Can Renewable Energy Be Sustained?
Engineers and entrepreneurs are rushing to explore alternative sources of efficient and renewable energy in New Jersey and elsewhere in the country. A Rutgers School of Business—Camden professor has strong words of caution as projects involving wind farms and photovoltaic cells proliferate. With the electric-power industry poised for its most dramatic changes in decades, too little thought is being devoted to coordinating these piecemeal initiatives, warns Richard Michelfelder in a recent edition of The Electricity Journal, the leading policy journal for the electric industry. The consequence, he fears, might well be a disastrous overload of the nation’s electrical grid. An assistant professor of finance at the Rutgers School of Business—Camden and former president and CEO of Quantum Consulting Inc., a national public utilities consulting firm based in Berkeley, Cal., Michelfelder comes to his assessment after a quarter-century in the energy-technology industry. “When you start adding