There have been many exciting, inspiring, informative diaries recently about the growth of solar energy: Just Signed for my Solar PV system (BrowniesAreGood), Breakthrough GE Turbine Combines Solar, Wind, and Natural Gas for Large-Scale Electrical Production (HoundDog), Why My Plunge Into Solar (chuco35), and You Know that the 21st Century Will Be The Solar Century when... (Lawrence) are just a few examples. Right now, I'd like to take a wistful but plausible journey into what the solar transformation of our economy will look like, and what impact it will have on cities, regions, nations, economies, ecosystems, and cultures.
I'd like to use an FAQ format to organize my thoughts:
1. You refer to our "PV future," but what about solar thermal?
There are clearly many benefits of solar thermal, on both the small and utility scale. For individual homes, the use of solar water heating eliminates the electronic layer between solar energy and one of its most intensive applications. This, I think, will never go away in regions where it's practical - wherever the Sun shines most of the year, it will (IMHO) always be more efficient to use its direct rays for heating than to go through an electronic medium first. However, the story is different for utility-scale solar thermal.
What you have with large ST plants are three advantages over current PV: The technology is simple - mirrors, pipes, steam engines, and vats of heat storage material such as molten salts - in addition to having strong storage capacity, and is well-suited to the centralized utility model of today's electrical system. As a result of these advantages, we can expect new ST plants to blossom all over the world for many years to come. But its advantages are also disadvantages over a longer timeframe: The components of the technology are simple, but its arrangement, management, and maintenance can be demanding and yield increasingly Baroque solutions to improve efficiency since the underlying technology is already so mature. In other words, it will be difficult to find ways to improve it without growing overly complex, or relying on making each plant elephantine in size.
In addition to that, ST needs more space and larger components as a whole system than PV, so its ability to achieve commoditization is far more limited. Don't get me wrong, commoditization will occur: But largely on the component level rather than entire functioning systems. The mass-production of ST components will greatly reduce the fixed costs of ST plants, but the plants themselves cannot be mass-produced: Their ability to generate power stems from integration of the components, rather than from modules that are individually power-producing. A single unit of PV, however, can be individually power-producing, so the mass-production of PV panels is effectively the direct mass-production of solar energy.
With recently introduced systems, you can add power to a PV system by simply adding more panels without having to totally rearrange how the panels are connected, but with most ST systems - particularly heliostats - the system is already designed to be operating at optimum, so adding another mirror would be counterproductive. For ST, then, you have to build entire plants as individual units, so progress occurs in high step-wise fashion with significant barriers to new expansion relative to PV. This will ultimately be decisive in PV's favor - I do not see how it could be otherwise, especially as progress with batteries and other high-volume, commoditized storage erodes the advantages of the heated fluids and moltent salts used in ST plants.
Pretty much the same process applies with storage as with the generation itself: High-volume, unboundedly-extensible, commoditized systems eventually annihilate large, integrated, self-contained systems, however simple they are. A bank of batteries you can just add on to at will would economically swamp a fixed, operationally rigid storage medium that has to stay within the bounds of an equally rigid, integrated system.
Now, that isn't to deprecate the absolute value of ST - it's vastly superior to non-renewable energy systems in every way. But it cannot compete with the eventual economies of scale of PV, and is based on centuries-old technology while PV didn't exist until a few decades ago. At the heart of the dichotomy is a powerful transition that humanity will be making as part of the solar revolution: The marginalization of the heat engine, and the beginning of the rigorously electronic world.
2. What about wind?
Wind power shares many of the long-term disadvantages over PV that ST has - namely, its economies of scale occur at gargantuan module sizes rather than by outputting larger quantities at smaller sizes. In other words, it makes a lot more sense to build a few very large turbines than to build many, much smaller ones, so the economies of scales (as with ST) are entirely in the component production rather than the module production and plant expansion. It does have advantages over ST in the latter, because you can just add more turbines without changing the rest of the windfarm, but individual turbines have become very large.
It'll hang around a lot longer than ST, since wind doesn't compete for the same territory as the two types of solar, but eventually - and I'm speaking very long-term - PV and stored energy from it may be so cheap and ubiquitous that it may become cheaper to just import batteries or build high-efficiency cables to cloudy parts of the world from the solar regions than to service titanic wind farms that are periodically annihilated by severe weather or ocean conditions. Wind power will never go away, but it would join a multitude of relatively expensive harvesting technologies that augment the trivially cheap, ubiquitous global solar power network.
3. What about geothermal?
This actually has staying power, although it will never compete with solar. Since the Earth's magma is heated by radioactive decay in the core, geothermal is basically a steam engine hooked up to an inexhaustible RTG (radioisotope thermoelectric generator) with all of the benefits and none of the problems - the radioactive materials are in the Earth's mantle and core, and can never escape short of a cataclysm that would make radioactive contamination the least of our worries. It's as reliable as it gets, and safe once you figure out how to channel the heat without causing subsidence and earthquakes, but the up-front costs are enormous. Still, they're very desirable in the sub-Arctic regions, although we're now talking about what is essentially a niche application.
4. What global problems will PV solar help resolve?
In truth, the list of global problems PV won't help would be smaller than those it will, but here's a stab at the latter:
- Reduce greenhouse gas emissions. (duh)
- Improve air quality. (duh)
- Make desert land a valuable commodity.
- Electrify rural villages in third-world countries with minimal ecological impact.
- Makes sand into an "energy reserve."
- Sustainable, non-polluting, affordable transition to desalinated seawater becomes possible (this may be one of the areas where ST survives), freeing us from dependence on dwindling glacial runoff and increasingly finicky rainfall patterns.
- Sustainable, ubiquitous, and fast electric transportation.
- Help North African and Middle Eastern countries prosper independently rather than through control and export of a limited and ecologically damaging commodity.
- Increase the overall size of the global economy by decentralizing and commoditizing the direct generation of electricity.
- Liberate governments worldwide from the corrupting influence of centralized energy interests with control of a limited and dwindling resource.
- Give birth to whole new cities and urban regions around concentrations of solar generation, while also liberating people to live far away from centralized infrastructure in comfort.
- Sustainably power the large-scale transportation of desalinated water into continental interiors, transforming minimal-value scrublands and deserts (not chosen for preservation) into whatever we want them to be - manicured suburbs, prairies, gargantuan gardens, or even wooded forests.
- Places humanity on a sturdy energy footing, utilizing a source that can never be exhausted, destroyed, manipulated (in the long-run), monopolized, or denied to any country, any internal population, or even any individual.
That's off the top of my head some of what PV promises.
5. What about materials shortages, such as the 2009 silicon shortage?
While human beings number in the billions, there is essentially no chance that we will run up against absolute material shortages - that is, ones that are based on the firm parameters of the Earth's metallic makeup and our technological ability to access it. Rather, what we run up against are situations where the demand for a metal outstrips the ability of current facilities to process it, and there is a temporary spike in price while new facilities are brought on-line to meet the demand. Sometimes a shortage can be brief and modest in size because it's limited to a single place in the supply chain, where new capacity can be brought on-line relatively quickly.
But sometimes it extends over a large part of the supply chain, and then a lot more work has to be done to expand the infrastructure before supply can increase: E.g., they need to mine silicon at a faster rate, and then need to expand their processing facilities, and then need to expand their transportation of the product, and then the customers need to respond to their newly-met demand by expanding their own throughput, and so on. We will never, ever, ever run into an absolute shortage of silicon - it's everywhere, and present on the Earth's surface in far greater abundances than the basic staples of human life (oxygen, fresh water, and food).
Now, that isn't to trivialize shortages - they can still be quite economically damaging, if there isn't sufficient foresight to plan for bringing new capacity on-line at the right times. And that isn't to say that all the metals used in all PV technologies are abundant - some that are used in certain types of PV, like gallium, are relatively rare. But the fact that it's not abundant has meant that, historically, not much money has been invested in learning how to find and process it efficiently, especially given how few high-volume applications there have been for many of these metals before PV came along. So, as time goes on, the absolute quantities of these metals in circulation will continually increase, even though the price may move jaggedly.
It is possible, as has happened with China recently, for materials to be temporarily constrained by the domination of the mining and processing markets, but it isn't possible to continue that as a general policy: Using such control would merely drive up the cost, motivate other countries to ramp up their own capacity, and thereby undermine the whole point of achieving domination in the first place. And the reason is that these are not, like petroleum, regionally limited substances that occur in blobs here and there - they are strewn throughout the Earth's crust, everywhere, so cornering the market does nothing but make people turn to their own domestic sources. And that is exactly what's been happening, as China has tried to cut off shipments of rare metals to Japan, and played subtler but no less obvious games with their exports to the US: We've simply begun ramping up our own production.
So, provided the global economy remains sound enough throughout the transition to continue investing in it, I don't see any fundamental roadblocks ahead - just speedbumps followed by even greater jolts of economic acceleration.
6. What is "solarchy"?
This is a term I made up on the spur of the moment to describe a world where PV solar is not only the overwhelming energy system, but the economic and geopolitical foundation. Solarchy is radically different from the politics and economics of a fossil fuel system, due to all the reasons outlined above, and would have as much positive impact on society as oil has had a negative impact. It gets very weird the further out in time you extrapolate (not that I'm dumb enough to believe in mere linear extrapolations), but a lot of this seems inevitable even if it takes a more circuitous path getting there than I expect.
7. What impact would solarchy have on the United States?
This is my sense of things with respect to the US, and do understand this is a pretty long timeline I'm talking about - none of us is going to personally see all of this:
- Salutary effect on our relations to other countries, because there would no longer be a single, peremptory economic interest dictating our foreign policies.
- Real terrorist threats would decline, both because of our own policy reform and better conditions in regions where it would otherwise have bred.
- Our military would face cutbacks in the decline of both oil politics and terrorism, but they would find a new compelling narrative in dealing with the results of climate change (we've already seen their instincts are running in that direction, based on reports predicting all sorts of disorders from CC). Once the money interests are no longer denying CC exists, they would probably start looking for ways to predicate profitable military action on it, such as perhaps playing up how much pollution other countries are responsible for, and blaming US disasters on them - but the economics of war would be greatly diminished, and far less compelling to political authorities than when oil was involved.
- Coal-based state and local economies would collapse into even worse straits than they already are, and probably would not be able to transition to PV-centered mining and ore processing due to infrastructure rigidity, lack of public investment, and lack of training and education. Continued population exodus from these areas.
- Sustainable electric transportation would accelerate suburban sprawl, but also feed the wealth and density of the urban cities.
- In the Western US, the radical expansion of suburban sprawl from the California-Nevada border all the way to Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico based on the vast solar resources of the region. BUT, at the same time, the coasts would become much denser, more urban, and more affluent - especially Southern California, since it would be located right at the center of both year-round solar energy and most of the desalinated water infrastructure that would feed to the inland Western states.
- The Pacific NW would not change as much as the rest of the US, but would be positively impacted by the explosive economic growth of the desert, becoming denser and more urban.
- Texas and the Prairie states would also benefit, though not as greatly as the deserts and the West Coast. Their growth would, I should think, nearly all involve sprawl.
- The NE and Great Lakes region would likely pursue a Northern European mixed energy model, using solar to an extent and then augmenting it with imported energy and sustainable niche sources.
- With desalinated water piped into the Western interior from the Pacific, significant parts of the desert and semi-arid environments would disappear, although I'm sure some regions would be carefully preserved. The Plains states would be fed from the Gulf of Mexico and the Great Lakes, depending on which is closer and more reliable (the Gulf might be too difficult to work with due to global warming).
- The Gulf states (except Texas) may become expensive places to do anything because of hotter temperatures with high humidity, and frequent damage from storms and hurricanes. Not sure how or if they would deal with it, but it doesn't look good. But they'd still benefit from solarchy, even if they might have to buy disposable panels because they keep getting wrecked.
- Alaska - I'll go out on a limb and say it'll go for geothermal, and look increasingly askance at the rest of America as it's socially and economically transformed by solarchy.
8. What impact would solarchy have on Europe?
Europe is going to be much as described above for the American NE, but there will be an economically warping effect of being so close to the Sahara desert: Local, decentralized PV will be plentiful, of course, but since much of the continent is cloudy, the ability to connect with a vast territory of year-round Sun would prove attractive. To the extent North African countries are able to make a go of it and use the opportunity to improve their situation, there might be an accelerated (and mutual) population exchange between the two regions, with Europe once again blending smoothly into North Africa for the first time since the Roman Empire. This might cause some tensions, but I don't expect anything major.
9. What impact would solarchy have on North Africa?
The land, sunlight, and materials are so abundant, and yet money for building renewable energy so scarce in North Africa that it seems they might develop a lopsided relationship that benefits Europe a lot more than it does their partners across the Mediterranean. But however long it takes, it would transform the Saharan region economically, politically, and culturally - and the recent waves of democratic reform (or at least, expression, however stifled) signal that by the time solarchy really gets going, some of these states might be in a good position to make a go of it. And with the coming of energy and money, water would be brought in to feed the burgeoning cities, and for the first time in recorded history the Sahara might begin to retreat and the green of the Mediterranean coast march southward.
Of course, countries on the coast would be in an economically and strategically superior position to those further South, leading to some predictable problems. For instance, Chad, Niger, and Mali would benefit from southward extensions of water infrastructure from the Mediterranean, but then this would grant Libya and Algeria a literal hydraulic empire over them. The better things go on the Med. coast, the more cutthroat they might become on the landlocked desert interior, but I wouldn't expect southward growth to be halted by it - just shaped and carved by it.
10. What about the Middle East?
Mark my words: The Middle East is going to become a place as mild, soft-hearted, and aesthetic as Sweden. Think about how vicious the Scandinavians were in the Middle Ages, compared to what the region became in later years - that's the path the Middle East is going to follow. And it happens when there's enough prosperity going around to insulate people from the climates that had originally made them crazy - when you can afford to stay warm all the time, you don't have to drink yourself stupid or go to war as a berserker to avoid freezing to death. Take someone who has to suffer the heat of the desert in their daily lives, give them air conditioning, and watch their disposition improve.
Even if the political situation doesn't improve - which I think it will, dramatically - once average people in the region are powering air conditioners with generic solar panels, cooling their homes to a nice icy chill, and desalinated water is piped in to spruce up their environments with greenery, the old grudges are not going to resonate as much. Even if they don't have jobs, it's hard to be angry in 72 degrees with the scent of trees on the air. I think of Dune, and how Muad'Dib defanged the dreaded Sardaukar military force: He turned their planet into a nice, comfortable, entertaining paradise where there was simply no opportunity to stay tough. But it won't be mere pacification, I'm sure - the economic growth will come with the decision to tap into their most abundant and potentially enriching resource - a resource no oppressor can control.
11. How about Australia?
Australia will become one of the world's wealthiest and most powerful countries, due to its continent-sized, flat, relatively accessible desert, and its convenient assortment of coastlines from which to reach it with water pipes. The Outback is gone the moment the water starts snaking into the desert - given the choice of a famous but empty and unproductive desert wilderness and turning your continent into the world's breadbasket, I have little doubt which Australia would pick. The interior will become a real place to live, with interior cities equal in caliber to Sydney and Melbourne, their eonomies largely concerned with the solar infrastructure and the water pipes, but whole ancillary economies building up around them.
12. And what of South Asia?
However goes the US Gulf Coast, so goes South Asia, only much worse. Climate change will be most devastating in the tropics, but solar panels will be everywhere - on the roof of every third-world hut and village hovel. Solar water heaters would heat water and sterilize it against microbes, insects, and parasites, and meanwhile the newfound, cheap, decentralized power systems could power dehumidifiers to get rid of mosquitoes and make the air fresher.
13. South America?
South America is a tossup, IMHO. While it would benefit as much as anyone else from cheap, ubiquitous PV, the bulk of the population already lives on the coast, and the interior is not a wasteland to be reclaimed, but a tropical rain forest it would be both immoral and impractical to mess with. They do not lack for water in South America, nor sunlight, nor really any economic input. So either the effect of solarchy would be minimal, and South America would just keep being as it is except with decentralized energy, or else it would make it into a powerhouse whose new prosperity would spread to West Africa and drive change there.
14. What jobs might be created?
The secure, well-paying jobs around PV are not that many: The scientists who design it and the engineers who implement it on a scaled level get paid well; the skilled professionals who install and maintain the system probably get paid well; but others are ancillary to the business, and don't have a firm footing in it. BUT, the economic activity created by PV is what will be the real driver, not the PV industry itself - there is going to be way more energy being generated than today, generated at a cheaper price, and in a far more decentralized system. That means all the money otherwise wasted paying the oligopoly prices of fossil fuel companies is instead reserved in the economy. This means more money will be invested in creating a business ecosystem around solar - specialty, niche, and Long Tail applications that individually do low-volume work, but together make up a huge industry. They in turn will grow still new offshoots, etc. etc. - and that is the REAL trickle-down economics, when you do it right: Energy trickling down from the SUN, creating jobs every step of the way.
15. Who will be the employers?
Potential employers in solarchy-related fields:
- Metals exploration / extraction
- Metals processing / refining
- Solar cell manufacturer
- PV Module manufacturer
- PV installation and maintenance
- PV financing
- PV sales
- Utilities
- Grid management
- Commodity brokerage (PV will some day be traded like gold or silver on NYSE)
- Battery owners (may lease them to PV users instead of selling)
We could go on and on generating all the ancillary job opportunities that would arise in a rigorous solar economy. It all just comes from the fact that an economy stems from its energy source, and fossils fuels are second- or third-rate compared to solar in this respect. Transitioning to solar would open a whole ocean of new economic potential compared to the mere lake we've been swimming in, hemmed by a non-renewable resource and corrupt, oligarchic control over it. They'll try to control the new situation too, of course, but they'll fail - as described earlier.
16. How will cities be changed by solarchy?
Suburbs, unfortunately, will get a lot bigger and less friendly to pedestrians as road surfaces and the roofs of carports become convenient places for energy generation, and cars become increasingly high-performance EVs that can go much longer distances at far cheaper prices than IC cars. However, they will come to look very interesting as surfaces all over the place become PV - not just rooftops, but walls, roads, poles with PV branches sticking out of them like pine needles, and the PV will look different and cool depending on its application: Some neon and translucent, some pitch black and slick, some shiny and blue.
The city becomes difficult to recognize once PV becomes ubiquitous. Building complexes, or parts of cities may build PV canopies over their combined property and manage them through a co-op agreement. It might look like huge metallic umbrellas, or like a tree with metallic leaves, etc. etc. In denser cities, the canopies might have to compete with each other, or be forced to merge. In other words, weird and exciting things start happening.
With cheap, abundant, sustainable energy generated all-but on site, you can do things that would be expensive and wasteful otherwise: E.g., putting escalators and sliding walkways everywhere and just letting them run all day regardless of how many people use them. It's not wasteful at all - the energy would have come from the Sun whether you used it or not, and if you hadn't, it just would have bounced off the pavement or been absorbed by some tree, but instead you used to ride a moving walkway a few miles down a pedestrian mall. And the environment wasn't harmed by your laziness one damn bit. You could outfit buildings with extremely bright decorative LED light panels of any color or brightness as a permanent fixture, making for futuristic-looking cities even in the suburbs, and there would be nothing at all wasteful about it, because the alternative would just be to let the sunlight hit dirt and do nothing. Once solar is cheap enough and the grid fully non-polluting, you're given a full moral, ethical license to waste energy on anything you can imagine.
You have to really get imaginative to waste so much energy that you'd end up paying more. Like putting powerful, juice-sucking electromagnets under your house so you can float it 20 feet in the air. Permanently. Just because it's cool. A number of steps along the way might involve your Darwin Award-worthy death, but none of them would be caused by your electric bill.
17. What would life be like in Solarchy?
Energy doesn't merely cost money in solarchy, it is money - the most fundamental form of economic value possible. So the same extent you make daily decisions about money, they would instead be about energy - food intake (calories), expenditure (exercise), intake into your electrical systems, output to your devices and services, etc. Before you begin panicking, it would be no more essential to be diligent in this as is to be diligent with money - you can get by being lazy about it the same as you can today with your checkbook. But the same principles would apply: However gradually, the value of energy would become unified with economic value and used as its standard. Of course, you aren't actually paid in energy, unless you want to be - it's just credited to you, for your use how and when you please upon accessing the grid. Instead of "10s and 20s, please," you would say "Recharge my car, please." So basically the monetary system is backed by electrons.
If you live in a sunny area, you would wake up with the sunlight all around you, because your windows are selectively-polarized PV that generate electricity while letting through shades of the light that are comforting and attractive. You have a solar water heater that never needs maintenance or makes noise, and the tiles of your roof passively follow the Son through a cheap chemical trigger like plants use to track it. You pay no attention to any of it, beyond occasionally appreciating how beautiful it all is, but instead keep an eye on the monitor showing you your electro-credit balance - a simplified interface with a big, easy-to-see number on the display. As usual, your credits keep going up with time, even though you're not doing anything, because your house is making money for you. In fact, you're pitching in yourself - every time your foot falls, every time you open or close a door, and dozens of other mundane things, your house harvests the tiny bit of energy from them and contributes it to the grid and your credit.
Your clothes are loaded with PV fibers, but feel exactly like normal clothes. They'll spend the whole time you're out in the Sun charging, and whenever they beep full, you can just plug the string hanging off the side into a low-voltage socket, download the juice, and add a few more credits to your account. Or you could use it to charge your phone. Or just buy a cup of coffee, since electricity is money in solarchy. And as electricity is money, your footsteps up the train station platform input enough energy to pay your fare, so there's no need for a ticket. Of course, even with all these options, there are still charging stations for every conceivable gadget and voltage all around you, with a high-powered PV canopy hanging over the platform.
You take your ultra-silent mag-lev train downtown, where every surface is functionally PV but also serves as a display, showing brilliant colors, moving artwork, commercials, TV shows, advertisements, game highlights, and so on. Oh, you forgot something. You stop at a random panel on the wall of a random building and touch it with your shirt, activating it, and then use it to leave a note for yourself that will show up on your doorstep. You look over at the distant skyline, with the soaring solar canopies of the cities like sapphire-blue elm trees, and marvel.
That's my relatively near-future idea of solarchy, but it gets weirder as time goes on. Two words: Sun worship. Literally. Try to appreciate that the whole of civilization - and all if its economic potential - will come to spring from solar energy. Realize that once this happens, it's not going to change: People are just going to become more and more adept at utilizing solar energy to its fullest, large-scale economic movements will come to resemble the contours of the solar energy field as occurs on Earth's surface, with our progress closely tracking it. Now, I don't mean people would spontaneously revert to Neolithic notions of the Sun being god - I mean economically, then culturally, then spiritually, and perhaps among some people, religiously, it will be recognized as a fact that the Sun rules our lives from the highest to the lowest. People will begin to really see that when the Sun's natural energy fluctuations begin to have an affect on their individual bank accounts, and there's nothing they can do about it except strive to understand those fluctuations better.
The gamblers, the day traders, and would-be market-corners would all be studying the Sun as hard as they could to learn deeper knowledge of its internal motions that would give them profitable insight into it, and a few would succeed and combine business principles with scientific phenomena to form new doctrines of solar business. Meanwhile scientists who study the Sun would be flush with money from all the industry support, fueling their own obsessions and drawing that much more attention to the subject. Spiritual people could begin to sense, if not see with their own eyes, how the Sun was reshaping people's lives and cities for the better, and begin to develop reverential feelings toward it. It is, after all, the source of our being - the source of the energy that animates this crude organic matter into something more than goo, and that has driven evolution since the beginning.
But if a sun-worshipping religion did arise and flourish in the distant future of solarchy, it would not be a religion as we think of it - the stifling, ideological religion. It would be more like the religions of the ancient world: Practical religions organized around what were considered to be practical rituals for continued prosperity. Except the rituals being reverently performed by the faithful of the solarchy would not be metaphorical, they would just be standard tasks for maintaining their technical systems - except they would be performed with deep reverence and emotion. Humanity is going to worship the Sun in the future, mark my words. And It's not even really a bad thing - it's probably the most rational religion that could possibly exist. Anyway, I'll see you in the future! And don't forget to polish your Altar of the Sun when you get there - it's designed so that when you polish it, you create electricity that goes into your account. ;D