Elect-ricity

Look out honey cause I’m using technology

Ain’t got time to make no apology

The Wall Street Journal has a piece on solar that exemplifies the wrongheadedness of so much thinking on energy, the environment, technology, and politics. The article demonstrates how necessary change is likely to fail, the status quo continuing until it simply no longer can.

The Journal includes a nice little video on China's solar industry dominance. “The U.S. invented solar panels in the 1950s. But it’s China that’s grown to dominate the technology in global markets.” Unfortunately, the Journal doesn't go into how this came about, yet it’s key to any understanding. However, it is understanding that goes against the Journal's myths about how the economy and the world work.

The solar PV cell was invented at basically the same time as the transistor, both coming out of Bell Labs. The transistor entered a basically non-existent or at best what might now be deemed a primitive communications and information technology environment. In the intervening years, trillions were spent developing the transistor, creating the computer industry, the internet, and now the latest generation of piled transistors promoted as AI. The transistor evolved in a wide open environment with little impediment to its exponential development and numerous adaptations.

PV on the other hand was born into an already established and very powerful American electricity environment that was controlled by powerful government bestowed monopolies. Solar was a complete game changer in how to do and value energy, most critically the value of the utilities themselves. If that wasn't bad enough, the PV cell came into being immediately after the splitting of the atom. The then recently established National Security State assured all good Americans nuclear was the energy of the future — “Too cheap to meter.” With the utilities controlling local and state electricity policy and the National Security State controlling federal policy, solar lay dormant for a half-century.

It’s not necessary to go into details about the utilities and their umbilically attached environmental groups such as the NRDC opposition to solar, but even in the 1990's anti-solar sentiment remained dominant in the American energy sector. It was almost impossible to have any discussion. On the other hand, China had no great established electricity infrastructure. Their massive industrialization push in the last two decades of 20th century gave them a seemingly limitless need for new energy sources, no matter the fuel. In a decade, China established solar as part of the global energy future, with established American energy interests, most especially the electric utility industry still largely indifferent or hostile to solar adoption, most especially rooftop solar — a distributed generation architecture completely overturning the utilities’ established centralized structural organization, economics, and politics. The Journal video notes, 75 years after being invented in the US, solar comprises only 3.4% of American electricity generation, while it makes-up 12% of Chinese supply.

We get to the nut of the article,

“The state has installed so many panels that it has a glut of solar power during the day. Last year, California implemented new rules that cut the amount of compensation most rooftop solar owners get for the electricity they send to the grid by 75% or more to manage the oversupply and soaring costs for upgrading the grid. ...But because the state’s grid can’t absorb all the solar power generated during the day, it ends up throwing increasing amounts of it away or curtailing it. ”

God Bless America.

California leads the nation in solar generation at approximately 20% of its supply and according to the WSJ now has a “glut.” The economist Amartya Sen stated historical famines have mostly been the result of politically motivated misallocations of food stuffs. The solar “glut” is entirely a political misallocation of electricity.

Industrialization is the development of society atop the burning of fossil fuels. Utilities are fossil fuel organizations. Renewables will not replace fossil fuels. They require a reorganization of society. The utilities are completely incapable of organizing an electricity system based on distributed generation. Solar requires new organization and new values. Switching away from fossil fuels is not simply a technological question, but a social and political one.

A society largely utilizing solar electricity generation needs to reorganize most of its activities around the sun, when its energy is most prevalent. It is, in certain ways, a return to the past but with new technology, requiring a reorganizing of established industrial life, the creation of new social, cultural, and political institutions just as industrialism reorganized agrarian life. In the words of Norbert Wiener, it requires not primarily technological know-how, but a “'know-what': by which we determine not only how to accomplish our purposes, but what our purposes are to be.”

Such discussions are nonexistent, just the opposite, solutions to environmental challenges are looked at overwhelmingly as technological know-how, essentially, the ability to keep doing what we are doing. Again, Norbert astutely observed 75 years ago,

“It is one of the paradoxes of the human race and possibly its last paradox, that the people who control the fortunes of our community should at the same time be wildly radical in matters that concern our own change of our environment, and rigidly conservative in the social matters that determine our adaptation to it.”

Nothing is most recently representative of this than the promoting of electrifying American car culture personified in the person Elon Musk. However, under hope springs eternal, Tesla's stock price has dropped by over half in the last two years. For a number of reasons, it shouldn’t be 10% of its present price, then, hopefully, we’d be rid of one of those people with far too much bad influence, unfortunately there’s plenty more.

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