Imagine That!

The place of imagination in the green energy revolution

The green energy revolution is beginning to pick up steam (renewables-produced, of course). Solar power technology is burgeoning in many US states, although stalled in others, Germany plans to produce 80% of its energy from renewables by 2050 and both Germany and Switzerland will abandon nuclear energy in the foreseeable future. Getting recalcitrant US states on board and enabling Germany and Switzerland to act on their future scenarieos will require fairly heroic measures. It would seem that a few effective threads running through the situations are needed. 
Enter imagination

One such is imagination, valued in science labs and a major contributor to the progress that has taken place in developing renewable energy sources. Let’s start with solar, which got its start in the brain of Einstein. He is responsible for our understanding of the photoelectric effect, which depends on the supposition that light consists of photons, discrete packets of energy. As light had been considered up till then to be waves and only waves, this example of Einsteinian imagination led to a revolution in scientific thought and…. to the production of electricity in solar panels from the light of the sun.
All of the other alternative energy sources can be traced back to ingeneous ideas in the minds of brilliant scientists. No dearth of imagination here, nor in the painstaking engineering that has gone into innovative applications of those ideas. So far so good – where does it all break down? 
Start-up vs battening down
It is at the production stage that there is wildly varying aproach to innovation. On the one hand, the oil companies frantically turn to fracking and tar sands to keep their government subsidies and the status quo of a fossil fuel-oriented society, giving new meaning to the term “fossil”. At the other end of the scale are the start-up companies producing everything from algae farms to window solar chargers for cell phones to malls with natural light.
Enlightened business leaders realize that a focus on rapid production of clean energy would provide a positive motivation for local innovation, energy security, job creation and economic competition, and this brings us to business models.  

Business models of ingenuity 
Imaginative solutions are not limited to technology; they are also found in clean-tech business models. Investors in solar energy concerns, for example, receive dividends of as much as 10% a year on their investments, paid out of the savings on energy costs. Individual owners of solar panels and windmills are increasingly able to inject excess energy into the grid – “running the meter backwards”. There are considerable technical challenges to be met before the smart grid will be fully in operation, but the idea is so enticing, so fair, so citizen-oriented that power companies the world over are putting resources to work to make it happen.

Politics as usual
Here is the real sticky wicket. Every year there is a climate change conference and every year the results are disappointing. The United States is afraid of commitments, the developing nations feel the developed nations should pay for the pollution they have caused; more energy is spent in wrangling than in finding innovative measures.
On the country to country level, national governments are often concerned with political fallout; with the US congress at a standstill it falls to individual states and cities to come up with workable plans. To their credit, many are doing so. Meanwhile, in Europe, Denmark leads the way with livable cities, wind power and a biking culture that features imaginative cargo bikes that hold several children or lots of stuff.
The Big One
Most disconcerting, however, is the general agreement that a new, now-unkonwn energy produciton breakthrough will be needed in the long run. Alternative sources will do the job for a while, but energy needs are expanding exponentially, and present technology can’t keep up. A US Energy Department task force report released early in 2009 urged a sharper focus on basic science research in the energy production area.  Such research is grossly underfunded; in 2012 less than one percent of the federal budget, $30.2 billion, went to fund basic science research. As a comparison, Exxon-Mobil revenue in 2012 was 44.9 billion.
We need a new industrial revolution. If we look back at the original industrial revolution and the subsequent IT and electronic revolutions, what is most apparent in all of them is the application of human imagination to the problems at hand. Technology is indeed one manifestation of the marvels of human ingenuity and inventiveness. The electric motor and the transistor, for example, have revolutionized society; they were once the brainchildren of original thinkers. Oil and coal are on the way out; human imagination is as fresh as ever, with a huge new challenge to sink its teeth into: a transition from fossil fuel based energy production to one using renewable energy sources and on to one using an as yet unknown technology.
To sum up the above in one simple thought, here is the comment of Dave Chameides in his article Hope for a New Decade:
“Someday, perhaps, we’ll look back and realize all the energy we used fighting over Global Warming would have been better spent bringing a renewable energy future to fruition.”

---