May 28, 2010
It’s sometimes tough, when supposedly writing about solar, the whole of solar, and nothing but solar, to keep from straying into all kinds of peripheral fields.
Poor writing discipline? Almost certainly (along with atrocious penmanship), but an understandable fault, because solar power affects and is affected by so many externalities - utility pricing, climate change mitigation, nuclear policy, market equities, water supplies and more - that one can’t consider it in isolation.
Of course, if our existing energy regime were truly clean, reliable and sustainable we’d have no reason to tinker with, or write about, photons, ions, heliostats and heat exchange fluids. Trouble is, we know better.
We know, for instance, that we can’t keep burdening our waters with mercury and our air with particulates from coal-burning plants. We know that we can’t combat the problems that oil brings to our environment by finding more oil, or finding it in different forms. We know that we can’t entrust our energy future to nuclear technology unless we as citizens are prepared to underwrite the construction costs - and inevitable overruns - of every reactor built, and commit ourselves to a power source with no solution to its waste problem and an insatiable demand for water in a drying world. We also know that no amount of success in other fields, including health care, education, and anti-terrorism, will mean anything if our planet’s climate is unable to sustain our species.
Most of all, we know that Solar is at least part of the response to everything else we know. Even if we doubt the evidence of climate change, we must know that dependence on a diminishing source of energy derived from “remains of dinosaurs and their urine”, as Rocky Mountain Institute founder Amory Lovins recently put it, is a fool’s game. If we don’t turn away from that kind of fuel, and fast, it will fast turn away from us. And when that happens, it will be too late to start thinking about where to site all those wind farms, whether to raise CAFE standards above 35 mpg, and how to convince homeowners’ associations to allow solar panels on their color-coordinated roofs. Those are decisions we should have taken long ago and be implementing now. (more…)
