The Wizard and the Prophet2 Read online

  As the fears mounted that oil would run out, nations around the world built solar parks of ever-increasing scale. The biggest in Asia (as I write, anyway) is the Charanka solar park, an Ozymandiac installation located on a wasteland in the coastal Indian state of Gujarat, a hundred miles from Ahmedabad, its biggest city. When I visited Ahmedabad not long ago, I could see Charanka gleaming from my airplane window: dozens of rectangular photovoltaic arrays, regular as midwestern wheat fields, scattered in a broad U about three miles on a side. By squinting a little I could talk myself into thinking I saw power lines spiderwebbing from the arrays: hundreds of megawatts from the desert. Twenty miles from the airport was a metallic ribbon half a mile long and a hundred feet wide: a solar park built atop an irrigation canal. Southeast of the city was another, even longer one. As the plane approached the city, solar panels stood like sentinels atop buildings everywhere—one of the world’s most important efforts to bring into being a solar future.

  The Charanka solar park: a sea of photovoltaics Credit 62

  The center of India’s oldest civilizations, Gujarat is at once a cradle of Hindu identity and a busily cosmopolitan place, full of traders from across Asia. It is also the homeland of Narendra Modi, elected prime minister of India in 2014, the principal author of its solar program. Modi was born in 1950, the son of an impoverished tea-stall owner in a remote Gujarat village. A political activist since adolescence, he joined, in 1987, the Bharatiya Janata (Indian People’s) Party (BJP), a pro-Hindu, nationalist party tied to nativist organizations known for attacking Christians, Muslims, and other non-Hindus. He rose steadily and won election as chief minister of Gujarat in October 2001. A few months later a Gujarat train loaded with Hindu pilgrims and activists caught fire, killing dozens of passengers. Angered by rumors that the blaze had been set by Muslims, club-wielding Hindu thugs murdered a thousand or more people, most of them Muslim. Human rights groups and political rivals charged that Modi and the BJP had encouraged the attacks. Inquiries found no evidence for the charge, but the riots stained his reputation; in 2005, Modi became the only person ever denied a U.S. visa for “severe violations of religious freedom.”

  Alarmed by the fallout, Modi shifted gears, refashioning himself as a nattily dressed, tech-friendly progressive who lured major companies, foreign and Indian alike, to invest in Gujarat. He also became one of the world’s most prominent advocates for solar power. In a “green autobiography” published in 2011, Modi promised to transform hot, dry Gujarat, with its 55 million people, into an emblem of sustainable development, simultaneously increasing irrigation and recharging aquifers, converting thousands of cars from gasoline to natural gas, and turning the state capital, Gandhinagar, into a “solar city.” He created Asia’s first ministry of climate change and led a pioneering program to install solar panels atop irrigation canals, shielding the canals from evaporation and generating power without covering scarce farmland. “I saw more than glittering panels,” said then U.N. secretary-general Ban Ki-moon, inaugurating a canal-top project in 2015. “I saw the future of India and the future of our world.”

  On one side of the Charanka solar park is a seven-story observation tower sheathed in glass. When I visited it, placards trumpeting advances in photovoltaic technology were mounted for perusal inside. The best modules available today, they said, convert more than 20 percent of the sun’s energy to electricity. In lab tests, some solar cells reach 40 percent. (A typical coal plant converts 40–45 percent of the energy in coal to electricity.) In parallel, the cost of generating power with photovoltaics has plummeted. Exact figures are hard to nail down, but in many places the cost of building a big solar plant is now equivalent to the cost of building a big coal plant, and in all likelihood photovoltaic prices will continue to fall.*3

  I climbed to the top of the tower. The solar panels below seemed to stand at attention, a vast photovoltaic army. That day the temperature was about 110 degrees. Wind whipped dust into the air, coating the solar panels. Pipes beneath the arrays carried water to wash them. Solar parks, farms for electrons, effectively must be irrigated. Here and there the serried lines of panels wobbled, harsh conditions and land subsidence nudging them out of alignment. The panels were designed and built by engineers from temperate-zone nations; I wondered how long they would last in the heat. Energy from the sun today is responsible for about 1 percent of India’s electricity; even in Gujarat, it amounts to just 5 percent. Optimistic scenarios show its share rising to 10 percent by 2022. The state Power Grid Corporation has proposed creating huge systems in Indian deserts to boost that number to 35 percent by 2050.

  Atop the tower, I tried to imagine what Augustin Mouchot would have made of Charanka. Would he see such enormous installations as vindication? Or would he be dismayed by the lack of progress on the problems that had bedeviled him? Like Mouchot’s mirrors, Charanka’s photovoltaics generate electricity only between sunrise and sunset—6:45 a.m. to 6:45 p.m., during my visit. To provide electricity at night, energy generated in daylight must be stored in some form for later use, a practice called “load-shifting.” Typical load-shifting projects heat a liquid (molten salt, say) by day; at night the stored, super-hot liquid boils water, driving a steam turbine, producing electricity in a manner Mouchot would have approved. In 2010 India announced seven solar energy-storage projects, five of them in Gujarat. Only one was under construction. The others had been abandoned when the builders learned that the state’s air is so hazy that initial estimates of potential solar power were off by a quarter.

  Germany, richer than India, has about seventy energy-storage projects, about a third of which collect the output from wind and solar plants into banks of batteries. The price of batteries, like the price of photovoltaics, has been falling. Renewable-energy enthusiasts imagine great warehouses full of batteries, soaking up excess sun power by day, releasing it by night, keeping the lights on in the dark. But no matter how cheap the batteries are, such facilities will involve constructing a second, parallel infrastructure for energy storage, adjacent to the first, for energy production, a costly step for the foreseeable future. Today, as in Mouchot’s time, free energy from the sun is surprisingly expensive.

  Even this may understate the price of renewables, as I learned when I spoke to Steven Chu, the Nobel-winning physicist who was U.S. energy secretary from 2009 to 2013. Chu, who described himself as a “very strong supporter” of renewables, pointed out that the skies in places like New England or France or northern China can be cloudy for weeks on end. “There are times,” he said, “when you get a week of bad weather or a week of cloudy days over hundreds of miles. There are times when the wind stops blowing across all of Washington and Oregon for two weeks. During these times—guess what?—you still need a source of reliable power.”

  Later Chu emailed a chart to me of the wind-energy output in January 2009 from a big wind farm run by the Bonneville Power Administration in eastern Washington State. The chart had two lines: one on top, zigging up and down every day, depicting the energy demand in the region; one on bottom, showing the contribution of the wind farm to satisfying that demand. Halfway through the month, the bottom line dropped to zero—and stayed there. The wind had ceased entirely for eleven days. As the top line showed, people’s needs didn’t stop with the wind. Hospitals, schools, libraries, homes, and office buildings still needed light and heat. If nations switched over wholly to renewable energy, Chu said, they would have to come up with mechanisms to supply entire regions with power during long periods of cloudy or still weather. Engineers, he said, have barely begun working on this challenge. A century and a half after Mouchot, the problems he identified with solar energy remain unsolved.

  Hundreds of large renewable energy installations now dot the globe. But only one even begins to approach what advocates envision: a solar or wind installation that provides reliable, round-the-clock power to large numbers of people. Completed in 2015, the $800 million Crescent Dunes project, located in Nevada, consists of a central tower surro
unded by ten thousand mirrors, each the size of a small house. Tracking the sun, the mirrors focus sunlight on the tower, which is filled with molten salt. The hot salt boils water, driving turbine generators; the electricity is sent to Las Vegas to power streetlights, air-conditioners, and video-game consoles. Because the salt stays hot for hours after sunset, the project makes electricity at night: solar power in the dark.

  A chart emailed to the author by Steven Chu Credit 63

  Strikingly, Crescent Dunes has been fought by Prophets. As a rule, renewable-energy leaders see their goal as building giant, centralized facilities like Crescent Dunes—they are Borlaugians through and through, hard-path advocates in solar guise. But many or most renewable-energy supporters are Prophets who view Big Solar and Big Wind with almost as much distaste as the Big Coal and Big Oil they seek to replace. From its inception, Crescent Dunes was resisted by an environmental organization, Basin and Range, because the installation, like Father Himalaya’s Pyrheliophoro, kills any birds that come near it. Basin and Range also objected to the concomitant destruction of the fragile desert environment; building Crescent Dunes required bulldozing about 2.5 square miles of arid land, including about 10 percent of the habitat of two rare beetles, the Crescent Dunes aegialian scarab and the Crescent Dunes serican scarab.

  Similar complaints dog Big Solar in California’s Mojave Desert. Litigation from the Sierra Club and the Natural Resources Defense Council in 2012 helped doom one massive solar-mirror project there. Two years later, another Mojave enterprise—the $2.2 billion Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System, then the world’s biggest solar-mirror installation—managed to begin operation. Covering more than five square miles, it knocks large numbers of bats out of the sky, which has led to near-constant attack by environmental groups.

  These Prophetic anxieties are not restricted to the United States. Protests against solar farms have occurred by the score in England. Wind power has been fought in Canada, Denmark, Ireland, Italy, Mexico, and Spain. (For this century, the Oxford zoologist Clive Hambler charged, wind power is “a far greater threat to wildlife than climate change.”) Even renewables-mad Germany has battled the infrastructure necessary to bring wind-generated electricity from the breezy north to the industrial south; rather than allow new high-voltage transmission lines, the Bavarian government has campaigned to return to fossil fuels.

  Most objectionable, to Prophets, are these projects’ scale. Some complaints, to be sure, are linked to the selfish unwillingness to sacrifice anything for the common good encapsulated in the slogan NIMBY—Not In My Back Yard. But others are rooted in a respect for limits. Prophets see the mile-long stands of photovoltaic cells in projects like Charanka as inherently destructive to communities, natural and human. Industrial giantism is the problem, in their view, not the solution. True to Ericsson’s original vision, they argue instead for smaller-scale, networked energy generation: rooftop photovoltaic panels, air-source heat pumps, biological fuel cells, solar air heating, methane generated by agricultural or municipal waste, and so on.*4 All of this is to be accompanied by insulating buildings, installing energy- and water-saving fixtures and appliances, recirculating waste heat, and fitting sensors into buildings that automatically monitor power use, shutting off lights and temperature-control when rooms are unoccupied.

  Wizard-style renewable advocates like the venture-capital-backed firm that built Crescent Dunes scoff at these ideas. Even in the best of circumstances, the process of replacing the present coal-and-gas grid with a new, renewable-energy grid—all the while keeping the old grid running—would be long, expensive, and risky even if it weren’t being sabotaged by the people who are supposed to support it. Insisting on using small-scale components to build in a world of 10 billion only multiplies the difficulty. Now add in the fact that fossil-fuel prices have been declining for decades. Thinking purely in terms of a reliable energy supply, one is hard-pressed to imagine why one would try to do it.

  But, of course, the question is not simply about a reliable energy supply.

  * * *

  *1 Nuclear plants provide a bit more than 5 percent of the global energy supply; renewable-energy facilities, a bit under 5 percent. The remainder is from biofuels: wood, charcoal, ethanol (from corn and sugarcane), biodiesel (usually made from vegetable oils), and so on. The most important types of renewable energy are solar, wind, and hydroelectric. I focus on solar power, rather than wind power, because it has, rightly or wrongly, drawn the most interest from Prophets, and because many of the same arguments apply to wind. I don’t discuss hydroelectric power, because the lack of suitable untapped rivers means that it is unlikely to expand greatly.

  *2 Mouchot’s last years were bleak. Retired on a modest pension, he lost track of his finances; creditors seized his possessions. He died in lonely squalor in 1912.

  *3 Here I am being deliberately vague. Cost estimates depend on the factors included in the assessment. For solar power, these include the location (sunshine varies from place to place), the type of photovoltaic, and the likely subsidies and taxes (almost all energy is subsidized in one way or another). For coal, should one include the cost of its carbon-dioxide emissions? If so, at what price? For solar plants, how should one treat the emissions due to manufacturing, land acquisition, and installation? And so on. One prominent study argued that the true costs of solar are so high that it will always be unaffordable. Another says that coal-pollution costs are so high that coal is unaffordable. Different studies have such different results that it seems best to say that neither solar nor coal has an undisputed cost advantage.

  *4 Air-source heat pumps take advantage of temperature differences to transfer heat from outside to inside a building, or vice versa. Biological fuel cells use bacteria that consume wastes to drive chemical reactions that produce electricity. Solar air heating involves covering buildings with thin, air-filled panels that absorb heat from the sun; the air is then piped into the building, directly or indirectly. Methane that spontaneously issues from waste—municipal dumps, say—can be tapped and burned in local power plants.

  [ SEVEN ]

  Air: Climate Change

  A Quick Million Years

  Lynn Margulis had high standards for calamity. Years ago she came into a café where I was reading a book while waiting for my daughter to finish an art lesson. I was on a jury that awarded prizes to popular books about science. One of the entries was the book in my hand: An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore’s invocation of the “planetary emergency of global warming.” Margulis picked it up and gazed at the back cover, which showed the author standing before microphones in a rugged outdoor setting. She said nothing, but her expression was eloquent.

  Feeling defensive, I asked if she thought the kind of climate change Al Gore was describing wouldn’t be a catastrophe.

  Sad, sure, she said, in my recollection. But a catastrophe—no. She paused. Oxygen, she said. Now, that was a catastrophe.

  The oxygen she was referring to was the Great Oxidation Event, which occurred after cyanobacteria evolved photosynthesis. Photosynthetic creatures spread through the oceans, excreting oxygen all the while. The flood of oxygen permanently changed the surface of the earth, the composition of the oceans, and the functioning of the atmosphere. Most scientists believe it made the vast majority of the world’s land and sea uninhabitable for the vast majority of the planet’s living creatures. Margulis called the resultant slaughter an “oxygen holocaust.” Over time, minerals absorbed much of the gas, stabilizing it at about 21 percent of the atmosphere—a good thing, because if the level had risen much more our air would have had so much oxygen that a single spark could have set the planet afire.

  To Margulis, the Great Oxidation Event had lessons for today. The first was that people who thought that living creatures couldn’t affect the climate had no idea of the power of life. The second was that the onset of climate change meant that Homo sapiens was getting into the biological big leagues—we were tiptoeing into the terrain of bacteria, alg
ae, and other truly important creatures. The third was that species, like sullen teenagers, don’t pick up after themselves. Cyanobacteria sprayed their oxygen garbage all over Earth without concern for the consequences—littering on an epic scale. People were doing the same with carbon dioxide.

  Cyanobacteria were lucky: being inundated by their own oxygen didn’t end up bothering them much. But people were going to feel the effects of carbon dioxide. That wouldn’t stop us, Margulis said, unsentimental as ever. Humans were no more going to stop emitting carbon dioxide than cyanobacteria were going to stop emitting oxygen, she thought. If it is the fate of every successful species to wipe itself out, climate change looked to Margulis like a plausible candidate for the method by which Homo sapiens would achieve that end. The upside, she told me, was that the impacts would be relatively confined and short-lived. In a few millennia, the world would look much the same, except that people probably wouldn’t be living in it.

  Climate change! In the last chapter, I looked at two visions of how society should meet its needs for energy. Borlaugian Wizards favor large utilities that feed metered power to households and businesses. Vogtian Prophets like small-scale operations that harness renewable sources and are owned by the neighborhoods that use the power. Because the sunlight and wind favored by Prophets are intermittent, they have not yet been able to compete economically against the reliable power provided by fossil fuels. Indeed, the cost advantage is so extreme that there would be little reason to switch to renewables unless some new factor put its thumb on the scale. In recent decades, the prospect of devastating climate change has done just that.*1