interdependent, sun-powered fecundity. Solar energy is affirmed in the flight of birds, in our woodstove fires, in the force of hurricanes, and even in the taste of a cheeseburger.
2.7Following Nature’s Energy Path
The continuous success of solar-powered life throughout the ages provides a reliable and durable energy design model for our sustainable business. If we follow nature’s lead, this free, local, abundant, and clean energy source will in time replace our current problem-ridden energy choices as a value-laden alternative. Community-procured solar energy for transportation, industrial, and residential needs would provide stable local employment and would dramatically reduce the dollars leaving cities for distant energy sources and thereby build wealth inside local economies. Electricity, cleanly generated and used inside each of our communities, offers additional advantages such as reduced transmission-line infrastructure and maintenance costs, less energy consumed in moving electricity from a regional power plant to the consumer, and reduced vulnerability of power supply to malfunction or sabotage.
Today, many environmentally conscious energy specialists recommend a power distribution system based on a variety of alternative production schemes available from the existing opportunities within a region. Typical scenarios often include a combination of solid waste and biofuels combustion, hydroelectricity, and “clean” coal technology. This multi-source energy strategy may reduce harmful local effects, particularly in the short term, but it also contains significant conceptual long-term liabilities that degrade living conditions in distant locations. Consider all the consequences from each of these alternative energy sources mentioned above.
Waste-to-energy plants burn solid municipal waste to generate electricity, perpetuate the concept of waste, emit dangerous industrial air pollutants, produce concentrated toxic ash, and encourage linear manufacturing systems and natural resource exploitation. Biofuel production primarily relies upon fossil fuel-powered, mechanized agriculture, which continues to degrade soils, put pesticides into our drinking water, decrease food production, and add carbon dioxide (a greenhouse gas) to the atmosphere. Few new hydroelectric dam sites exist in the U.S. today, and the existing dams destroy irreplaceable riparian habitat, flood fertile bottomland farmland, and obstruct the migration patterns of certain species of fish, including salmon and steelhead. Finally, “clean” coal technology is a misnomer: it is expensive, it only slightly reduces overall pollution, and it concentrates toxicity and moves pollution from one waste stream (air) to another (solids).
If we are to follow nature’s lead and convert to a strategy that would satisfy our energy needs for the millennia to come without negative side effects, then solar energy should be the centerpiece of our energy technology. Nature has ingeniously used solar power for all biotic activities in polar latitudes as well as in cloud-dominated temperate regions of the world. A global commitment to solar technology will provide our species with the available abundant local energy for another 5 billion years with little danger of supply interruption, significant pollution, or climate-changing side effects. Intelligent systems that capture energy from the sun to power our businesses, transportation, and homes will provide lasting and rewarding employment worldwide and will prove worthy of the changeover investment in time and resources. Consider the long-term employment and economic boost from locally capturing, storing, and distributing all the energy needs of your community. Imagine a city with the outsides of all buildings made of windows, vegetative material, or photovoltaic (PV) surfaces (generating electricity from sunlight) that generate both the stationary and personal vehicle energy needs of the occupants. The location of the latitude and the number of sunny days per year will initially determine the need for additional power sources, but constantly improving the technological efficiency of PV systems and the mechanical efficiency of all power-driven devices will continually lower the cost of energy by increasing the percentage of energy provided by the sun.
2.8Other Sun-Powered Opportunities
The fusion nuclear reactor 93 million miles away gives us some additional opportunities for harnessing indirect solar energy in the form of wind, wave, and tidal forces at numerous locations around the globe. Our global wind patterns are powered by the sun’s differential heating of the atmospheric gasses, with coasts and interior flatlands generally providing the best prospects to harvest a reasonably strong and consistent wind supply. However, the intermittent and tumultuous nature of wind proves particularly challenging for the designers of durable and efficient wind power-generating equipment. Wind turbines are quite noticeable on the landscape or shoreline and can pose an aesthetic drawback to some communities. Nevertheless, using the wind to generate electricity may adequately satisfy the definition of sustainable energy — a technology that can meet our energy needs indefinitely without negative effects — and can provide the total power production for some wind-rich regions.
Generating electricity from ocean waves and tidal forces offers us some advantages and disadvantages as well. On the plus side, energy from the ocean offers densely populated coastal areas the opportunity to harness large amounts of sustainable energy where it is needed by many people. On the negative side, quite a few technological challenges remain to be solved before this energy choice is available to power large metropolitan groups. Fortunately, no matter which combination of sustainable energy choices a region selects, other design improvements currently underway, such as intelligent building design, improved mechanical efficiency, and resident-friendly community design, will lower the per-person demand for energy and will help the transition to durable, healthy, and locally run energy supplies.
2.9Envision a Sun-Powered Human Society
A fully transitioned sun-powered U.S. economy will offer quite a contrast from the fossil fuel- and nuclear-powered economic engines of today. Moving toward this nature-inspired ideal will require a mammoth national investment and several decades of infrastructure changeover, but the upside payoff implications are enormous. Gone will be the insidiously injurious air, water, and soil pollution from the extraction, transportation, processing, and combustion of fossil fuels. Our single nuclear power plant will be a safe 93 million miles away, along with all the accompanying dangerous radioactive materials. As the demand for crude oil, coal, and natural gas continually shrinks, greenhouse gas emissions will correspondingly decrease, and our atmosphere will begin to self-regulate its constituency again. Part of the climate change mitigation process will no doubt include massive carbon sequestration efforts from worldwide reforestation programs and site-appropriate solar technology transfers to communities inside developing nations. As we begin to recognize that a sustainable world requires the well-being of all members of all species (including humans), international political relationships will also purposefully evolve and be strengthened.
As the energy transformation continues around the world, the corresponding decrease in crude oil demand will dissolve any remnants of the previously influential Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). “The Age of Fossil Fuels” section in future world history books will be relatively brief with the period comprising less than 400 years. Major oil companies, the economic juggernauts of conventional energy, have the means to follow the early lead of global energy corporations such as British Petroleum (BP) and begin to diversify their operations to small-scale solar-powered energy production systems; these systems would deliver hydrogen from the process of “clean hydrolysis” (the passing of a sustainably generated electric current through water, yielding hydrogen and oxygen) that would be used to supply stationary and vehicle fuel cells and for hydrogen combustion turbines in a variety of regional markets. Rather than resisting the conversion to clean energy, these cash-flush oil corporations have the opportunity to position themselves as early providers of an intelligent energy infrastructure. If major oil companies do indeed reorganize and become sustainable energy providers, the metamorphosis will require considerable effort and capital investment but will prove to be advantageous for their businesses in the long term.
Opportunities also exist to research, develop, and market a plethora of plant-based materials that will replace petrochemicals in many manufacturing applications. Actually, this opportunity will be a resumption of an earlier research emphasis in this field that was started during the pre-World War II years. These plant-based production materials will be part of the products-of-consumption side of the materials equation. Some high-performance