Will Engineering Giants Be the Next to Embrace Climate Concerns?

The winds of change are blowing, and they’re affecting more than just wind turbines. My colleague Kirsten Korosec has been covering the defection of companies from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce over its anti-global warming stance, which started with utilities like Exelon, PNM and PG&E and recently grew to include apparel giant Nike.

Such defections, along with others (like Duke Energy’s departure from the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity) are a growing trend. Large corporations seem to be increasingly in support of strong action to limit emissions.

So who’s next? It could actually turn out to be a group of companies with close ties to oil and gas, the international engineering industry. That includes a multi-billion dollar firms like Bechtel, Fluor and McDermott.

Reuters has a new story describing the business prospects of these companies. Business from building coal plants is down, and wind power, already almost half of all new power, is projected to grow steadily after 2010.

Meanwhile, solar power is set to boom; Bechtel just won the contract to build a 440 megawatt solar thermal plant in California for BrightSource Energy. Its competitor, Fluor, is working on the Carrisa Plains photovoltaic mega-project, which is about the same power output.

The same Reuters article also provides a quote from a Bechtel exec speaking at a conference, who said, “We don’t see the onslaught of environmental regulation as necessarily a negative.” The word “onslaught” is usually used by Republicans to ding new climate laws, but in this context, it almost sounds positive.

The bottom line for any company, of course, is how it sees its own future prospects. Exelon and PG&E both want to derive much of their future profit from renewables, so it’s no surprise they ditched the Chamber. Duke, a board member, would probably be next, except that its large number of coal-fired plants leave it financially vulnerable.

If engineering firms run the calculations and see that they stand to profit significantly from laws like the Waxman-Markey cap and trade plan, then they’ll probably shift their support. But that might take a while, since the renewable energy industry still needs to recover from the recession before it can start working on more huge projects.

The Chamber, while maintaining its opposition, has modified its message on climate change, saying that it only wants a more comprehensive bill. That’s easy to say, until details emerge on the Senate’s cap and trade plan. For most companies, the point of taking sides is still well in the future.