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Powering the Future
AUGUST 2005
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By Michael
Parfit
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Photographs by Sarah
Leen
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| Where on
Earth can our energy-hungry society turn to
replace oil,
coal, and natural gas? |
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Freedom!
I stand in a
cluttered room surrounded by the debris of
electrical
enthusiasm: wire peelings, snippets of copper,
yellow
connectors, insulated pliers. For me these are
the tools
of freedom. I have just installed a dozen solar
panels
on my roof, and they work. A meter shows that
1,285
watts of power are blasting straight from the
sun into
my system, charging my batteries, cooling my
refrigerator, humming through my computer,
liberating my
life.
The euphoria of energy freedom is
addictive. Don't get me wrong; I love fossil
fuels. I
live on an island that happens to have no
utilities, but
otherwise my wife and I have a normal American
life. We
don't want propane refrigerators, kerosene
lamps, or
composting toilets. We want a lot of electrical
outlets
and a cappuccino maker. But when I turn on those
panels,
wow!
Maybe that's because for me, as for
most
Americans, one energy crisis or another has
shadowed
most of the past three decades. From the OPEC
crunch of
the 1970s to the skyrocketing cost of oil and
gasoline
today, the world's concern over energy has
haunted
presidential speeches, congressional campaigns,
disaster
books, and my own sense of well-being with the
same kind
of gnawing unease that characterized the Cold
War.
As National Geographic reported
in
June
2004, oil, no
longer
cheap, may soon decline. Instability where most
oil is
found, from the Persian Gulf to Nigeria to
Venezuela,
makes this lifeline fragile. Natural gas can be
hard to
transport and is prone to shortages. We won't
run out of
coal anytime soon, or the largely untapped
deposits of
tar sands and oil shale. But it's clear that the
carbon
dioxide spewed by coal and other fossil fuels is
warming
the planet, as this magazine reported last
September.
Cutting loose from that
worry is
enticing. With my new panels, nothing stands
between me
and limitless energy—no foreign nation, no power
company, no carbon-emission guilt. I'm free!
Well, almost. Here comes a cloud.
Shade
steals across my panels and over my heart. The
meter
shows only 120 watts. I'm going to have to start
the
generator and burn some more gasoline. This
isn't going
to be easy after all.
The trouble with
energy
freedom is that it's addictive; when you get a
little,
you want a lot. In microcosm I'm like people in
government, industry, and private life all over
the
world, who have tasted a bit of this curious and
compelling kind of liberty and are determined to
find
more.
Some experts think this pursuit is
even
more important than the war on terrorism.
"Terrorism
doesn't threaten the viability of the heart of
our
high-technology lifestyle," says Martin Hoffert,
a
professor of physics at New York University.
"But energy
really does."
Energy conservation can
stave off
the day of reckoning, but in the end you can't
conserve
what you don't have. So Hoffert and others have
no
doubt: It's time to step up the search for the
next
great fuel for the hungry engine of humankind.
Is
there such a fuel? The short answer is no.
Experts say
it like a mantra: "There is no silver bullet."
Though a
few true believers claim that only vast
conspiracies or
lack of funds stand between us and endless
energy from
the vacuum of space or the core of the Earth,
the truth
is that there's no single great new fuel waiting
in the
heart of an equation or at the end of a drill
bit.
Enthusiasm about hydrogen-fueled
cars may
give the wrong impression. Hydrogen is not a
source of
energy. It's found along with oxygen in plain
old water,
but it isn't there for the taking. Hydrogen has
to be
freed before it is useful, and that costs more
energy
than the hydrogen gives back. These days, this
energy
comes mostly from fossil fuels. No silver bullet
there.
The long answer about our next
fuel is not
so grim, however. In fact, plenty of contenders
for the
energy crown now held by fossil fuels are
already at
hand: wind, solar, even nuclear, to name a few.
But the
successor will have to be a congress, not a
king.
Virtually every energy expert I met did
something
unexpected: He pushed not just his own specialty
but
everyone else's too.
"We're going to need
everything we can get from biomass, everything
we can
get from solar, everything we can get from
wind," says
Michael Pacheco, director of the National
Bioenergy
Center, part of the National Renewable Energy
Laboratories (NREL) in Golden, Colorado. "And
still the
question is, can we get enough?"
The big
problem
is big numbers. The world uses some 320 billion
kilowatt-hours of energy a day. It's equal to
about 22
bulbs burning nonstop for every person on the
planet. No
wonder the sparkle is seen from space. Hoffert's
team
estimates that within the next century humanity
could
use three times that much. Fossil fuels have met
the
growing demand because they pack millions of
years of
the sun's energy into a compact form, but we
will not
find their like again.
Fired up by my
taste of
energy freedom, I went looking for technologies
that can
address those numbers. "If you have a big
problem, you
must give a big answer," says a genial energy
guru named
Hermann Scheer, a member of the German
parliament.
"Otherwise people don't believe."
The
answers are
out there. But they all require one more thing
of us
humans who huddle around the fossil fuel fire:
We're
going to have to make a big leap—toward a
different kind
of world.
SOLAR: FREE ENERGY, AT A
PRICE
On a cloudy day near the city
of
Leipzig in the former East Germany, I walked
across a
field of fresh grass, past a pond where wild
swans fed.
The field was also sown with 33,500 photovoltaic
panels,
planted in rows like silver flowers all turned
sunward,
undulating gently across the contours of the
land. It's
one of the largest solar arrays ever. When the
sun
emerges, the field produces up to five megawatts
of
power, and it averages enough for 1,800
homes.
Nearby are gaping pits where coal
was
mined for generations to feed power plants and
factories. The skies used to be brown with smoke
and
acrid with sulfur. Now the mines are being
turned into
lakes, and power that once came from coal is
made in a
furnace 93 million miles (150 million
kilometers)
away.
Solar electric systems catch energy
directly from the sun—no fire, no emissions.
Some labs
and companies are trying out the grown-up
version of a
child's magnifying glass: giant mirrored bowls
or
troughs to concentrate the sun's rays, producing
heat
that can drive a generator. But for now, sun
power
mostly means solar cells.
The idea is
simple:
Sunlight falling on a layer of semiconductor
jostles
electrons, creating a current. Yet the cost of
the
cells, once astronomical, is still high. My
modest
system cost over $15,000, about $10 a watt of
capacity,
including batteries to store power for when the
sun
doesn't shine.
Like most things
electronic, solar
power has been getting cheaper. "Thirty years
ago it was
cost-effective on satellites," says Daniel
Shugar,
president of PowerLight Corporation, a
fast-growing
California company that has built solar
installations
for clients including Toyota and Target. "Today
it can
be cost-effective for powering houses and
businesses,"
at least where utility power is expensive or
unavailable. Tomorrow, he says, it will make
sense for
almost everyone.
Martin Roscheisen, CEO
of a
company called Nanosolar, sees that future in a
set of
red-topped vials, filled with tiny particles of
semiconductor. "I put some of that on my finger,
and it
disappeared right into my skin," he says. He
won't say
exactly what the particles are, but the "nano"
in the
company name is a hint: They are less than a
hundred
nanometers across—about the size of a virus, and
so
small they slip right through skin.
Roscheisen
believes those particles promise a low-cost way
to
create solar cells. Instead of making the cells
from
slabs of silicon, his company will paint the
particles
onto a foil-like material, where they will
self-assemble
to create a semiconductor surface. The result: a
flexible solar-cell material 50 times thinner
than
today's solar panels. Roscheisen hopes to sell
it in
sheets, for about 50 cents a watt.
"Fifty
cents a
watt is kind of the holy grail," says David
Pearce,
president and CEO of Miasolé, one of many other
companies working on "thin-film" solar cells. At
that
price solar could compete with utilities and
might take
off. If prices continued to drop, solar cells
might
change the whole idea of energy by making it
cheap and
easy for individuals to gather for themselves.
That's
what techies call a "disruptive
technology."
"Automobiles were disruptive
to the
horse and buggy business," Dan Shugar says. "PCs
were
disruptive to the typewriter industry. We
believe solar
electric systems will be disruptive to the
energy
industry."
Yet price isn't the only
hurdle solar
faces. There are the small matters of clouds and
darkness, which call for better ways of storing
energy
than the bulky lead-acid batteries in my system.
But
even if those hurdles are overcome, can solar
really
make the big energy we need?
With solar
now
providing less than one percent of the world's
energy,
that would take "a massive (but not
insurmountable)
scale-up," NYU's Hoffert and his colleagues said
in an
article in Science. At present levels of
efficiency, it would take about 10,000 square
miles
(30,000 square kilometers) of solar panels—an
area
bigger than Vermont—to satisfy all of the United
States'
electricity needs. But the land requirement
sounds more
daunting than it is: Open country wouldn't have
to be
covered. All those panels could fit on less than
a
quarter of the roof and pavement space in cities
and
suburbs.
WIND: FEAST OR
FAMINE
Wind, ultimately driven by
sun-warmed
air, is just another way of collecting solar
energy, but
it works on cloudy days. One afternoon I stood
in a
field near Denmark's west coast under a sky so
dark and
heavy it would have put my own solar panels into
a coma.
But right above me clean power was being cranked
out by
the megawatt. A blade longer than an airplane
wing
turned slowly in a strong south breeze. It was a
wind
turbine.
The turbine's lazy sweep was
misleading.
Each time one of the three 130-foot (40-meter)
blades
swung past, it hissed as it sliced the air. Tip
speed
can be well over 100 miles (160 kilometers) an
hour.
This single tower was capable of producing two
megawatts, almost half the entire output of the
Leipzig
solar farm.
In Denmark, turning blades
are always
on the horizon, in small or large groups, like
spokes of
wheels rolling toward a strange new world.
Denmark's
total installed wind power is now more than
3,000
megawatts—about 20 percent of the nation's
electrical
needs. All over Europe generous incentives
designed to
reduce carbon emissions and wean economies from
oil and
coal have led to a wind boom. The continent
leads the
world in wind power, with almost 35,000
megawatts,
equivalent to 35 large coal-fired power plants.
North
America, even though it has huge potential for
wind
energy, remains a distant second, with just over
7,000
megawatts. With the exception of hydroelectric
power—which has been driving machines for
centuries but
has little room to grow in developed
countries—wind is
currently the biggest success story in renewable
energy.
"When I started in 1987, I spent a
lot of
time sitting in farmers' houses until midnight
talking
to the neighbors, just selling one turbine,"
says Hans
Buus. He's director of project development for a
Danish
energy company called Elsam. "I would not have
been able
to imagine the level it is today."
He
means not
only the number of turbines but also their sheer
size.
In Germany I saw a fiberglass-and-steel
prototype that
stands 600 feet (200 meters) tall, has blades
200 feet
(60 meters) long, and can generate five
megawatts. It's
not just a monument to engineering but also an
effort to
overcome some new obstacles to wind power
development.
One is aesthetic. England's
Lake
District is a spectacular landscape of
bracken-clad
hills and secluded valleys, mostly protected as a
national park. But on a ridge just outside the
park,
though not outside the magnificence, 27 towers
are
planned, each as big as the two-megawatt machine
in
Denmark. Many locals are protesting. "This is a
high-quality landscape," says one. "They
shouldn't be
putting those things in here."
Danes seem
to like
turbines more than the British, perhaps because
many
Danish turbines belong to cooperatives of local
residents. It's harder to say "not in my
backyard" if
the thing in your backyard helps pay for your
house. But
environmental opposition is not the only trouble
facing
wind development. Across Europe many of the
windiest
sites are already occupied. So the five-megawatt
German
machine is designed to help take wind power away
from
the scenery and out to abundant new sites at
sea.
Many coastlines have broad areas of
shallow
continental shelf where the wind blows more
steadily
than on land and where, as one wind expert puts
it, "the
seagulls don't vote." (Real voters, however,
sometimes
still object to the sight of towers on the
horizon.) It
costs more to build and maintain turbines
offshore than
on land, but an underwater foundation for a
five-megawatt tower is cheaper per megawatt than
a
smaller foundation. Hence the German giant.
There
are other challenges. Like sailboats, wind
turbines can
be becalmed for days. To keep the grid humming,
other
sources, such as coal-fired power plants, have
to stand
ready to take up the slack. But when a strong
wind dumps
power into the grid, the other generators have
to be
turned down, and plants that burn fuel are not
quickly
adjustable. A wind-power bonanza can become a
glut.
Denmark, for example, is sometimes forced to
unload
power at uneconomic rates to neighbors like
Norway and
Germany.
What's needed for wind as well
as solar
is a way to store a large energy surplus.
Technology
already exists to turn it into fuels such as
hydrogen or
ethanol or harness it to compress air or spin
flywheels,
banking energy that can later churn out
electricity. But
most systems are still decades from becoming
economically feasible.
On the plus side,
both
wind and solar can provide what's called
distributed
energy: They can make power on a small scale
near the
user. You can't have a private coal plant, but
you can
have your own windmill, with batteries for calm
days.
The more houses or communities make their own
wind
power, the smaller and cheaper central power
plants and
transmission lines can be.
In Europe's
big push
toward wind power, the turbines keep growing.
But in
Flagstaff, Arizona, Southwest Windpower makes
turbines
with blades you can pick up in one hand. The
company has
sold about 60,000 of the little turbines, most
of them
for off-grid homes, sailboats, and remote sites
like
lighthouses and weather stations. At 400 watts
apiece
they can't power more than a few lights.
But
David Calley, Southwest's president, whose
father built
his first wind turbine out of washing machine
parts, is
testing a new product he calls an energy
appliance. It
will stand on a tower as tall as a telephone
pole,
produce up to two kilowatts in a moderate wind,
and come
with all the electronics needed to plug it into
the
house.
Many U.S. utilities are required
to pay
for power that individuals put back into the
grid, so
anyone in a relatively breezy place could pop up
the
energy appliance in the yard, use the power when
it's
needed, and feed it back into the grid when it's
not.
Except for the heavy loads of heating and
air-conditioning, this setup could reduce a
home's
annual power bill to near zero. If, as Calley
hopes, he
can ultimately sell the energy appliance for
under
$3,000, it would pay for itself with energy
savings
within a few years.
Somewhere in this mix
of the
grand and the personal, there may be big numbers
in wind
too.
BIOMASS: FARMING YOUR
FUEL
In Germany, driving from the
giant wind
turbine near Hamburg to Berlin, I regularly got
an odd
whiff: the sort-of-appetizing scent of fast
food. It was
a puzzle until a tanker truck passed, emblazoned
with
the word "biodiesel." The scent was of burning
vegetable
oil. Germany uses about 450 million gallons
(1,700
million liters) of biodiesel a year, about 3
percent of
its total diesel consumption.
Biomass
energy has
ancient roots. The logs in your fire are
biomass. But
today biomass means ethanol, biogas, and
biodiesel—fuels
as easy to burn as oil or gas, but made from
plants.
These technologies are proven. Ethanol produced
from
corn goes into gasoline blends in the U.S.;
ethanol from
sugarcane provides 50 percent of automobile fuel
in
Brazil. In the U.S. and other nations, biodiesel
from
vegetable oil is burned, pure or mixed with
regular
diesel, in unmodified engines. "Biofuels are the
easiest
fuels to slot into the existing fuel system,"
says
Michael Pacheco, the National Bioenergy Center
director.
What limits biomass is land.
Photosynthesis, the process that captures the
sun's
energy in plants, is far less efficient per
square foot
than solar panels, so catching energy in plants
gobbles
up even more land. Estimates suggest that
powering all
the world's vehicles with biofuels would mean
doubling
the amount of land devoted to farming.
At
the
National Bioenergy Center, scientists are trying
to make
fuel-farming more efficient. Today's biomass
fuels are
based on plant starches, oils, and sugars, but
the
center is testing organisms that can digest
woody
cellulose, abundant in plants, so that it too
could
yield liquid fuel. More productive fuel crops
could help
as well.
One is switchgrass, a plant
native to
North America's prairies that grows faster and
needs
less fertilizer than corn, the source of most
ethanol
fuel made in the U.S. It also thrives on land
unfit for
other crops and does double duty as a source of
animal
food, further reducing the pressure on
farmland.
"Preliminary results look
promising,"
says Thomas Foust, the center's technology
manager. "If
you increase automobile efficiency to the level
of a
hybrid and go with the switchgrass crop mix, you
could
meet two-thirds of the U.S. transportation fuel
demand
with no additional land."
But technically
possible doesn't mean politically feasible. From
corn to
sugarcane, all crops have their own lobbyists.
"We're
looking down a lot of alleys," says Pacheco.
"And every
alley has its own vested interest group.
Frankly, one of
the biggest challenges with biomass is that
there are so
many options."
NUCLEAR: STILL A
CONTENDER
Nuclear fission appeared to
lead
the race as an energy alternative decades ago,
as
countries began building reactors. Worldwide,
about 440
plants now generate 16 percent of the planet's
electric
power, and some countries have gone heavily
nuclear.
France, for instance, gets 78 percent of its
electricity
from fission.
The allure is clear:
abundant
power, no carbon dioxide emissions, no blots on
the
landscape except an occasional containment dome
and
cooling tower. But along with its familiar
woes—the
accidents at Three Mile Island and Chornobyl,
poor
economics compared with fossil fuel plants, and
the
challenge of radioactive waste disposal—nuclear
power is
far from renewable. The readily available
uranium fuel
won't last much more than 50 years.
Yet
enthusiasm is reviving. China, facing a shortage
of
electric power, has started to build new
reactors at a
brisk pace—one or two a year. In the U.S., where
some
hydrogen-car boosters see nuclear plants as a
good
source of energy for making hydrogen from water,
Vice
President Dick Cheney has called for "a fresh
look" at
nuclear. And Japan, which lacks its own oil,
gas, and
coal, continues to encourage a fission program.
Yumi
Akimoto, a Japanese elder statesman of nuclear
chemistry, saw the flash of the bomb at
Hiroshima as a
boy yet describes nuclear fission as "the pillar
of the
next century."
In the town of Rokkasho at
the
northernmost tip of Honshu Island, Japan is
working to
get around the limits of the uranium supply.
Inside a
new 20-billion-dollar complex, workers wear pale
blue
work suits and an air of patient haste. I looked
in on
cylindrical centrifuges for enriching uranium
and a pool
partly filled with rods of spent nuclear fuel,
cooling.
Spent fuel is rich in plutonium and leftover
uranium—valuable nuclear material that the plant
is
designed to salvage. It will "reprocess" the
spent fuel
into a mixture of enriched uranium and plutonium
called
MOX, for mixed oxide fuel. MOX can be burned in
some
modern reactors and could stretch the fuel
supply for
decades or more.
Reprocessing plants in
other
countries also turn spent fuel into MOX. But
those
plants originally made plutonium for nuclear
weapons, so
the Japanese like to say that theirs, due to
start up in
2007, is the first such plant built entirely for
peaceful use. To assure the world that it will
stay that
way, the Rokkasho complex includes a building
for
inspectors from the International Atomic Energy
Agency,
the United Nations' nuclear watchdog, who will
make
certain that none of the plutonium is diverted
for
weapons.
That doesn't satisfy nuclear
energy
opponents. Opposition has mounted in Japan after
fatal
accidents at the country's nuclear plants,
including one
that killed two workers and exposed others to
radiation.
Shortly after my visit to Rokkasho, about a
hundred
protesters marched outside the plant in a
blizzard.
A bigger controversy would
greet what
some nuclear proponents think is a crucial next
step: a
move to breeder reactors. Breeders can make more
fuel
than they consume, in the form of plutonium that
can be
extracted by reprocessing the spent fuel. But
experimental breeder reactors have proved to be
temperamental, and a full-scale breeder program
could be
an arms-control nightmare because of all the
plutonium
it would put in circulation.
Akimoto, for
one,
believes that society has to get comfortable
with fuel
reprocessing if it wants to count on nuclear
energy. He
spoke to me through an interpreter, but to
emphasize
this point he jumped into English: "If we are
going to
accept nuclear power, we have to accept the
total
system. Sometimes we want to get the first crop
of fruit
but forget how to grow the trees."
FUSION:
THE FIRE SOME TIME
Fusion is the
gaudiest of
hopes, the fire of the stars in the human
hearth.
Produced when two atoms fuse into one, fusion
energy
could satisfy huge chunks of future demand. The
fuel
would last millennia. Fusion would produce no
long-lived
radioactive waste and nothing for terrorists or
governments to turn into weapons. It also
requires some
of the most complex machinery on Earth.
A
few
scientists have claimed that cold fusion, which
promises
energy from a simple jar instead of a high-tech
crucible, might work. The verdict so far: No
such luck.
Hot fusion is more likely to succeed, but it
will be a
decades-long quest costing billions of
dollars.
Hot fusion is tough because the
fuel—a
kind of hydrogen—has to be heated to a hundred
million
degrees Celsius or so before the atoms start
fusing. At
those temperatures the hydrogen forms a roiling,
unruly
vapor of electrically charged particles, called
plasma.
"Plasma is the most common state of matter in
the
universe," says one physicist, "but it's also
the most
chaotic and the least easily controlled."
Creating and
containing plasma is so challenging that no
fusion
experiment has yet returned more than 65 percent
of the
energy it took to start the reaction.
Now
scientists in Europe, Japan, and the U.S. are
refining
the process, learning better ways to control
plasma and
trying to push up the energy output. They hope
that a
six-billion-dollar test reactor called ITER will
get the
fusion bonfire blazing—what physicists call
"igniting
the plasma." The next step would be a
demonstration
plant to actually generate power, followed by
commercial
plants in 50 years or so.
"I am 100
percent sure
we can ignite the plasma," says Jerome Pamela,
the
project manager of a fusion machine called the
Joint
European Torus, or JET, at Britain's Culham
Science
Center. "The biggest challenge is the transition
between
the plasma and the outside world." He means
finding the
right materials for the lining of the ITER
plasma
chamber, where they will have to withstand a
bombardment
of neutrons and transfer heat to electric
generators.
At Culham I saw an experiment
in a
tokamak, a device that cages plasma in a
magnetic field
shaped like a doughnut—the standard design for
most
fusion efforts, including ITER. The physicists
sent a
huge electrical charge into the gas-filled
container, a
scaled-down version of JET. It raised the
temperature to
about ten million degrees Celsius, not enough to
start
fusion but enough to create plasma.
The
experiment lasted a quarter of a second. A video
camera
shooting 2,250 frames a second captured it. As
it played
back, a faint glow blossomed in the chamber,
wavered,
grew into a haze visible only on its cooling
edges, and
vanished.
It was—well, disappointing. I
had
expected the plasma to look like a movie shot of
an
exploding automobile. This was more like a ghost
in an
English paneled library.
But this phantom
was
energy incarnate: the universal but elusive
magic that
all our varied technologies—solar, wind,
biomass,
fission, fusion, and many others large or small,
mainstream or crazy—seek to wrestle into our
service.
Taming that ghost is not just a
scientific challenge. The ITER project has been
held up
by a seemingly simple problem. Since 2003 the
participating countries—including much of the
developed
world—have been deadlocked over where to build
the
machine. The choice has come down to two sites,
one in
France and one in Japan.
As all energy
experts
will tell you, this proves a well-established
theory.
There's only one force tougher to manage than
plasma:
politics.
Although some politicians
believe the
task of developing the new energy technologies
should be
left to market forces, many experts disagree.
That's not
just because it's expensive to get new
technology
started, but also because government can often
take
risks that private enterprise won't.
"Most
of the
modern technology that has been driving the U.S.
economy
did not come spontaneously from market forces,"
NYU's
Martin Hoffert says, ticking off jet planes,
satellite
communications, integrated circuits, computers.
"The
Internet was supported for 20 years by the
military and
for 10 more years by the National Science
Foundation
before Wall Street found it."
Without a
big push
from government, he says, we may be condemned to
rely on
increasingly dirty fossil fuels as cleaner ones
like oil
and gas run out, with dire consequences for the
climate.
"If we don't have a proactive energy policy," he
says,
"we'll just wind up using coal, then shale, then
tar
sands, and it will be a continually diminishing
return,
and eventually our civilization will collapse.
But it
doesn't have to end that way. We have a
choice."
It's a matter of self-interest,
says
Hermann Scheer, the German member of parliament.
"I
don't appeal to the people to change their
conscience,"
he said in his Berlin office, where a small
model of a
wind turbine turned lazily in a window. "You
can't go
around like a priest." Instead, his message is
that
nurturing new forms of energy is necessary for
an
environmentally and economically sound future.
"There is
no alternative."
Already, change is
rising from
the grass roots. In the U.S., state and local
governments are pushing alternative energies by
offering
subsidies and requiring that utility companies
include
renewable sources in their plans. And in Europe
financial incentives for both wind and solar
energy have
broad support even though they raise electric
bills.
Alternative energy is also
catching on in
parts of the developing world where it's a
necessity,
not a choice. Solar power, for example, is
making
inroads in African communities lacking power
lines and
generators. "If you want to overcome poverty,
what do
people need to focus on?" asks Germany's
environment
minister, Jürgen Trittin. "They need fresh water
and
they need energy. For filling the needs of
remote
villages, renewable energy is highly
competitive."
In developed countries
there's a
sense that alternative energy—once seen as a
quaint
hippie enthusiasm—is no longer alternative
culture. It's
edging into the mainstream. The excitement of
energy
freedom seems contagious.
One afternoon
last
year, near a village north of Munich, a small
group of
townspeople and workers inaugurated a solar
facility. It
would soon surpass the Leipzig field as the
largest in
the world, with six megawatts of power.
About
15
people gathered on a little man-made hill beside
the
solar farm and planted four cherry trees on the
summit.
The mayor of the tidy nearby town brought out
souvenir
bottles of schnapps. Almost everyone had a swig,
including the mayor.
Then he said he
would sing
to the project's construction supervisor and a
landscape
artist, both American women. The two women stood
together, grinning, with the field of solar
panels
soaking up energy behind them. The German mayor
straightened his dark suit, and the other men
leaned on
their shovels.
Fifty years ago, I
thought, there
were still bombed-out ruins in the cities of
Europe. The
Soviet Union was planning Sputnik. Texas oil was
$2.82 a
barrel. At the most, we have 50 years to make
the world
over again. But people change, adapt, and make
crazy new
stuff work. I thought about Dan Shugar talking
about
disruptive technologies. "There's a sense of
excitement," he had said. "There's a sense of
urgency.
There's a sense that we cannot fail."
On
the
hilltop, the mayor took a deep breath. He sang,
in a
booming tenor, without missing a note or a word,
the
entire song "O Sole Mio." Everyone
cheered.
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