Solar and the Politics of Technology
What's missing from politics today is any understanding of organization. Not simply organizing in bringing people together to push for a defined goal or even the initial step of bringing people together to define a goal, but the understanding organization, how power is structured, is the very foundation of politics. Over the last two centuries, humanity has launched an unprecedented technological revolution that radically reorganized human culture, yet has had remarkably little impact on how we think about political organization.
The Los Angeles Times has a great opinion piece on solar technology, clearly demonstrating the inability of established power to incorporate the politics of a new technology requiring a reorganization of both governance and the industry itself. The piece deals with California changing their rules to make the installation of rooftop solar more difficult. The change is led by the California Public Utility Commission (PUC), which as far as symbol of dysfunction and corruption of government in the 21st century is right up there say with DC's Securities and Exchange Commission.
The PUC is in every way the story of the inability for the processes and institutions of governance to healthily respond to and influence technological evolution. The PUC was initially instituted at the end of 19th century in response to the growth of one of industrialism’s first radical technologies, railroads. The commission basically became the model for the government regulation of industry in the 20th century. The Railroad Commission contained three important elements that defined all future regulatory agencies: 1)It was run by the railroads, that is the industry it supposedly regulated; 2)It was at least one level removed from direct public control; 3)It quickly locked in certain processes defining the power of the agency and industry, processes that both would then seek to protect.
In the early 20th century, the Railroad Commission was used to regulate industries that followed, such as electricity. Now, you might think it queer a railroad commission regulating energy, but it clearly exemplified our inability to either understand or respond to the politics presented by any given new technology. California wasn't alone in their lack of imagination equating the regulation of railroads and energy. For example, few know in the 1930s, the Texas Railroad Commission was largely responsible for setting global oil prices. That's another story, remarkable on many levels, but maybe most so in it was pretty much the only time the oil industry was ever regulated. The point here is the regulatory organization established with one of industrialism's first great technologies became precedent for all technologies, seeing little modification over the following century and half.
The overwhelming mandate of industrial regulation became simply supply at an affordable price. How a given industry accomplished this rested largely outside what was considered politics. Just as its forebear the Railroad commission, the PUC was largely run by the industry, in this case California's three largest government bestowed monopoly electric corporations. Most importantly, the utility system architecture — massive centralized generation plants supplying electricity to a distributed customer base — homes, businesses and industry et al — became codified in both law and just as importantly industry economics as the only way the industry could run and profit. This basic system architecture remained unchallenged until the last couple decades and the rise of solar.
To gain solar’s full value requires using is as a distributed energy source and upsetting not only the industry's established centralized generation architecture, but much of what’s built on top, including how electricity is utilized. The American electric industry, including its regulators, fought tooth and nail against solar for a half-century, ok, really it wasn't much of fight, more an ignoring. In the last 20 years, solar's ascendance, thanks largely to the Chinese, has basically forced the industry to begin to accept solar, which they've done hesitantly, mostly by encouraging centralized, “utility scale” generation projects.
Rooftop solar requires not simply a switching of technology, but accompanying political and social reorganization. Rooftop solar allows people to create participatory electric associations in which excess generation from distributed sources is aggregated and supplied to others. Again it is not simply changing the technological network, but the social and political networks.
Such thinking is completely missing not just from electric technologies, but all our technological development, most especially with information technologies. What is needed is not simply engineer driven development, but reformation of established political, economic, and cultural organization, a revaluing of value starting not just from a technological, but human perspective.