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Alexis Madrigal
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Alexis commented on the article |@CTYankee: I'm happy that you think a technological fix is readily available. That seems like a good sign.
But where are those numbers from? Concentrated solar power requires direct sunlight and doesn't seem to work very well in places like Connecticut.
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Alexis commented on the article |
@Emily: There are a few key ideas that I've stumbled across.
The first is that renewable energy played an underappreciated role in industrial revolution in the U.S. Unlike Britain, which really got going with coal, American factories used more hydropower than coal all the way through 1850. Windpower also opened up the prairies for farms, unleashing a torrent of energy (i.e. food) upon the nation. So, even though the overall horsepower or kilowatt hours (or whatever metric) of a lot of early renewable energy technologies was rather low, their social impact was very high.
Second, every energy technology has receieved enormous support from the government, as have biotech and most of the packet of technologies associated with computing and the Internet. Most of the subisidies and R&D money have gone to nuclear power and fossils. And by most, I mean almost all of it. Despite what free marketeers might want to think, the markets for energy have never been "unfettered" or structured in a neutral way. For many years, the government wanted to encourage energy consumption, not conservation. (In retrospect, perhaps that wasn't the best policy, but that's an easy thing to say when you live in a fabulously rich country with unfettered access to all forms of energy.) The Cold War directly and indirectly drove U.S. energy policy for nearly thirty years. Thus, nuclear power plants got tons of support — despite the existence of many of the solar building and water heating techniques (as promoted by the 50s era Association for Applied Solar Energy) that are now in use elsewhere in the world.
For a lot of green tech types, I think it's exhilarating and surprising to find intellectual predecessors. There have been people making roughly the same arguments for solar power for a hundred years. In the 50s, Farrington Daniels at the University of Wisconsin, for example, would be more than at home in most of the debates that we're familiar with. Some of the earliest advocates of solar power — say, John Ericsson, a famous-in-his-day inventor — pushed hard to deploy it in the poor/developing countries of the global south.
But the key question that people ask me a lot is something like this: do the technologies already exist to generate a huge percentage of our light, heat, and power from renewable sources?
My answer is a qualified yes, for three main reasons: 1) green tech has never received funding at levels comparable to the other "new" industries of the 20th cenury (biotech, nuclear power, semiconductors, network tech). We don't know how much cheaper and better solar, wind, geothermal, and energy storage can get, but they are already pretty close to competing with fossil fuels in many places. 2) The price of energy is going to go up. The cheapest oil is gone and the cheapest power comes from very old power plants (nuclear, coal, or hydro). Without renewables or huge amounts of demand reduction, the utilities will have to build new plants, which will be more expensive no matter what the power source is. Comparing new fossil, nuclear, and renewable power plants, renewables will look pretty good. 3) Solar, wind, next-next gen biofuels, and geothermal look better positioned to take advantage of the other technologies that have developed over the 30 years since the last energy crisis.
But, still, it's a little hard to answer this question because it assumes that technology is just metal and silicon and engines.
Technologies are only half-machine. The rest is human. People establish the systems and ground rules that allow them to work. Arguing that renewable energy systems cost more or can't provide 24/7 power can be rhetorically effective but misses a key point: The energy system was built by and for fossil fuel use. An individual solar/wind/geothermal tech is trying to play on a field that's been designed for a different game. Wind is wearing cleats on a basketball court, let's say.
If you change the technical and financial systems — making the grid more flexible, say, or valuing cost stability more highly in economic models — then alternative energy looks better. For example, wind is totally insensitive to the price of oil and natural gas. If we think that over the next 20 years, the price of oil/gas will go up (which damn near everybody does), then wind farms look a lot more competitive with natural gas plants.
Another example would be the indemnity that the US government extends to the nuclear industry (Price-Anderson Nuclear Industries Indemnity Act). It essentially takes a lot of risk off nuclear power plant developers' balance sheets. That makes the "cost of money" (the interest rate, basically) that these guys have to pay lower. Voila! No technological change, but the price of nuclear plants drops.
Long answer to a reasonable question, but I hope that answers it.
@Alexa: The book is coming out in Fall of 2010, but I post to the site just about every day. Would love to engage with your people, if they are interested!
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Alexis commented on the article |
Sorry, Out of Gas is, indeed, a fantastic book. Jon Naar's photographs of crazy 60s-era solar homes out in the desert alone are worth the cover price. Very highly recommended, and I'm glad to hear that word is getting out there.
If you're interested in this sort of thing, I'm working on a book about the history of what we now call green technology. It covers a much broader range of time periods and technologies, and is more analytic, less descriptive. I've got a research and project site up at greentechhistory.com. I've been assembling a renewable energy reading list with a lot of other books and papers on related topics.
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