Healing Our World Commentary: Solar Power

By Jackie Alan Giuliano, Ph.D.

Let Solar Power See the Light of Day

They've lost it, lost it,
and their children
will never ever wish for it -
and I am afraid ...
because the sun keeps rising
and these days
nobody sings.
-- Aaron Kramer

Is it really a lack of the right technology that is keeping solar power off the mass market? Or is the light from our nearest star, the Sun, being held hostage by an economy that is devoted to using up the Earth's last drops of fossil fuel at all cost?

Using the light from the Sun, our ultimate energy source, is not a new technology at all, but has been around for thousands of years. Passive solar heating, orienting a dwelling to take advantage of the sun, has influenced the design of communities from the times of ancient Greece. Fuel wood supplies quickly dwindled as cities grew and an energy crisis was soon at hand. In the 4th century B.C., merchants rose to power by controlling wood supplies and cornering export and import markets. Greed is not a modern invention.

Modern solar power array in Italy (Photo courtesy Greenpeace)

In the 4th century A.D., all of the 4,000 residents of the city of Priene in Asia Minor relocated their homes to nearby Mount Mycale to escape frequent floods. An entirely new city was designed and oriented so that they could enjoy the warmth of the Sun in winter and be spared its heat in summer.

The use of glass in the 17th and 18th centuries was a way to capture the heat of the Sun efficiently. Soon, solar engines and machines were devised, including a solar powered steam engine, and a solar boiler. A massive solar power plant was built in Egypt in 1912. This plant could pump 6,000 gallons of water per minute and generate 55 horsepower. Plans were underway to replace dirty coal with this new, cheaper form of energy.

The onset of World War I in 1914 ended that wave of solar development projects around the world, as engineers and workers left their jobs in sunny climates to do war related work in their homelands.

At this point, huge oil and natural gas fields were discovered, eliminating the incentive to continue solar power development. Oil and gas were selling at giveaway prices, and the world's governments and business people became complacent over the availability of energy. Many of the land barons who became the oilmen of the early 20th century formed the huge energy companies we have today.

Also around this time, solar powered water heaters were really catching on. More than half the population of Miami, Florida had them by 1941, including 80 percent of the new homes built. But World War II and the prohibition on non-military uses of copper nearly ended the industry in favor of new, cheap electricity.

In the 1950s and 1960s, U.S. gas and electric utilities promoted heavy consumption in their advertising campaigns. Lower prices were given to those who used more energy! The campaigns worked, and natural gas and other fuel production doubled between 1950 and 1965. With prices at two cents per kilowatt-hour, there was absolutely no incentive to create energy efficient appliances.

The energy ethic that exists today had taken hold. The goal had become to sell the cheapest forms of energy possible to make the most profit for utility owners. Alternative forms of energy that use free sources such as sunlight, wind, and the heat of the Earth do not fit into this model of production.

Even though crude oil shortages were beginning to appear in the mid-1960s, the U.S. government never embraced the new technology for solar cells. Authors Ken Butti and John Perlin in their book "Golden Thread, 25,000 years of Solar Architecture and Technology," said that "Washington's attitude mirrored that of a nation hypnotized by seemingly limitless supplies of cheap fossil fuel, and by the almost magic aura surrounding nuclear energy."

Butti and Perlin remind us that there was no powerful solar lobby like the ones for the huge business interests behind coal, oil, gas, and nuclear power.

This home in Hopewell, New Jersey is not connected to the utility grid. It utilizes passive solar design, solar photovoltaic power, and solar heated water. (Photo courtesy Lyle Rawlings, First, Inc.)

The utility companies, of course, do not want you to leave the grid, since such an approach would infringe on profits. So anti-solar propaganda is spread liberally around the world. In an article in the "Washington Post" on June 8 that was carried as a full page special feature in the "Seattle Times," readers were told that even with batteries attached to solar systems, "homeowners probably could not run washers and air conditioners at the same time."

But do we really need to run them at the same time? The same postwar energy consumption mindset is still firmly in place.

That same article quotes a solar expert from the Electric Power Research Institute who continues to dampen our enthusiasm for solar power today by predicting that in "100 years from now, solar energy will provide a substantial percentage of the world's energy needs." He tells us that solar power is still a "luxury item, like buying a swimming pool." Sadly, it is true.

But while the U.S. government has been uninterested in developing solar power commercially, many inventors around the world have continued solar development and many other nations are aggressively pursuing solar power. The Sanyo Company plans to build the world's largest solar power generation system, with a 3.4 megawatt output, in Toyko by 2004. One megawatt is enough electricity to light 1,000 typical American homes.

Sim Van der Ryn, an architect who directed California's now defunct Office of Appropriate Technology under Governor Jerry Brown, told the "Benicia News," a California newspaper, "If the government had been a major purchaser of [solar] photovoltaics, it would have stimulated that industry."

Van der Ryn asserts, "You could supply the entire electricity demand of the U.S. with one giant solar farm in Nevada."

The gold of the solar arrays on the Hubble Space Telescope, illuminated from behind by the sunrise (Photo courtesy NASA )

While working on the Voyager, Galileo, and Space Station missions for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, I worked designing missions for instruments that were the most advanced, yet most energy efficient, on Earth. A high resolution TV camera used five to 10 watts of power. Its counterpart in a TV station on Earth uses tens of thousands of watts.

When fully deployed in space at the International Space Station, the eight solar panel wings, each 107 by 38 feet, will encompass an area of 32,528 square feet, and will provide power to the station for 15 years. Those panels provide enough energy to power about 10 average American homes.

The solar technology is there, but the heart and motivation are not. It is time to throw open the doors to solar power technology and release the stranglehold that fossil fuel energy companies have on our lives.

RESOURCES

1. Visit Real Goods for a primer on solar power at: http://www.solareco.com/articles/articles.cfm?ct=1000. While you are there, you can outfit your home with the necessary equipment to get off the grid.

2. Visit the Institute for Solar Living at: http://www.solarliving.org/index.cfm for info about a sustainable future.

3. Get into solar cooking at: http://solarcooking.org/

4. Learn about the human impact on our world from the Worldwatch Institute at: http://www.worldwatch.org/.

5. See a Greenpeace report about why we don't have more solar power by clicking here.

6. Find out who your Congressional representatives are and e-mail them. If you know your Zip code, you can find them at: http://www.visi.com/juan/congress/ziptoit.html.

7. Contact President Bush at president@whitehouse.gov. Tell him it is time to let the Sun shine in and to stop resisting solar power.

{Jackie Alan Giuliano, Ph.D. is a writer and teacher in Seattle. He can be found marveling at all the energy from the Sun that bathes our Earth every day. Please send your thoughts, comments, and visions to him at jackie@healingourworld.com and visit his web site at: http://www.healingourworld.com}