[Oe List ...] On solar energy

[George Holcombe]

An important statement on the future from Alternet.

The Revolution Will Be Solarized
By David Roberts, Grist Magazine. Posted December 2, 2006.

Author Travis Bradford says that solar energy will eventually break  
the hold that centralized power companies have on our energy grids.

Solar power has been the Next Big Thing for decades now, yet it  
remains a niche player in the energy world. The problem of  
intermittency is unsolved, up-front capital costs remain high, and  
surging demand for polysilicon, a key component of solar panels, has  
recently outstripped supply, stifling production.So when someone  
claims that within decades solar photovoltaic technology will come to  
dominate the world's energy portfolio -- with or without subsidies,  
with or without rising fossil-fuel prices, with or without new  
environmental legislation -- one could be forgiven a degree of  
skepticism.

But Travis Bradford is no hippie idealist. The author of Solar  
Revolution: The Economic Transformation of the Global Energy Industry  
spent the early years of his career in corporate acquisitions and  
private equity funds -- not fields that reward irrational exuberance.  
His book is based on research and analyses done at his Massachusetts  
think tank, the Prometheus Institute for Sustainable Development,  
working from what he claims are conservative assumptions about market  
and capital trends.

Those trends, he says, are inexorable: Just as revolutions have  
transformed the information and communication sectors, solar power  
will break the hold of sclerotic, centralized power companies.

Roberts: Your book's central claim is pretty bold.

Bradford: Thanks for recognizing that.

It's not just that we're moving toward alternatives, it's that we're  
moving toward distributed [power generation] as well. If both of  
those are true, solar is the only viable option.

Solar is different from other energy technologies in that it delivers  
energy at the point of use, directly to the end user. That allows it  
to circumvent the entire supply chain. It's not another option for a  
utility, it's a competitor to a utility -- the first time utilities  
have really had a competitor.

The best way to describe it is with an anecdote about cell phones. We  
used to have these monopoly telephone infrastructure players. They  
controlled everything, and they had all the processing power at  
central switching stations. You had these dummy terminals that you  
just picked up; you had a connection, but no brains. All the brains  
were in the center of the network. And then these cell-phone  
producers came along and, in the Telecommunications Act of '96, were  
given access to the telephone grid. They began to go completely  
around the supply chain and offer competing services to the same  
customers, wireless and easier. The telephone utilities ... first  
they ignored it, then they tried to fight it legislatively, and when  
they lost that they tried to fight it economically. Eventually they  
just decided, screw it, we're going to buy them. Today those are the  
most profitable parts of their business. That's the transformation.

This also happened in computers. We went from large, centralized  
mainframes with dummy terminals to a distributed hybrid architecture.

Solar is slowly going to begin to unwind the existing utility  
economics, to the point where utilities decide they have to get in or  
they risk losing their core business -- exactly the transformations  
we've lived through in the last 20 years.

The solar revolution does not require new breakthroughs in  
technology. You could do it with the technology we have, scaling it  
up and learning how to do it incrementally better every year -- which  
is what naturally happens with scale.

Roberts: Solar is mainly used for electricity, which represents just  
over a third of energy use. How do you account for transportation fuels?

Bradford: We'll never solve the problem of transportation until we  
reconnect the transportation and electricity infrastructures. There's  
not enough liquid fuels.

I'm not a big fan of biofuels -- on close examination their  
environmental impact is wretched. What it does is export part of our  
energy price for transportation through the grocery store, right? We  
end up subsidizing the cost of our transportation infrastructure in  
the price of food stocks. Biofuels will solve some problems, but at  
the end of the day there's not enough land in the entire Mississippi  
River Valley to meet our transportation needs. And then where would  
we get food from? There's cellulosic, but that's only another 10  
percent.

There are real capacity constraints in any transportation-fuel option  
until we reconnect it with the electricity infrastructure. You do  
that either with plug-in hybrids or with electrolyzed hydrogen. My  
guess is that batteries will be better for transportation purposes,  
and electrolyzed hydrogen for stationary applications, because fuel  
cells on site are much easier to make than fuel cells with the thrust  
needed in automobiles.

Other than industrial processes, we use thermal applications in  
heating and hot water. There are electric analogs to both of them. We  
can have electric hot water heaters just as easily as gas hot water  
heaters. We can have electric home heating. Historically it was  
believed that thermal applications were about a third the price of  
electricity-based heating applications, but that was based on $2 per  
thousand cubic-foot natural gas and whatever the prevailing price of  
electricity was. These have come a whole lot more in parity, and in a  
lot of places in the world, electric heat's the way they go.

Everything has to reconnect. The infrastructures that separated --  
first at the beginning of the century, and again in the middle of the  
century for natural-gas infrastructure -- have to reconnect. And  
we'll need a lot more electricity to drive that.

Roberts: A lot more. What do you do about coal?

Bradford: Coal is the enemy of the human race.

Roberts: There's my pull quote. Do you think solar's going to beat coal?

Bradford: Solar's going to change the electricity infrastructure in a  
way that will make coal unnecessary. This distributed architecture is  
going to get to the point where wind and geothermal, where available,  
take over a lot of the baseload needs; solar will meet a lot of the  
peak needs, and some of the base needs during the day. The  
combination of these portfolios will make coal irrelevant. Wind and  
thermal are nearly as cheap as coal, if not cheaper, and coal still  
enjoys tremendous subsidies. Under certain circumstances nuclear  
power would be OK, but I highly doubt those circumstances can be met.

Solar is a universal system available inversely with the wealth of  
the nation. The richest countries have less and the poorest countries  
have more.

Roberts: What about areas that get little sunlight -- like, say,  
Seattle?

Bradford: The sun is shining, just not as brightly here as it is in  
the desert. Seattle gets about half the sun of Los Angeles, for  
instance.

Historically, the cost of solar drops about 5 to 6 percent per annum,  
just based on the volume of growth and natural learning. If that  
continues -- and I use even more conservative estimates than that,  
showing the learning rates slow down a little bit -- you get to the  
point that solar in Seattle is cost-effective 10 years later than  
solar in Los Angeles. Ten years is not a very long time in terms of  
energy infrastructure. It's the blink of an eye, when you're thinking  
about planning and zoning.

Solar's taking off right now in Germany and Japan, which have as  
little sun as Seattle. It's taken off because of some good political  
will; they've ended up subsidizing renewables as much as they've  
subsidized existing fossil-fuels infrastructure. They've leveled the  
playing field a little bit better than we have.

Solar's not going to be the only solution. It's going to be part -- a  
surprisingly large part -- of a portfolio of solutions. Its limits  
are not a problem we're going to have to deal with for at least two  
or three decades. By the time we reach a point where solar's problems  
might be binding, we'll already have a set of options to deal with  
them -- storage solutions will be three decades ahead. By that time  
we're generating a quarter of our energy on solar anyway.

Roberts: A good problem to have.

Bradford: Exactly.

Roberts: It's always the supply side that gets press and attention,  
but utilities and utility regulations are a bottleneck. What's going  
to happen grid-wise?

Bradford: Deregulation has allowed utilities to squeeze their spare  
capacity. They've been able to reconfigure assets and put off  
upgrading their infrastructure. The grid today is deeply  
underinvested in. So it's getting frailer -- that's what the blackout  
in Brooklyn this summer was all about. The upgrades are too  
expensive; they can't afford it under the current rate structures.

The grid infrastructure is problematic, but distributed solutions  
help solve that. The utilities have already been moving toward  
distributed natural-gas plants. Solar provides a great alternative  
for utilities that don't want to invest in line extensions and  
upgrades. Ultimately utility providers are going to figure out that  
they want this hybrid infrastructure. They'll get to a point where  
they're participating in and pushing the process rather than ignoring  
or resisting it.

I've talked to a number of senior managers and board members at  
utilities around the country. One of them -- a board member of a  
Northeastern utility -- said to me, "We don't know what to do, but  
the writing's on the wall, and the conversation is occurring at the  
board level at every utility around the country: How do we migrate  
our systems to a renewable, distributed system?" The conversations  
are being had, but these are slow-moving entities.

Roberts: Bush's Asia-Pacific climate pact is a trade deal to  
facilitate U.S. nuclear and coal industries selling their older  
technologies in the developing world. There's a rush to build up  
traditional electricity infrastructure in the developing world. Will  
it succeed?

Bradford: They're going to be successful in some places. But the  
reality is that grid infrastructures are not economic in low-density,  
low-income nations. If they were anywhere close to economic they  
would have been built already. You'll have integrated policy  
environments like China, where they've got 96 percent grid  
electrification and lots of coal. But in the vast majority of the  
under-electrified or non-electrified countries, solar's already the  
cheapest option.

Roberts: It's frequently said that the U.S. is falling behind in 21st- 
century energy industries. Is it true?

Bradford: I often claim that we are in danger of trading our  
addiction to Middle Eastern oil and Russian natural gas for an  
addiction to Chinese polysilicon and solar cells. That is a risk.

But if you look at where the materials come from for the solar  
industry today, while a lot of the cells are made in Germany and  
Japan and a few in China, a majority of the silicon they use comes  
from the United States. We're shipping them the feed stocks, and  
we're making a tremendous amount of money doing it. That's where all  
the profit is in the supply chain right now, because of the shortage.

The U.S. has lost the glamorous parts of the supply chain. But the  
profitable and the potentially path-breaking parts like thin-film  
solar are still here. If we don't get in the game, those will go  
away, too. We are at risk of losing those, but right now we actually  
have a pretty strong position, at least in solar.

Roberts: Are you a "crash and contraction are inevitable"  
environmentalist or an Amory Lovins-style techno-optimist?

Bradford: I am definitely in the latter family. The way I  
characterize those two schools of thought are the defense school and  
the offense school. The defense school is filling the sandbags --  
they think we have passed the point of no return, so their strategies  
to cope are defense-based strategies. My deepest concern is that the  
defense crowd is right. But I'm not ready to play defense yet.

If we're going to solve the problem, the solar revolution is a  
necessary and significant component of the solution.

Roberts: If.

Bradford: We all live with what we believe to be true and what we  
fear to be true.

Roberts: Will the decentralization of power production be accompanied  
by a decentralization of political power?

Bradford: Solar power is empowering. All things being equal, people  
like to control the resources upon which they rely. That's why I  
spend time thinking about solar technologies rather than centralized,  
easily controlled technologies. At the end of the day, sustainability  
includes distributed power and democratization.



Tagged as: energy, solar power
David Roberts is a staff writer at Grist.


George Holcombe
14900 Yellowleaf Tr.
Austin, TX 78728
Home: 512/252-2756
Mobile 512/294-5952
geowanda at earthlink.net


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