone if we did.