Solar Chronicles
It's difficult for people to understand what's deemed modernity was brought about by Homo sapiens harnessing of energy on a mass scale. It doesn't matter what economic, political, or cultural order you place atop it, without fossil fuels, what's conceived modern wouldn't exist.
There's a wonderful, probably apocryphal story, about Lenin in the Kremlin. Into his office come a number of commissars from across the new Soviet Union complaining about the Bolshevik policy of closing and destroying the churches. “People are outraged,” the commissars plead with Lenin. They worry of upheaval. Lenin replies, “Don't worry, they will worship electricity.” Lenin was right, we all worship electricity. In regards to changing every day human life, no political theory or action ever proved as radical as the mass availability of electricity.
For electricity's ever growing congregation, how it was generated and who controlled it was never much of a concern. Availability and affordability were the only issues. Utilities, a 2Oth century social innovation, soon became extremely powerful entities. Money generated by this new radical technology quickly became a backbone of finance. After a few initial crises, utility bonds quickly became the safe, conservative investment.
The utilities built simplistic grids centered around massive centralized generation plants fueled by oil, coal, and most recently natural gas. Each plant, through elaborate networks of wires, provide electricity for hundreds of thousand of homes, businesses, and schools. This new energy order quickly redefined social, political, and economic systems. The priesthood of industrial order, economists, even derived a term to justify such concentration of technological power, deeming electric utilities a “natural monopoly.”
Only a couple decades into this new order, a new electricity technology, photo-voltaic cells (PV) were developed. PV is a first generation solar technology, taking sunlight and directly converting it to electricity. For a number of reasons, nobody in the utility industry supported this new technology.
First, a few years before, nuclear energy had been harnessed and a political force much more powerful than the electric utilities in the US, the military industrial complex, declared nuclear generation America's energy future.
Secondly, no one in the utility business was enthusiastic about being incapable of charging for solar's energy source – the sun. And finally, the real value of solar photo-voltaic is best gained with distributed generation, a literal revolutionary restructuring of the centralized generation grid the utilities sat atop.
With the utilities and military industrial complex opposing solar, outside a brief flirtation in the 1970s, it was a technology that sat mostly dormant for a half-century. It wasn't until the turn of the century, that solar installation began to pick-up, largely, though not exclusively, through the efforts of the Chinese.
In the US, adoption of solar still remains largely under control of the utilities. Solar's greatest advantage as a distributed generation source mostly dismissed. A practice called “utility-scale solar” was developed. This is covering open space with vast arrays of PV, mimicking the established centralized generation network the utilities control. In order for solar to gain a toe-hold in the US, it embraced the utilities' centralized architecture.
However, there's no need to cover vast tracts of open space with solar panels, instead we need to cover our inhabited spaces — roofs, buildings, parking lots, and even aqueducts. This necessitates a reimagining and reform of how the grid operates, moving from a centrally controlled network to a more distributed one. It requires the development of new electricity institutions, more democratically structured than the utilities.
Make no mistake, this is no simple task, as the LA Times reveals in a very good piece on California's talk about an “energy transition” versus delivery. In the last paragraph, which should have been the lede, we find the nut,
“If you’re talking about California trying to move its emissions from gasoline cars into EVs, you’re talking about probably doubling the amount of electricity demand on the grid,” said Kyle Meng, associate professor of environmental economics at UC Santa Barbara. “Where’s that going to come from? You could imagine large utility-scale solar in places like Kern County, but with the laws as they’re written now, it’s very hard for Kern County to get property tax benefits from a solar farm than it could from oil drilling.”
Indeed, where's it going to come from? The simple answer, it ain't coming. Over half of California's electricity is still generated from fossil fuels and dangerously depleting hydro (river generation). Just meeting Climate goals would require replacing most of this generation, not including doubling generation trying to keep California's car culture intact. We need to get a lot more creative about our transportation fixes.
Solar, utility-scale or distributed, is no cure-all. All electric generation has environmental costs, so too solar, and adding a bunch of batteries makes the environmental impact worse. That said, PV is only an initial solar technology. Everything green on this planet is solar fueled, we still have plenty to learn.
I had a job pushing renewables back in 1990s' California. I worked with a diverse coalition of NGOs, elected officials, bureaucrats, businesses, and citizens to get people to start buying electricity generated from renewable sources. Among others, we helped the cities of Santa Monica and Oakland, a pretty good spectrum of the state all said, to start installing solar on some of their rooftops.
We were the most successful component of the otherwise now forgotten disaster – California's 1996 electricity deregulation legislation, passed unanimously by both houses of the legislature. When the whole thing collapsed in 2000, in a whirling cesspool of fraud and dysfunction, ending with generator scammed blackouts, our program, the legislation's most successful endeavor, greatly disliked by the utilities and more than a few environmentalists, was the first unplugged. To paraphrase Mr. Dylan, there's no failure like success.
Once again, the legislature made it illegal to buy electricity from anyone but the utilities. There goes six years of a life. Reason for leaving last position? It’s now illegal. A decade previously, I had come to the conclusion that without reform our broken politics would become increasingly detrimental to American life, this blow landed squarely on my head. Amusingly enough, I thought I was getting out of politics by working on energy. Energy wars, they ain't nothing new. All I could think about California's political class, in the immortal words of Californian and 37th President of the United States, Richard Milhous Nixon, “Cocksuckers!”
Don't get me wrong. I spent a quarter of century living in the great State of California, and besides this incident, a big and rotten one, it was always California Love.
Ironically enough, solar's recent two decades of growth started with the collapse of California's electric restructuring. Per America of the last few decades, establishment failure causes the disgorging of vast amounts of money, the greater the failure, the more money (see Ukraine as the most recent example). A lot of money poured out of California's coffers, including money helping spark solar's present development.
A few years ago, after spending over a year in Nigeria and Tanzania, I was in LA, meeting up with a friend and coconspirator from those renewable days. He invited me to sit and talk to a group of young people he was working with on energy and other environmental matters. I told them the biggest thing I learned in my recent African sojourn was the need to focus a lot more energy intensive activities during the day, when that great fusion reactor in the sky was pumping all sorts of free energy.
Phew, they didn't want to hear that.
“No really, I've just lived with tens of million people's doing just that,” I countered.
Nope, didn't want to hear it.
Of course there's a universe of possible alternatives between present day energy consumption in the US and Tanzania, but the American mind immediately equates energy change with deprivation. I thought to myself, “The Boomers' children, Jesus, what else can be expected?” If you do the math, their children are, more or less, only the third generation of Americans to grow up with on-demand energy. All energy change, except more, is a hard sell. Over decades of experience, I knew their parents never wanted to discuss doing anything about energy, when for years just cutting the obscene waste would do wonders.
So, I ended the discussion, “Gotta go.”
The LA Times also has a short interview with energy historian Vaclav Smil. His points are simple: energy use is infused across every aspect of what's deemed modern life; moving away from fossil fuels will be no simple, quick, or easy transition; and the place to start is with the massive waste.
The politics of technology are complex. They have defined the past. They're going to define the future, whether we want to recognize them or not.