Renewable Energy, continued

Misconceptions

The first point I would like to make is about the availability of information on alternative-energy sources. The oil crisis of the early 1970s was the first time in the post-war growth era that Americans and American government seriously questioned the wisdom of our overwhelming reliance on petroleum products, which had become the very foundation of our lifestyles. This questioning was a reaction to higher prices more than anything else; unfortunately, it did not lead many to ask fundamental, systemic questions, but simply, what new products could we insert in what parts of the energy chain to keep everything pretty much the same? Only those on the radical fringe attached themselves to (and have clung to) the idea that maybe something basic to the system itself needs to change. Indeed, all that was needed was for oil/gas prices to fall again for most people to forget that there ever had been a glitch in their energy regime.

I have found that information on alternatives is not exactly easy to come by. Take Western Washington University's Wilson library for example. (This may not be the best example, but is an example nevertheless.) The vast majority of the titles that Wilson has on "renewable energy" are from the 1970s. The only recent material is in the form of government documents related to bills and laws instituted under Clinton, California's zero-emissions-vehicles statutes, etc. One might get the impression that little has been happening of late, that folks realized 20 years ago or so that alternative-energy stuff was all just a pipe dream. Another example is this: the flimsy, 60-page, stapled report entitled "Progress in Solar Energy Technologies and Applications" claims to be "one of the most exhaustive and authoritative assessments of the state of solar technologies made in recent years" (American Solar Energy Society 1994, p. 10).

Nevertheless, as John Berger notes in his 1997 book Charging Ahead:

"Solar cell panels that cost $1000 a peak watt in the 1960s and $30 in the early 1970s were only $4 by the mid-1990s, and costs are still decreasing rapidly. Wind power that cost on the order of 30 cents a kilowatt-hour in the late 1970s cost only 5-7 cents in 1995, with new capacity available at just 3.5-4 cents a kilowatt-hour in the windiest areas." (p.5)

One would think that advances like these, among others, would lead to more than a 60-page overview. Despite the fact that wind and other technologies have been improving by leaps and bounds, and have been growing in use especially outside of the U.S., Berger's book and similar ones, like The Next Great Thing by Mark Shelton (about Stirling thermal engines and the great, great promise they hold), read largely like laments about the failures of short-sighted policies and generally self-centered, consumptive orientations. These are war stories about visionaries trying to get their ideas off the ground in the cold, bottom-line climate of the post-1970s.

My main critique is that the little material there is in the main about alternative energy systems still largely takes what I would call a substitution view. That is, the conventional understanding has it that all we need to do is, say, add some solar panels here and there, replace gasoline with batteries, use hydrogen instead of propane, etc. There is precious little attention (again, aside from on the fringe) paid to the essential lifestyle choices that are at issue and that need to be addressed squarely.

So it is, for example, that in a discussion, taken from the pages of Scientific American, of energy efficiency for buildings (the maintenance of which is said to be responsible for some 29% of world carbon emissions), so-called "smart houses" are promoted as a reasonable goal (Flavin and Dunn 1997, p. 35; Bevington and Rosenfeld 1990, p. 32). A smart house is supposed to be a giant machine automated by computer (complete with touch-screen interfaces), a machine that optimizes energy consumption and minimizes waste. The failures here are those of falling into the the trap of assuming that all technological evolution is in the direction of efficiency on the one hand, and the trap of believing on the other hand that economy-of-scale always holds true.

There is a myth, touched on in Jeremy Rifkin's book Entropy, that our production systems have been getting more and more efficient; this myth is related to the one that larger always means cheaper per unit (1980, p. 65; pp. 87-91). The truth is that markets and prices set in them are so distorted by both government subsidies and the failure to address full social costs of production that it falsely appears that bigger is always better, or that, for example, latter-day technologies like those found in nuclear plants represent the ultimate in human efficiency achievement. Once full social costs are addressed, it is certain we will find that "small is beautiful," not only in energy terms and ecologically, but economically and socially as well.