Redwood City, CA -- It's intriguing to look at the debate about clean, low-carbon electricity through the lens of health, especially with a guide whose challenge to the conventional wisdom is as sharply honed as anthropologist, physician, and Partners In Health co-founder Paul Farmer's.
Here at the Global Philanthropy Forum, Farmer has provided his usual blunt assessment. Somehow, he says, anything that is intended to serve the poor is assumed to be too expensive to do well. We are told that we lack the expertise. Don't have the infrastructure. The capital cost is too high. The technology really won't meet the challenge. And the costs of inaction never get tallied.
Farmer calls this the "failure of imagination."
To prod our imagination, he meticulously lays out the flaws in each of these arguments -- and points out that no one ever has similar objections to health interventions that serve the prosperous.
Listening to him, I am reminded that for the world's poorest 1.5 billion people (those who are off the grid) solar and wind are already much cheaper sources of light than the kerosene they use instead. And the arguments that Farmer cites from public health officials who, through a failure of imagination, argued that the world could never afford to treat HIV in Africa are eerily similar to those we hear about why wind, solar, and other clean-energy technologies can't meet the growth needs of Asia, Africa, and Latin America.
Expense and lack of reliability are the two big ones, just as they were for why HIV couldn't be treated in Africa. But, lumen for lumen, solar power is now perhaps ten times cheaper than kerosene, and wind power is twenty times cheaper. And that gap grows each month. As for reliability, anyone who has spent much time in a village on the grid in rural India or Africa knows that grid-power is at best a sometime thing. Indeed, the original business model for India's Suzlon, the world's fourth biggest wind company, was based on wind power being more reliable for pumping energy in oil fields than grid power.
The cost of inaction? For all the discussion about how urgent it is to electrify India's villages, it remains the case that almost all of the proposed investment in the country's Jawaharlal Nehru Solar Mission is utility-scale solar intended for already electrified cities -- only 10 percent is aimed at unserved villages.
So I idly wonder what the conversation would be like if it were the rich and prosperous who did not yet have power from the grid? Would we still be hearing that solar is "too expensive and unreliable"? And I realize that we already know the answer to that question -- because in Europe and the U.S., it is the prosperous who are investing in roof-top solar, and their willingness to do so is sufficiently great that in virtually every state the private utilities have lobbied to keep it illegal for roof-top installations to feed the grid. Why? Because they are afraid of the competition from their own customers. Even in California you aren't allowed to generate "too much" clean solar energy on your roof.
So the next time someone tells you that solar and wind are too expensive and unreliable, help them overcome their failure of imagination. Remind them that for at least a quarter -- and probably half of the world -- solar and wind are already dirt cheap and highly reliable, compared to what poor people get by with now. And remind them, too, of how quickly we brought down the cost of drugs to treat HIV simply by putting them into the hands of the people who needed them the most -- the poor.
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Adam Scott: Wind Power: A Quiet Solution to Climate Change
- Neha Misra, Solar Sister Inc, www.solarsister.org
Diesel for $30 per barrel from a breakthrough biofuel system being born at present.
See Cold Fusion and Moving Beyond Oil at www.aesopinstitute.org for more about these and other cheap green power systems.
These are Black Swans, highly improbable breakthroughs with huge impact potential.
Superseding fossil fuels can be accomplished must faster than conventional ignorance would suggest.
A handful of entrepreneurs are leading the way.
How long before the "leaders" find they must follow?
Grid power has an Achilles heel. See Green Light on the same website to learn more about it and what can be done to minimize the damage.
The energy ballgame is about to see revolutionary change. Encouraging it can boost the economy and create lots of well-paid jobs.
And to the surprise of almost everyone the threats to the grid might encourage bipartisan support for cheap green decentralized electric power.
Future cars are likely to be power plants when parked. Sale of electricity to the grid could pay for the vehicle.
When vehicles can do that - and the technology is on its way - building new coal and nuclear power plants becomes absurd. They will not be able to compete.
Welcome to the real energy revolution!
Converting DC to AC is really wasteful. Especially when you consider that nearly all of the typical household lighting, HVAC, refrigeration, appliances, etc should be capable of running on DC.
Also, it's not "wasteful" to transform it with the right technology. Further still, DC motors are horrible compared to AC motors and have a very, very short life or require massive amounts of maintenance (due to carbonization).
What are you talking about?!?!?! You seem to no nothing about power generation, transformation, transmission, or use.
1. Generators produce DC. Alternators produce AC.
2. Solar PV arrays produce DC.
3. Batteries store and release DC.
4. Many household devices either can run on DC or use rectifiers to convert AC to DC.
5. Inverters are expensive and waste electricity.
6. The primary advantage of AC is the ability to easily step up and step down the voltage for long range transmission. If your energy source is onsite and DC to begin with, what is the point of inverting it with expensive and inefficient equipment?
7. High Voltage DC tranmission is cost compettive and with superconducting/cryogenic technology very efficient relative to AC transmission.
But what do I know? I might just be another of the hundreds of paid shills here. Not.
I have a system that has an underground wire that runs into my garage and into a big box. All of my electrical appliances work great and all have have to do is send them a little money each month and they take care of it. Works great ...
The answer: No, it wouldn't be.
I live in a northern climate in a house built almost 100 years ago. They heated with wood cut and hauled by hand or animal drawn wagon. The insulation and tight widows and doors puts to shame what most modern houses would boast as efficient. It's amazing how much you can sqeeze out of resourses when they are dear in cost and/or availability.
Let us substitute energy for transportation....would this author say that it is the responsibility of America's rich to provide cars for the poor in India??
As to cost issues, I shall hoist the author on his own petard thusly....the hiv drugs did not get cheaper simply because we handed them out....they got cheaper because the research costs had become amortized over time and worlwide demand increased to the point that the smaller units prices could equal or exceed the aggregate overall revenue pool, the same will happen SOME DAY in (non-commodity based) energy arena whether we talk solar wind water fusion or nuclear......when enough "RICH" people who CAN afford to keep buying the initial technology and thus allowing more research and innovation, and unit cost reduction....so in other words if the "RICH" didn't buy the technology at exorbitant prices...then the produst would never gain enough economic traction to be offered to the masses.... the "rich" are already doing what's needed, by being guinea pigs to the wisdom or folly and drain of their dollars in furtherance of the technology, and the "poor" can piggyback as costs fall....the "rich" are doing their part for the world just by doing this.
This is the problem when people with no knowledge of how the grid and our power generation system work. Solar is NOT limited because of "they are afraid of the competition from their own customers". that is a very silly and WRONG statement.
Read and learn!
“The electric grid—an interconnected system illustrated in Figure 1—maintains an instantaneous balance between supply and demand (generation and load) while moving electricity from generation source to customer. Because large amounts of electricity are difficult to store, the amount generated and fed into the system must be carefully matched to the load to keep the system operating.”
“Some renewable energy technologies provide power only when the resource is available. These resources are often contracted as “must-take” generators, where their output is always used when it is available. However it is difficult to integrate a large amount of “must-take” generation into the grid because its availability is uncertain and constantly changing.”
Source, US National Renewable Energy Laboratory:
http://www.nrel.gov/csp/pdfs/45653.pdf
Putting a solar panel on every hut in Africa will not solve their energy needs without a grid to handle it.
A few lights, a TV, maybe a laptop, and we must keep the refrigerator going all night.
"Conclusion
The electric grid is a complex network that
is an integral part of our society. Running
the grid in the presence of increasing fuel
costs and growing environmental concerns
will require new technologies and ways to
use them. While renewable power technologies will be an essential part of our energy future, no one technology can provide
all of the energy and services we need.
Careful integration of distributed generation and careful
deployment of utility-scale generation will be needed to
provide the mix of power and reliability that we require
for a healthy electric supply as renewables contribute an
increasingly larger share of our energy needs"
from the same report.
It's an engineering problem, and won't be even significant until solar and wind reach about 50% of the total mix. Peaking generators can already respond fast enough for multi mW load changes, and already exist and can be fueled with waste bio fuels. Changing loads are ALREADY a problem for nuke power and large muti stage coal and fossil plants. It is the slowness of these "baseline" generators that is the problem.
Big Enviros, who have been pushing for Chevron, BP and Goldman Sachs to monopolize our solar energy, destroy millions of acres of healthy (taxpayer owned) wilderness, deplete desert groundwater and INCREASE GHGs!
Democracy, the environment, the economy and the atmosphere have all suffered mightily while this charade has perpetuated a Big Energy robber baron model of unreliable, overpriced, planet-killing electricity and diverted tens of billions of OUR dollars to Chevron, Google, Goldman Sachs and similar mercenaries when WE could be using them to install rooftop solar where power's needed.
If you are having a change of heart, great. There is a lot of capitulation under the greenwash bridge that needs to be made up before Big Enviros get back to "no harm done," so here's where you can start:
Send out a series of e-blasts saying that Sierra Club has reconsidered it's endorsement of Big Solar, and has realized that local solar within the built environment with an occasional plant on Superfund lands near transmission are the only solar power alternatives that will help the planet.
Revise comments to the PEIS making it clear that NO public lands other than the EPA's RePower America 15 million acres of degraded lands may be considered for industrialization.
Start REALLY supporting FITs and PACE loans for home and business owners to install rooftop systems that offer fair return on investment.