Scheer Solar Economy Renewable Energy for a Sustainable Global Future (Earthscan, 2005)
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save the energy consumer having to source all their energy services individually.
The full impact of new technological solutions is only felt when their promoters go beyond the familiar structures of technology use. If those opposed cannot halt the development in its tracks, the result is a structural revolution that former critics then try to use to their advantage. This was the pattern for the growth of IT, with both positive and negative social and environmental consequences. The negative consequences arise because these distributed technologies have not been truly independent of centralized infrastructure, which has allowed the established corporations to regain control.
In fact, the way IT and technologies for generating and harnessing solar energy can complement each other makes them ideal partners. Solar power can liberate IT from fixed energy supplies, allowing it to be deployed in an even more mobile and independent way, whereas IT can make solar devices smarter. Microelectronics allows different devices to communicate with each other, and programs can be developed to integrate and control them. Autonomous solar energy supplies and multifunctional systems can be controlled by remote data link, and simulations can be run, analysed, modelled, halted and maintained.24 The transition from a national energy grid to independent mini-grids thus becomes considerably smoother. Today’s PCs can perform tasks that, until the 1970s, only mainframes could manage. Likewise, small solar energy systems could in future take over from the industrial-scale technology of nuclear and fossil energy supplies.
More than anything else, what characterizes the economic and societal modern age is the idea of the ‘information society’. The concept arose with the advent of IT, and the pundits have been singing its praises ever since. One such information society evangelist is John Naisbitt, who sees in it the ‘machine of individualism’ which will radically reshape all economic and political structures: ‘the deployment of power is shifting from the state to the individual. From vertical to horizontal. From hierarchy to networking.’25 The larger the world economy grows, the more powerful the ‘small players’ become, while the ‘big players’ decline in importance. This, allegedly, is the ‘global
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paradox’. With the ‘mixed technologies’ of the telephone-cum- television-cum-computer hybrids, anybody can communicate with anybody from anywhere. The ‘personal telecomputer’, he claims, will bring ‘wireless productivity’ through technologies that become ever cheaper, lighter, small and more mobile. Ultimately, ‘the most efficient and most effective economic unit will be the individual’, who will work within a network that itself is part of a global network in which no one company and no one country can be a successful player in the ‘global game’. Hence the urgent need for global players to form strategic alliances.
This, however, is the great illusion of the information society. All the technical details are correct: fast communication from anybody to anybody, the lack of geographical ties. But power is not moving sideways, but upwards; and the centres of power are not shrinking, but becoming larger and more hierarchical than before. This contradiction between the centripetal momentum latent in the technology and the centrifugal agglomeration of power that is actually taking place stems from the fact that the centres of power can make better and faster use of the information available, because their greater organizational and financial muscle offers better opportunities to turn words into deeds. Where a technological network exists, someone has to run it. The 13 largest internet service providers in the world are all US-owned. In the interest of creating a European counterweight, the activities of electricity companies are accorded special treatment by politicians. The ‘invisible hands of the networks’ writes Philippe Quéau in Le Monde Diplomatique, ‘are weaving their own uniform web. The functional logic of the network favours mergers and synergy effects – in the language of the market: collusion, oligopoly and monopoly.’26 Competition will continue to bring prices down, until the trend turns towards mergers and industrial concentration. Information may still flow freely, but already there are those with privileged access, and as monitor and television screen come together to form a single gateway for information retrieval and receiving TV programmes, the rich array of information providers contrasts with one-sided presentation through the mass medium of television. The network,
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without which information technology could not function, creates new dependencies that call the new autonomy it offers into question and reduce its meaning. Networks can liberate, but they also always represent a restriction on or danger to individual freedom. Networks can be ties that bind.
This is what sets localized solar power apart from the applications of information technology. No-one controls the solar ‘broadcaster’. Sun and wind do not need wires and transmitters to broadcast their energy. When harnessed through autonomous installations, they make networks dispensable. Moreover, this dispensability erodes the foundations of the ever-expanding networks of corporate power that the energy supply chains made possible.
Independent solar technology can realize what IT promised: the creeping decline of global corporate power, the whittling down of business hierarchies. The technology is still in its infancy, comparable perhaps with the automobiles of the 1920s. Work on PV is aiming at producing materials that can absorb far more sunlight and which can reduce material inputs a hundredfold. Cost reductions will result. The solar cells of the future will be made of flexible material capable of turning even the smallest quantities of light into electricity. Photoactive materials (‘wet solar cells’) may be developed using photochemical processes; photolytic separation of water; miniaturized electrolysis plants and miniature fuel cells; light concentrators; ultra-light light converters; high-performance thin insulating materials; fluvial hydropower; megaand miniwind turbines which can make use even of light winds; improved biomass gasification plants; high-performance small Stirling engines…27 – these and other developments are in the pipeline, on top of which comes the potential for cost-reduc- tion through mass production and improved tooling. The solar–technological revolution has only just begun. The driving force is the practical applications – the introduction of technology and its uptake by society.
Trains will be pulled by fuel cell locomotives, eliminating the need for overhead cables and making railways cheaper to run. Carriages will have solar modules built into the roof. Already, there are refrigerated lorries whose roofs are covered
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with PV panels. There will be airships whose entire external skin is one big photovoltaic array, which will provide much of the power they need. Freighters will produce their fuel on board, through wind power and electrolysis, and passenger ships will also use biogas plants to process their organic waste. What is needed is imagination and – more importantly – new priorities for science and technology, for architecture and for energy supplies themselves, for companies and governments. What is required is a vision for an energy supply that does not rely on a specialized energy industry.
C H A P T E R 7
The untapped wealth of solar resources
THE BIG PROBLEM with current environmental policy and environmental management procedures in businesses is that individual problems are tackled in isolation. The result is an unmanageable catalogue of single-issue demands and measures. Even by the mid-1980s, the Chemical Abstract Service had registered 8 million chemicals, mostly synthetic,1 and well over a million must have been added since. Several hundred thousand of these registered compounds are in active use. Even if only 1 per cent of products cause environmental difficulties, this makes proper environmental safeguards next to impossible to achieve, regardless of whether the instruments used are laws, regulations or voluntary agreements in industry. Even enhanced resource productivity is only of limited help, as productivity gains primarily reduce waste, without affecting the number of products produced or the raw materials used. Fossil resources require a thicket of specific regulations which no-one can hope to enforce and which smother both business and personal lives in red tape.
It is therefore no coincidence that public sympathy for environmental protection and environmental policy is waning, despite general recognition of the dangers. Careful consideration of every aspect of each environmental problem becomes tiresome and stultifying. The situation is also often worsened by failure to distinguish between truly serious and more trivial problems. Besides which, many people do not see why they should take an environmentally responsible attitude towards small problems while global problems go unchecked, often as not made worse by governmental action. As people lose patience
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with the vast range of demands made upon them, the cause of environmental protection is undeniably losing ground.
We need to radically rethink the relationship between industry and the environment, and harnessing the plant kingdom to provide industrial raw materials is the ideal way to do it. Changing the energy and resource base goes to the root of the whole problem of limited resources and the damage caused by their use. Historically, environmental concern in the energy sector meant energy conservation and energy efficiency. Now, as the technology improves, the focus must shift towards renewable energy. Likewise, in the case of industrial raw materials, the priority now must be to take a long, hard look at the replacement of limited reserves of raw materials with renewable solar (ie, biological) resources. Tapping the unlimited potential of solar materials will make it possible to move from rearguard criticism of environmentally dangerous activities to practical support for environmentally neutral industrial processes and products. The transition from fossil to solar resources is just as important as that from fossil to solar energy, and what is more, it is just as practicable. In many cases, it may even be easier to achieve.
Following a century in which plants and vegetation have been pushed to the margins of economic and cultural life, the last quarter-century has seen a revival of interest in this biological treasure chest. After long years in which urban greenery has had to make way for asphalt and concrete, and in which avenues of trees were even thought a danger to traffic, plants are in many places now making a comeback, both for aesthetic reasons and as a tool for improving the local microclimate. Deforestation and its consequences has become one of the global issues of the day. Reforestation initiatives are appearing, albeit they cannot keep pace with the continuing destruction of forests across the globe. By no means is it just the tropical rainforests that are disappearing: large tracts of North American and Siberian woodland are also under threat. There is now increasing recognition of the value, and even more, the potential value of biodiversity. Not least among the new botanical prospectors is the chemical industry – not that chemicals companies have made much effort to put a stop to
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the continuing destruction of biodiversity that results from climate changes wrought by fossil fuel consumption.
As fossil fuel reserves near exhaustion, the chemical industry must harness biological resources if it is to survive. Nevertheless, with few exceptions, chemicals companies are jeopardising their future existence by remaining firmly wedded to their fossil fuel resource base. ‘As long as there is a choice between fossil and regenerable resources,’ states a BASF representative in defence of this strategy, ‘the regenerable resource must be competitively priced on the world market and in adequate supply.’2 This attitude illustrates the barrier that industrial myopia and structural conservatism represent to the industrial potential of solar resources.
The transition to a solar resource base would not only allow the ‘poisoning of the planet’ (Karl-Otto Henseling)3 by chemical production methods and chemical products to be largely avoided. Although evolution has also brought forth all manner of highly dangerous toxins, nevertheless, the natural world in its entirety is a well-constructed, sustainable mechanism, because natural poisons are biodegradable and optimized to perform highly specific functions. Chemicals companies are already trying to learn from nature by combing through rainforests, for example, in search of plants that have evolved their own chemical defences against insects. Solar resources also provide opportunities for productivity gains that fossil raw materials could never deliver. There are already convincing examples from the world of ‘natural chemistry’ of how photosynthetic processes produce countless compounds with molecular structures that synthetic chemistry can replicate only through laborious, highly toxic and highly complex procedures.
Many people argue the case for renewable energy on the basis that burning fossil fossils is a waste of an indispensable raw material for the manufacture of synthetic goods. However, this well-intended reasoning seriously underestimates the damage done to the global ecosystem by chemical production processes, which consist overwhelmingly in the conversion of fossil hydrocarbons – ie, crude oil, natural gas and coal – into chemical feedstocks. It also underestimates the potential for solar materials as a comprehensive and, in many respects, superior alternative to synthetic petrochemicals.
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Biomass gasification produces a gas which is just as suitable for syntheses as the natural gas which is currently used – with the important difference that biomass-derived gas is almost devoid of sulphur. With biogas, the chemicals industry could retain existing synthesis pathways while simultaneously reducing their environmental impact. As plants are composed of hydrocarbon compounds, logically, anything produced from fossil hydrocarbons could also be produced from plants. Yet biological raw materials carry very different implications for processes and products than their fossil counterparts. In many cases, as with the substitution of renewable energy for nuclear and fossil fuel power, the shift towards solar materials will overturn existing procedures and reshape business relationships. Moreover, there is considerable scope within the spectrum of solar materials for reducing reliance on metals.
Whether and how these opportunities are seized is again a structural issue. Isolated replacements of conventional by solar materials in the production of particular intermediate or final products are of course sensible steps forward in their own terms. But the full scope for productivity gains from solar materials by comparison with fossil resources really comes from the very different ways the two are produced. This is what makes it clear that it is the choice of resource base that matters, not the actual quantities used. It also shows that the current slew of biotechnology companies have grabbed completely the wrong end of the stick.
The higher productivity of biological materials
The long road from extraction of oil, coal or gas, through refining and complex industrial processes to finished chemical feedstocks is matched in the case of solar resources by planting, harvesting, storage, cleaning, drying, separation and transport. In many cases, transport costs can be held to a minimum by growing the materials near the production plant. The only disadvantage as far as productivity is concerned is the considerably greater need for personnel, although this also represents a significant social benefit. Giuliano Grassi has calculated that, for each terawatt hour of energy, natural gas
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requires 250 employees, crude oil 260, coal 270 and nuclear power 70, whereas producing solid fuels from crops requires 1145 employees and 1000 employees in the case of woodlands.4 The greater labour input probably also applies to the use of solar materials in the manufacture of chemical products in place of the equivalent fossil feedstocks.
But against this alleged disadvantage, which takes into account the resource costs but not the costs associated with chemical industrial processes, should be set a raft of economic advantages. The industrial processing required for solar materials is much less extensive than for fossil hydrocarbons. The great diversity of natural chemicals means that, in many cases, they can be used ‘as is’, their chemical structure needing little alteration. By comparison, crude oil in its raw state is not even halfway usable as a chemical feedstock.
Hermann Fischer, a manufacturer of natural paints and dyes whom Capital magazine accorded the title Eco-Manager of the Year in 1992, illustrates this using the example of polyurethane, the base material for varnishes, adhesives, foams and artificial fibres.5 Crude oil requires substantial chemical engineering to turn it into usable feedstocks. The process involves high temperatures and chemically active surfaces, such as those based on the heavy metals. First of all, the sulphur content has to be removed by catalytic hydrogenation. Unwanted aromatic compounds are removed, and the purified hydrocarbons are then transformed into the desired molecular structure in a washing and reforming process at temperatures of between 500 and 1000 degrees Celsius. Component molecules are added to or removed from the basic structure as required. Only after this molecular disassembly has taken place can the hydrocarbons be turned into desirable precursor chemicals. Converting these precursors into active reagents results in highly toxic by-products. For example, one by-product of the process used to manufacture chlorinated hydrocarbons, the base material for the manufacture of pesticides, preservatives and wood treatment agents, is extremely toxic phosgene gas, which can be (and has been) used as a chemical weapon.
It is a combination of these reagents that produces the actual polyurethane, which is itself a feedstock for numerous
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other products. The component molecules are released when the final product is consumed or as it breaks down, gradually evaporating, peeling, ablating or being absorbed by living tissue. Even if the final product does not itself contain poisonous substances, this should not distract from the fact that highly toxic chemicals are employed in manufacturing the intermediate products, and that industrial chemistry is associated with considerable health risks and produces highly toxic waste. Where the final product ends up as waste, the very features that endow it with a long shelf life and which make it easy to use also cause it to persist in the environment. Reverse engineering back to mineral substances is energy-intensive, complicated and rarely performed for cost reasons.
For example, for every 100 kg of benzopurin 4B dye produced, there are 768 kg of waste and by-products. These figures relate only to the last stages of the manufacturing process – the precursor substances, from crude oil through to the production of naphthalene, aniline and toluol during refining are not included.
As Figure 7.1 makes clear, industrial hydrocarbon chemistry is an open loop (Fischer calls it the ‘petrochemical snake’), and therefore cannot offer fundamental economic advantages over its biological counterpart. Figure 7.2 underlines this point by comparing fossil and biological production pathways. Given its obvious drawbacks, it is perverse that the EU framework agreement of 1992 gives preferential treatment to the established structures of the chemical industry as a matter of course, by making ‘crude oil consumption by the oil-processing industry’ – ie, the chemical industry – tax-exempt. This amounts to environmentally detrimental and market-distorting subsidies of the order of billions – legitimized, once again, by the presumption that there is ‘no alternative’.
The reason given for preferring petrochemical over solar materials is the latter’s higher price. On a closer examination, however, this cannot be the determining factor – at the very least, it would carry little or no weight if the tax-exempt status of crude oil were revoked. Around 300 precursor chemicals are produced from oil, coal and gas. The waste disposal costs of these alone would be enough to tip the balance in favour of