Article published in Scheer, H. / Ghandi, M. / Aitken, D. / Hamakawa, Y. / Palz, W. (Ed.): The Yearbook of Renewable Energies 1994: Solar Energy – What are its Driving Forces ?, London, 1994 Editorial
Future generations will certainly ask why both politics and economics in the 1970s, 1980s, and the beginning of the 1990s of the 20th Century had been acting in such a passive and cowardly way with respect to the far-reaching opportunities of-fered by renewable energies. Therefore, the only open questions are...
- whether the majority of our present decision-makers will be asked these questions in a bitter
and accusing way due to the fact that an endless decline with innumerable catastrophes has
taken place in the meantime which is caused by ignoring the solar option, or
- whether they will be asked with an ironic smile due to the fact that maybe by the turn of the Century the political and economic priorities had been changed in time in favour of solar energy by establishing a global solar energy System within the first decades of the 21st Century, having made a Start in the present decade.There is no doubt about it: today we are at a turning point. The Rio Conference was a move in that direction but it failed to open the way for concrete and satisfactory alternatives. What was formulated there on the energy problem - e.g. a Convention to stabilize CO2 emissions by the year 2000 at the level of 1990 - is not sufficient at all for the goal itself and the Convention is not binding.
There is no reason for optimism that this Convention will be respected more than an existing 25-year -old commitment of industrialized countries to increase the budget for development aid up to 0.7% of the GDP (gross domestic product). Until today only four countries had implemented this Obligation.
The reality of 1993 has already disproved the declarations made at Rio in 1992, however. Even the CO2 emissions of western industrialized countries are still increasing - and at the same time China and other South-East Asian countries are facing rapid economic growth which is unprecedented in history. Everybody knows that the ecosphere would be already irreversibly damaged if China which has twice of the population of all the Member States of the EC, Japan and the United States together would have had the same energy consumption per capita over the last 40 years as most of the industrialized countries. But it is exactly this development that we are observing today.
And it is even welcomed everywhere - by the same governments that talked about the ecological limits to economic growth in Rio. They comfort themselves with the reflection, that more efficient energy technologies are being ex-ported to China today. But even when you imagine that the number of cars in China would be onethousand times more than today with a consumption of only 50% of the cars that had been used there so far, then car emissions would be still 500 times higher than they were before. In other words: at present all the signs indicate that by copying the western model of economic growth in China a global time bomb was set which is ticking louder and louder every year. An effective program for a civilization to commit suicide is working well. The Chinese example reveals some elementary and basic findings for our entire future:
1. the current energy System cannot be continued any longer;
2. the model of industrialization of northern industrialized societies cannot be translated to others -you cannot generalize. These findings are not only proved by the inherent ecological dangers but also by the increasing deficiency in the conventional energy resources;
3. the orientation of nearly all national economies in the world on the western free-market economic-growth model is mobilizing and driving economic growth. But economic growth promotes both energy efficiency and energy consumption at the same time. The energy consumption of other technologies will be reduced, but at the same time the demand for additional energy-intensive activities is growing. The global creation and development of free-market economies is not compatible with the use of limited and ecologically-damaging resources.
In other words: only if we base our economies on renewable energies will there will be enough resources for the development of free-market economies while respecting the ecological limits of our civilization at the same time;
4. in an equalizing global market-economy it is not possible to introduce renewable energies primarily for developing countries and to continue with the consumption of conventional energies by the northern industrialized countries. If we want to introduce renewable energies in the former, we have to make them a top priority in the latter, too.
If we want to enjoy the advantages of industrialized societies in the future without denying them to the rest of the world, and if we also want to overcome the disadvantages without additionally burdening the rest of the world with it, then we need - above all - a new paradigm of energy supply. Therefore we have to ask ourselves today why renewable energies - despite of their obvious ecological and long-term economic advantages - have not been fully introduced yet. We have to ask where the deficiencies lie that are hindering our society from accepting renewable energies, and what mistakes have been made even by those who have engaged themselves
in the cause of renewable energies without full success so far.
In other words: how can the wrong, current paradigm be described, which is also influencing the alternative approaches?
1. The environmental crisis is a global problem. Consequently there is a necessity to find global answers, which was tried in Rio. But the method of decision-making at international level is the slowest form of all decision-making. The most powerful competitor - given enough strength - sets the pace. It is political nonsense trying to win the race against time by the slowest method because the consequence is talking globally, postponing nationally. It remains a contradiction in itself, when initiatives for the creation of a global solar energy system were only undertaken on the condition that all governments participate from the beginning. This connection has never been made with other, even less important, questions, e.g. related to the promotion of or incentives for new technologies. In the development of modern microprocessors, modern aeroplanes or high-speed trains nobody waited for international agreements. On the contrary, it was said that "we have to be faster than the others in order to have future competitive advantages". And when President Roosevelt started the Tennessee Valley Program, he did not make an energy-cost comparison beforehand. He simply thought of how to overcome the economic crisis. This argument must become the premise for renewable energies today.
2. We are living in a culture of scientific, political and economic division of labor. Science, politics and economy have become organized in a particularistic way and therefore their representatives are acting particularistically, too. The consequence of a society organized in such a way is that its members - the people - despite the dramatic increase in knowledge and information, are educated in such a way that they become intellectual pygmies who are only able to act and think within small areas. They do not realize anymore that possible progress in one specific field might lead to degradation of the whole.
This culture is represented - in economic terms -by neoliberal economic theory. This theory only looks at the cost-effectiveness of specific products and their market principle but completely ignores the consequences for society. The economic advantages of such a theory are being privatized, economic disadvantages socialized, i.e. a burden on society.
The triumphal march of this ideology in the 1980s, which has lasted until now, is the main reason why our cognitions about the present dangers - documented by numerous conferences on environment and development - do not correspond at all with our political and economic behavior. This is why the 1980s was a lost decade for both environment and development; and the 1990s will become another lost decade, and even the next century will be lost, unless we respond to the interrelated problems with coherent strategies.
The economic and social advantages of renewable energies are enormous: for saving the earth's atmosphere; for the health of man; for an independent and safe, long-term energy supply as well as economic development; for new jobs in industry and for preventing a the steadily increasing rate of unemployment; for recuperation of soil and water, for avoiding a global water crisis and for the economic liberation of agriculture. The fact that all these chances are being ignored because of one single factor - the current price of energy - which puts aside all the other aspects is a classic example of intellectual pygmyism. There might bean excuse if an individual producer or consumer of energy is acting in such a way. But it is absolutely incomprehensible when the same way of thinking exists even at the political level.
3. The advocates of renewable energies have too long prevented themselves from attaining an overall perspective by thinking only of small-scale actions: asking for a little more money for research and development for pilot and demonstration pro-jects, for a doubling or tripling of the supply of renewable energies within ten years. The megawatt-suppliers of conventional energies are facing the kilowatt-suppliers of renewable energies. That is how the biased view that renewable energies would be able to contribute only a marginal share to the supply of energy within the next decades, seems to be justified.
Governments, who need offers of megawatt, rely on those who make such offers. But we should remind ourselves how comprehensively the perspectives of nuclear power had been formulated in the 50s: even before the first nuclear power plant was producing electricity, an energy future had been promised, in which the total human demand for energy would be met forever and completely by nuclear power. These perspectives animated governments and finally mobilized billions for research, development and market introduction programs. On the other hand, the advocates of renewable energies were being persuaded that asking too much would be harmful to their case. But the confidence of society in renewable energies as the alternative, and the courage to really push them, can only come in the end from thinking in large quantities and major advances: in megawatt produced by renewable energies, in an steadily increasing share of the total energy production - from 10 to 20, 30, 40, 50 % within a few centuries - up to a perspective of an energy system which is solely made up of renewable energies. Because the potential of solar energy shows this possibility, that there is every reason to aim for such a target.
4. Even the many supporters of renewable energies must learn that these will create completely new structures in the energy system once they have achieved a real breakthrough. Renewable energies cannot simply be transferred into the current energy system. What is called economy today, has nothing to do with economy at all. There is not only the problem of social costs which do not play a role in the studies of conventional, so-called, energy economists. Therefore the premises of the present energy supply are not transferable at all to renewable energies.
Let's take the example of the widely used potential studies for renewables. They are only correct when there are real limits for one form of energy due to limited resources. They are senseless in the case when there are no limits at global levels which is the case for renewables. In fact, the question about the available potential is only a simple input-output-question: the more input you give on renewable energies - in terms of research and development, investments and production - the more output you receive of renewable energies. We should concentrate more on the input than on potential studies. Or let's take another example: the cost of energy; comparisons usually take one kilowatt per hour electricity or one liter petrol as a basis. But in macro-economic terms it is much more important whether you have to import a source of energy or not. Even if wind power or biomass from domestic agricultural production would cost a few cents more, their macro-economic advantage would still be much higher as compared to the production of electricity from imported uranium, imported nuclear technology, imported or subsidized coal and imported oil.
Or let's take a third example: If there are more and more PV-and solar collector-, biomass-co-genera-tion and Stirling-motor applications in houses for electricity, heating and cooling, then the houses will become renewable energy producers instead of consuming conventional energies from the outside. If - for instance - a solar facade is constructed, instead of a traditional building frontage, then the usual comparison between costs for 1 kWh of conventional electricity on the one hand and of solar electricity on the other will be "out of business". The only relevant comparison then is the comparison between a conventional facade (by the way: nobody asks how much energy was needed for the production of these facades) and a solar facade, which produces electricity. It becomes a question of a new-buildings and household-economy instead of a conventional energy-economy. Someone who only counts the costs for kilowatt-hours is not an economist, he is just a calculator of one isolated factor; for such a calculation we do not need scientific analysts, because a simple computer can do better.
We ought to understand that the companies representing the current energy suppliers do not have to be the same as the companies representing a solar energy production sector in the future. The corporations of our present energy system are not public institutions whose existence is granted by a constitution. Solar energy is the road which leads us away from the energy-consuming towards the energy-producing house and by that we will automatically see a far-reaching structural change. Every structural change has winners and losers. It is not advisable to make the introduction of solar energy dependent on those who will be among the losers by such a structural change - from the oil-, coal- or countries or their contracting companies, or from those which operate large power plants. The solar future cannot be made dependent on the individual premises of one single branch of the economy. Even the current energy-supplying companies have the chance to participate in building up such a solar energy system: but rather through diversification than through structural conservatism - from the supplier or producer of oil to the producer of wind power plants, biomass-conversion plants, solar energy plants, producers of Stirling motors, solar cells or collectors.
5. There is a discussion about the number of jobs that could be created by producing renewable energy technology. No doubt there should be more analysis. But there is no doubt about one thing: all the costs for renewable energies are costs for the technology; that means: costs for labor to produce these technologies. Introducing renewable energies means in economic terms the replacement of conventional primary energy supply and conventional waste management by technologies that convert renewable energy sources into a secondary energy.
In other words: renewable energy technology production leads to much more employment in modern industrial jobs; it is the motor of new mass employment in industry and agriculture - an economic basis innovation!
6. In order to promote renewable energies we need the appropriate political institutions that are able to overcome the existing particularism. It is intolerable that there is a UN Agency for Nuclear Power but still none for Renewable Energies. This is the reason why Thailand, for example, is already planning several nuclear power plants at this moment - with the help and support of IAEA - but is not planning any solar power plant. As long as the jealousy of several UN institutions hinders the task which we are facing we will also fail to manage the future.
7. We need new thinking in terms of nature conservation. So far it has been of very defensive character - in connection with preventing further measures destructive to nature, whereby those measures which had been already undertaken are accepted indirectly. The consequence is a decadent attitude of trying to prevent wind power plants for nature or scenery conservation reasons. The defense of the mini-biotop has to many minds priority over saving the global biotop. This is another example of lack of proportion - but it is primarily a mistaken philosophy, an underestimation of the real ecological dangers and a misunderstanding of the ecological circle.
The 20th century became the century of the destruction of the ecosphere because of this intellectual hegemony of erroneous philosophies. We are now on the edge of a millennium of ecology. The philosophy of this new era begins with the basic assumption that renewable energies - coming from the sun - are not alternative energies; solar energy is the energy. Conventional energies were misleading alternatives. The more and the longer mankind has been following and believing in these alternatives, the more human civilization lost its ground, its basis. There is no doubt that in the future solar energy will be again the only energy used on earth. The only question is if this will happen with mankind or without mankind.
8. We need the courage for a renewal of economy and politics. Therefore, we have to develop priorities for environmental policies. We have to recognize that economics is the hard core of society, and that energy is the hard core of economy. Due to this overall importance of the energy question we have to set up an Agenda 1 within "Agenda 21" of the Earth Summit in Rio on this topic of renewable energy. Renewable energies are not an emergency exit from problems of energy supply and consumption. Renewable energies are the driving forces to renew our societies. It is not only an expert's approach, it is an approach for all human society. Solar energy is the energy of the people and we need the efforts of the people to introduce it. This is the reason why we must develop a grand strategy and a new movement - a solar strategy - for renewable energy introduction.