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TODAY Tuesday 27 May 1997 Each weekday. Conn Nugent on what's new in the world, on the site. |
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TODAY Tuesday 27 May 1997 Each weekday. Conn Nugent on what's new in the world, on the site. |
TODAY IN THE WORLD: Solar Hippies
Last week Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott addressed the Independent Petroleum Association of America. He assured his listeners that their industry was the engine for economic growth and prosperity in the country. He also took a passing shot at pie-in-the-sky energy alternatives. About solar power he said: "This is the hippies' program from the '70s and they're still pushing this stuff."
That's about half right.
The culture of solar energy, with which I was involved during the late '70s and early '80s, was comprised of two sub-cultures: the technos and the hippies. The distinctions were hardly impermeable, and everyone knew engineers who smoked dope and freaks who made databases. But there was definitely a division, and it played itself out along mechanical and aesthetic lines.
The technos basically accepted the consumer demand of mainline America and tried to devise strategies for meeting that demand with much less reliance on fossil fuels. Energy conservation was Step One, including insulation, new kinds of glazing, efficient motors, fluorescent bulbs and the like. Step Two was renewable energy production, particularly through solar-heated hot water, photovoltaic electricity, and varieties of power generated by wind.
The hippies emphasized the need to change the consumer demand itself. For the earth to endure, its people needed to reconnect to it. We needed to reduce the distance between our lives and the sources of our sustenance: we should grow our food, erect our shelter, and make our art. Solar machines were all right in their place -- windmills in particular were popular -- but the two favorite solar energy strategies for the hippies were south-facing windows and wood-burning stoves.
Two decades later, both sub-cultures have their fiascoes and their vindications. And both must ruefully admit that the low price of fossil fuels -- so much lower today than any of us bad prophets had foreseen in the '70s -- constitutes the main barrier to the solar future of our visions.
The great techno failure is solar-heated hot water. The biggest reason for the tiny percentage of sun-warmed water in this country is the lag time between buying solar panels and recouping your investment through lower utility bills; the length of that lag time, in its turn, is a function of the relative inexpensiveness of oil and natural gas. Another reason is that there aren't sufficient numbers of qualified contractors promoting, installing, and repairing the panels, the pipes, and the monitoring equipment. But not to be underestimated is the tendency of solar panels to look really unattractive. If your house faces due south and if your roof is pitched at an angle between 30 degrees and 60 degrees, you can lay the panels flat and they don't look too terrible. Otherwise -- renewable-energy eyesores.
Windmills are a half-success. The dream of the Wind Model-T -- a cheap, reliable generator for the backyards of the masses -- has been replaced by the dream of the Wind Farm, an array of machines sited to exploit reliably steady, strong breezes. Again, the main impediment has been cheap fossil fuel, but there's also the difficult technical issue of efficiencies in transmission. A giant wind farm in North Dakota, for example, could generate vast amounts of power; the trick is to get that power to where millions of people live without dissipating too much of it en route. Electrical engineers are optimistic, though, and the chances are pretty good that we'll see a wind power breakthrough in the next decade.
The technos' big success is probably photovoltaics, the panels of silicon chips that convert sunshine directly into electricity. Even with cheap fossil fuels, the prices of PVs are getting competitive at last. Efficiencies over the last twenty years have increased to such a degree that PVs are economically more attractive than laying in transmission lines for remote areas not yet electrified. Moreover, photovoltaics are more easily integrated into conventional building designs than solar hot water panels; you can even buy roof shingles that have photovoltaic arrays built right into them. Pricey, but definitely an interesting direction.
The hippie failures encompass both technology and lifestyle. The technological failures include an over-reliance on non-durable plastic glazings that cracked, clouded and degraded over time, littering yards and landfills with greenhouses and sunporches that lasted a few good years at most. Woodstoves turned out to be little air polluters (they're now sold with catalytic converters) and greenhouse gas emitters. Few site-built windmills still operate. But south-facing windows, coupled with tight construction, ample insulation, and some thermal mass -- what's called a "passive solar" approach -- are still a very good idea, easily accommodating traditional designs.
Nor were the hippies wrong about lifestyle. The satisfactions of the homegrown and the home-produced are now readily acknowledged by the great American Pop Culture. Gardening is up, do-it-yourself construction is up. The problem is that people do these things as leisure activities, as a form of therapy to counterbalance the hectic demands of the core of salaried life. Twenty years ago, my colleagues at the New Alchemy Institute on Cape Cod showed how clever architecture and bio-design allowed people to live year-round in unusual-looking buildings that heated themselves and grew fish and vegetables for their occupants and neighbors. What we did not fully appreciate was that not many people, not even many of us, were yet willing to change their lives very much because of it. The satisfactions of careers and the marketplace, the undeniable conveniences of cheap oil -- these things matter. We shall see what's in store for the solar future, Senator Lott notwithstanding.
TODAY ON THE SITE
Three of our High Fives are especially pertinent to this discussion, and are recommended to anyone wanting more Web-based information on solar technologies. Look into Energy (and Environment) by Victoria Chanse; Energy (Renewables) by Jeff Birkby; and, of course, Solar by George Mokray.
5/23: Spiffy Cars, Clunker Bikes
5/22: Petroleum Heresy
5/21: We Irish
5/20: Shallow Backpackers
5/19: Songbirds
5/16: Fat, Fat, Fat
5/15: Our Forthright Administration
5/14: Coral Reefs of the Sahara
5/13: (Life Before) Death and Taxes
5/12: Kids
5/09: Free Trade and Hormones
5/08: Sherry Boehlert, Republican
5/07: Fort Davis, West Texas
5/06: Europe (yawn)
5/05: Divorce, Mothers, Equality
5/02: Killer Grannies and the Highway Bill
5/01: China
4/30: Pity the Mangrove
4/29: Grizzlies off Battery Park
4/28: Mighty Monsanto
4/25: Growth
4/24: Refrigerator Wars
4/23: The Day the Earth Day Stood Still
4/22: Doorman Ecology
4/21: Toyota Steps Out
4/18: Victims of Extremism
4/17: Our White Guy Problem
4/16: Coca-Cola and the Merrit Parkway