Politics of Technology - electricity
Funnily enough, the NYT has a good piece on the current politics of the California electric industry. I remember back in 2000, the entire California electricity industry was collapsing on my head, the number of articles anywhere about what was actually going on were few to none. A cauldron of corruption and dysfunction of epic proportions, that energy fiasco cost California some $80 billion in fraud and various jobbery, though with an added tiny benefit of recalling the hapless governor.
I learned America's, call it privilege, in regards to crises of its own making, allowed the throwing of astronomical amounts of money to not solve the problem, but salve it. The California electricity bailout was a dress rehearsal for the the exponentially larger American bank bailout eight years later. Too big to fail they say, the top only goes down together.
However, in this case, the beginning of the solar industry emerged from the great wave of money emanating from Sacramento that crashed across California. A friend was instrumental in helping work the legislature on behalf of the then fetal solar industry. She would email me in Rome, where I had fled to contemplate earlier and greater political declines, asking about various niceties of the bailout legislation, my reply was always, “Just get more money.” While money is always fundamental to politics, in 21st century America, it is the only politics.
The money did help establish a solar market in California, but it would be the Chinese over the next decade who spent the real money to drive solar's price down. Even though the modern photovoltaic cell was invented at Bell Labs, the then energy future for America's National Security State was nukes. “Too cheap to meter,” claimed Pentagon marketing. So, besides a small blip brought about by the oil shocks of the 1970s, solar laid dormant as a technology for a half-century.
The basic configuration of the electric system, call it the architecture, is massive centralized generation plants. Only several thousand plants provide electricity to 350 million people. In the 20th century, electricity generation was overwhelmingly coal fired, some oil, some hydro, and beginning in the 1950s nukes. In the last several decades natural gas has explosively grown, replacing a lot of coal. Comparatively, renewables – wind, solar, geothermal – grew much less. A mass network of wires carry the generated electricity from the centralized plants to the very distributed customer base of every house, business, school etc.. These wires are collectively known as the grid. One can argue the entire electricity system is the biggest machine ever built.
Generation of electricity for mass consumption was and still is provided by America's utilities. With great growth in the 1920s, then in the 1930s for a variety of reasons, the new utilities became locally and state regulated. Either private or public, utilities became mandated monopolies, with complete control over distinct localities. Utilities have been a very powerful, if not a greatly visible force in American politics. As with most things providing the foundation of the American Dream, Americans know little about electricity beyond flipping a switch and not wanting to pay much. Of course as all established centralized power across history, utilities are happy with mass ignorance. They only care their customers pay their bills on time and offer a little genteel reverence. Today, the utilities are solar's great political problem.
To gain its real value, solar disrupts, as our tech neo-overlords fondly and endlessly repeat, the century old architecture of the utilities. Instead of massive centralized generation plants, solar is most valuable as a distributed generation source placed on every rooftop. Of course if you're a utility executive, shareholder, employee, or water carrier, generation on every rooftop is a great nightmare. With even a little imagination, one can picture the end of the utilities themselves.
The present fight in California is about a thing called net-metering, which is simply the utilities paying households for surplus electricity rooftop solar system generates, but the households don't use. Instead, the surplus goes onto the grid to be used by the utilities' other customers. Seems fair enough, right? Well, if you're a utility, you don't pay people for electricity, people pay you.
The NYT piece is pretty good on the various political factions involved. The utilities control the process almost completely. They own the regulators and most of the elected officials, even some of the environmental groups. I won't mention any names, ok I will, the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) has carried the California utilities water for decades, actively hostile to solar as long as I can remember.
But really this is all a sideshow. For solar and other distributed generation to really revolutionize energy in the 21st century, the utilities must lose control of the wires. With centralized generation, the grid is a traditionally organized pyramid power structure. That's not only what the utilities know, but what they want to keep. A distributed generation architecture, necessary to really gain the value of solar, allows a much more decentralized power structure, a democratic one. Rooftop solar owners can come together in associations and decide where to sell their surplus electricity generation – Jefferson's elementary republics as fundamental energy republics for the 21st century. The utilities, if we want to keep them, and I'm not sure why, can be paid to be wire maintenance firms.
Electricity is politics. If we are to figure out how to have democracy in the 21st century, though at this point I'm not sure you could get a quorum to discuss it, but if you could, how electricity is generated and controlled is as fundamental as voting for democratic politics – the politics of technology.