I am a born again Solar Power Freak #1

I seem to be becoming a solar power freak. This is weird. This is very weird. This is downright alarming.

Here's the thing: many decades ago, in my long lost youth, when dinosaurs ruled the earth and people actually listened to disco (No. Really. They did), I paid a lot of attention to solar power. This was the 1970s and we were just getting our first taste of energy famine. OPEC had just screwed the tap down tight and it seemed pretty clear that it was a sign of things to come. (And it was.)

So I spent some time casting about for alternatives. What, I wondered, could take the place of oil. One of the things I looked at was solar power.

There are several ways of extracting electricity for sunlight. You can, for instance, focus the sun's rays on a boiler. Water turns to steam and turns a turbine. In the 1970s, I could even see such a system in operation. I was living in New Mexico in those days (as I am now) and Sandia Federal Labs had an enormous solar power program underway.

It was quite amazing, really. On some land south of the city, the scientists had constructed an enormous field of mirrors which focused the sun's light on a tower in their midst. You could see it from almost any place in town. And when it was in operation…Lord! The tower glowed like steel in a blast furnace.

As I say, impressive. The problem? It actually produced very little energy. Not really. Oh, it could turn water to steam and turn a turbine and all that, but it also consumed power, usually in passive ways. My father was working at Sandia at the time, and he put it simply and distressingly. "As near as I can tell," he told me, "it can produce almost enough energy to keep its own mirrors clean."

That was the kicker, you see. You don't just stick a mirror or lens out in a field and hope for the best. It gets dusty, particularly in a desert, and you have to polish it. Or it degrades in the environment. Ordinary mirrors lose their reflectiveness after a while, which is why antique mirrors often seem so dim and brown. So, you need to develop entirely new kinds of mirrors, things what will stay bright even after decades in the open. And, at the time, there were no such mirrors out there, or at least none that could be produced cheaply enough to make solar competitive with oil or coal.

*

Okay, that seemed to pretty well take solar boilers out of the game…at least in most parts of the world. So, I turned to photovoltaics…that is, solar cells, materials that turn sunlight directly into energy. It's what people usually think when they say "solar power."

Solar cells are quick and convenient. You could use them pretty much anywhere. You can plaster your roof with 'em.

So, why not go with them?

Because…in the 1970s, they cost a lot, and they weren't too efficient, and they tended to degrade (like mirrors) over time. I remember looking at the numbers. In those days, solar cells were proven money losers. They consumed more energy to produce and maintain than they could possibly generate.

And that, as far as I was concerned, put paid to that.

I decided (around about 1980), that solar simply wasn't in the cards. What we needed to do, I thought, was focus on developing some other means of power production…Fusion, in particular. And, until we got that problem licked, we'd need to rely on a combination of oil, coal, and gas.

Which was about where my thinking stopped.


*


Okay, now fast-forward about thirty years. Give or take a little.

I began, dimly, in my limited way, to notice some things.

Like, for instance: the cost of solar cells has dropped like a gawdamn rock. I meant it has freaking plummeted. New manufacturing technologies, plus the advantages of sheer scale as more and more companies have come into the solar cell business, has brought them way, way down in price. (As I write this in early 2014, I can get enough solar panels to almost power my whole house for under $2K, depending on the supplier.)

And they've gotten more efficient. New solar cells are getting damn competitive with oil, gas, and coal in terms of generating energy…and they're getting better every day.

But the real news isn't in the cells themselves. It is in lots of other stuff. Like that batteries are getting better now. And a lot of our electronics don't consume that much energy any more. Your cell phone does things that would put a mainframe computer of the year 1980 to shame…but consumes so little power that it can be charged in under hour from any outlet.

And then there's weight. Things don't weigh what they used to. Which means it doesn't require as much energy to move them.

Case in point: in New Mexico there's a company named Titan Areospace. It makes drone aircraft. Not the kind that blow up people. Rather, the kind that drift up to high altitudes and hang out there for, say, five years or so.

And guess what? They're solar powered.

Titan just got bought by Google which is interested in the aircraft as alternatives to satellites for the delivery of wireless Internet (take that, Comcast! And Verizon!)

But Titan's drones would be impossible were it not for a host of new materials, new batteries, and new everything else. They are so bloody light, and so energy efficient, that they can cruise the skies, and do it all without a drop of jet fuel.


*

It was ironic, really. For years I'd been waiting for a technological revolution in energy production…fusion, thorium fission, space-based power satellites…and all the while the revolution was coming from quite a different quarter, from materials science.

But, better late than never. I now more or less admit that "renewables" in general and solar in particular are going to be a major part of our energy future. I still think we ought to keep up work on things like fusion and space-based power and all that other stuff. I also still think that solar power advocates need to face up to just how hard it is going to be to build a solar powered economy. And I suspect that, yes, there will always be a need for big generators somewhere in the system, if only to provide for backup or to power industry.

But clearly, the sun is going to be a very big part of our energy future.

Now, that said…I also think that solar is going to be a disruptive technology. Maybe even as disruptive as computers were before them. Maybe more.

Which is to say that there will be people who fight it, and progress in general, tooth and nail.

But that's for next time…

.3%

More thoughts on energy ....


I want to draw your attention to an advertisement.

It's not a bad ad. It's not misleading. I'm not about to launch off into another tedious tirade about Lies-From-Madison-Avenue.

But it is an ad that concerns me all the same.

You've probably seen it. It's been in a lot of the glossy print publications. At the top there is a large photo of a number of women—I believe they may be of the Tuareg people, but I'm not sure. Below that there is, on the left, the name of the sponsoring company, and, on the right, the following: "0.3% of Saharan solar energy could power Europe."

And that's what worries me.

Here's why. It lends itself to a kind of thinking that I encounter a lot among our decision-making elites. Specifically, it suggests that the energy crisis is a simple problem with a simple cure. All we have to do is [insert preferred solution here] and everything will be fine.

But there's the rub. That's not true.

Let's just take this ad. Again, I have no quarrel with the company that ran it. But that "0.3 %" which seems so quick and easy, is troubling.

There are a lot of unanswered questions behind that little number three. First, three tenths of a percent of the "solar energy" which falls on the Sahara might indeed power all of Europe, but can we catch it? What sort of collectors are we talking about? Are these solar cells? Mirrors focusing light on a boiler? Either way, what sort of efficiency is involved? Are the solar cells capable of turning 100% of all the energy that falls on into usable electricity? Last time I checked, the best of them does about 10%. That's good, but it isn't 100%.

But, let's say for the sake of argument that we can capture .3% of all the light that falls in the Sahara. Or that .3% is all we need even given the efficiencies of current technologies. If so, what does that mean in terms of construction? Do we put flat panel collectors or mirrors over .3% of the whole desert? The Sahara is about 3.3 million square miles. My math isn't good, but I believe that translates out to being about ten thousand square miles. For comparison, Rhode Island is about a thousand square miles.

Okay, let's say we are really going to cover all that territory with mirrors or panels. How are we going to pay for it? And, once we've done it, how are we going to keep them upright in a sandstorm? How are we going to maintain them? How are we going to keep them clean? Each time they get dusty, after all, their efficiency drops. Are we going to employ millions of Berbers to dash about the desert with squeegees?

Let's say we've got those problems licked. There are still lots of others to worry about—like, how do we store the energy we get? How do we transmit it? How do we protect the installations from sabotage? Particularly given the political instability of the region?

And on, and on, and on.

Now, this is not to say that these problems couldn't be dealt with. In fact, I notice that European scientists have indeed looked at all the issues and pronounced a Saharan solar facility "the size of Wales" quite feasible.

But it won't be a quick fix or a cheap one. And the same is true for any solution to the energy crisis that we can conceive. Clean nukes, controlled fusion, wind turbines, tidal power, rooftop solar…whatever.

But no one in power seems to be saying that. What we hear instead is that oh-so-seductive "all we have to do is X…" and everything will be just ducky.

Which is scary.

We are going to have to deal with the energy crisis. It isn't going to be easy. It is going to cost us big money. It is going to take a long time. Our standard of living is going to decline until we're finished. But it has to be done…for our children's sake, if not our own.

And having our leaders pretend otherwise is dangerous if only because it lulls us into the belief that we can delay action until some convenient time in the future.

But there will never be a convenient time.

So, let us act. Let us demand that our leaders confront reality and be honest about it. Let them know that they must speak the hard truth, or we will find someone who can.

We cannot survive anything else. We cannot again descend, again, into the delusions…the pleasant but deadly dreams…of a .3% solution.

What Isn't Being Said

Hello, Everyone,

I'm shopping a shorter version of the material below to op-ed pages at various newspapers. So far, no one has taken the bait. But, you never can tell…

In the meantime, here it is, submitted for your approval.



[head] What isn't being said

By Michael Jay Tucker





It is what they don't say that freaks me out.

I mean the debate in Washington (and everywhere else) on the current Recession. Like you, and probably like everyone else in America, I've been watching while Right, Left, and Center battle about it. It's rather awe-inspiring, really. Economists and scholars and pundits and people who look really, really good on Fox TV are slugging it out big time, and all of knows exactly What Is To Be Done.

But, have you noticed? They all disagree with one another, very loudly. Some of them invoke Ayn Rand, others Baron Keynes, but no matter what their ideological orientation, they are united on a single premise. To wit, they hold the Recession is (for lack of a better word) a managerial issue. Their underlying assumption is that the crisis was brought about by unwise policies on the part of someone in office—the Republicans under George W. Bush by failing to properly police Wall Street, or the Democrats under Barack Obama through deficit spending (which seems somewhat improbable, given that Recession began before Obama's election, but that's beside the point).

But, this is followed by an equally fascinating corollary—i.e., that having been created by one set of policies, the Recession can be made to go away again by the imposition of another, wiser set. Once we reduce taxes or increase them, introduce more regulation or less of it, things will "get back to normal."

In other words, everyone in the debate—everyone!—seems to hold that our current crisis is subject to bureaucratic pressure, and that the proper group of experts could end it by changing the regulatory environment of the economy.

That's comforting, because it seems to give us the power over our situation. We just keep trying to various solutions on offer—Republic, Democratic, Tea Party, Socialist Workers, whoever—until one of them works. And surely, they can't ALL be wrong. Can they?

But…what if they are? All wrong, that is.

What if the Recession has nothing to do with policy? What if it in fact reflects material, structural problems in the nation as whole? And nothing we can do—no matter who's Chairman of the Fed, no matter how much we fiddle with capital gains or impose new regulations on Wall Street—is going to change things? What if, in short, we're screwed?

For instance, let's talk about energy costs. There are other problems as well (like de-industrialization) but, for the moment, let's just stick with energy.

It doesn't take a genius to notice that energy costs have been going up consistently for the last half century.

Which is a problem, because our society is based on fuel. Consider food. Any time you eat, you eat fossil fuels. You were able to ease your hunger because our society has the oil, gas, coal, or whatever to power the pumps that irrigate our fields, the tractors that harvest our crops, the trucks and trains that carry that food to our cities, and the freezers and stoves that we use to preserve and cook it. Oh, and by the way, once we've eaten it, we need still more pumps, and still more energy, to carry it all away again…or else we drown in our own sewage.

Which means, in turn, that each time energy costs go gone up, so too does the cost of everything we use that energy to produce, refine, transport, or prepare. Which is pretty much everything. And, so, every time energy costs go up, we get a little poorer.

And, it has only just begun. You can argue about whether we've reached "peak oil production," but what is undeniably true is that we've pumped out all the oil that was easy, safe, and convenient to get. From now on, we're going to get our fuels from places that are hard to reach, politically unstable, or just flat out dangerous. Oil is going to go get more expensive, and everything else is too.

And there's absolutely nothing we can do about it.

Not…that is… until we can push energy prices back down.

I'm not sure how we're going to do that. Maybe we'll invent a 100% efficient solar cell. Maybe we'll get clean nukes. Maybe we'll finally get fusion power up and running. But, until we do, things are going to be hard. We will only know the sort of prosperity we knew in the 1950s and the 1960s when the cost of energy is, again, measured in fractions of cents, rather than multiples of dollars.

Which is what scares me. Nothing I've said here is a secret. We all know this.

But, have you heard anyone say it? I mean, among the People Who Know Best? Our Leaders? Our elites? Have you heard any of them say, "Here's the grim reality: if we are to survive, we must invest in alternatives to fossil fuels. It is going to take time and money. We will have to develop basic technologies and build considerable infrastructure. We will solve the problem eventually, but it may be twenty years before we even start to see results, and over that period there were be far fewer resources to do other things. It isn't going to be pleasant, but that's the choice we've got."

No. We haven't heard them because they haven't said it.

I certainly haven't heard them say this. And that scares me to death. Because someone…some man or woman among them…needs to say these things to us, and needs to say them soon.

The alternative, and I fear it is all too likely, is that we awaken one morning to discover that the sun, in fact, has not arisen. And we are condemned, forever, to that famous darkling plain, wondering only which ignorant army will claim us next.







Copyright © Michael Jay Tucker 2010