Solar Power #3: More On Disruption

My father and I resumed our conversation the following day. This time we were on our way to coffee. I was driving him to the Starbucks up at the intersection of Academy and Tramway.

Consider the utility company, he said.

I considered.

Utilities, and power companies in general (he said) appeared at a very specific point in our civilization's existence. They came about when we could only generate electricity by making big metal things move around in a circle. Dynamos, generators, and so on are basically just that…enormous metal wheels that rotate in a magnetic field. That's how you get electricity.

And so we built and sheltered large companies which did nothing but that. They constructed wheels and turned them, using coal or oil or gas or nuclear power to do it.

Okay, but now we have cheap solar power. Suppose you had every house with a roof covered with such solar cells. Each home generates a certain amount of electricity, uses some, and whatever is left over it puts back into the power grid, where it is stored and used later on.

Okay, if that's case, my father asked, what do you need a utility for?


*

Of course, he said, there's always a need for the power grid, and for some way of storing energy, and probably for backup generation in case of emergency…

But, if you had enough houses producing their own solar energy, and feeding that energy back into the grid, then things get interesting. You start to ask why you have quite so many big companies building gigantic wheels and making them go around in circles. You wonder why you are paying …though your tax dollars as well as via your utility bills…for all that coal that's being strip-mined out of the earth. And the oil that's being taken out of increasingly dangerous places…like Iraq, where we seem to have fought a full-scale war expressly for the benefit of the oil industry. And the natural gas that's being gotten by means of fracking every piece of rock from here to hell and back again. And the nuclear reactors that are, somehow, sitting in the way of tidal waves like in a Japan a while back. And the enormous dams that contain mountains of concrete and take billions of dollars to construct.

Again, he said, that isn't to say you wouldn't have some of those things about. The utilities, the coal mines, the generators, the coal mines, the oil wells, and, yes, even the nuclear reactors would still exist.

But we wouldn't need quite so many of them.

Maybe we'd only need a very, very few.

Which would make things…complicated. And certain people…very important people…might be angry.

Because, you see, they might lose quite a lot of money.

And people fight over money.

Always.


*

We came to the Starbucks. I parked the car and we entered. We found a table and we had our coffees.

I asked him if he really thought powerful people might genuinely be willing to use certain measures …fierce measures…against those who would promote solar power.

He raised an eyebrow. He pointed out that I was the one with two degrees in history. What did I think? What had I seen in the past to indicate the future?

And…

Despite the hot coffee. Despite the warm weather of this desert state.

I was chill.