The Solar Economy starts with a withering critique of the present fossil fuel economy. It lambasts those politicians who leave long-term planning to international stock markets that never look beyond the next quarter. It describes the risks posed by the lengthy supply chains needed to transport dwindling fossil fuel resources to run outdated combustion machinery and a dysfunctional agricultural system. It predicts not only increased international conflict as power blocks squabble for the remaining fuel reserves but also the concentration of wealth in fewer countries and hands.
Such warnings have been heard for at least thirty years and they seem to be having less and less effect on our collective conscious and our will to change. It is as if someone had been highlighting the fact that the King has no clothes for so long that we have become comfortable and complacent about the naked truth of our unsustainable economic model.
But Scheer is not simply foretelling doom if we carry on as we are. He presents a sweeping vision of what the renewable alternative could and should be like. His vision penetrates beyond the obvious potential of photovoltaics, wind power and biomass to explore the ways solar solutions will change every aspect of our economy and lives. Its realisation involves not just putting a few PV panels on our societal roof, but changing the plumbing, wiring and the basic building blocks of our society to build a renewable future.
A key step in that direction will be the development of new energy storage technologies for use by intermittent renewable power sources like wind. A lot of attention has been paid recently to storing energy from the wind by using surplus electricity from wind turbines to electrolyse water to provide hydrogen for use in fuel-cell-powered vehicles. My own hunch, however, having read Scheer's overview of the emerging technologies, is that innovations in areas such as compressed air cylinders may be a better bet in the near future. Unlike battery technology there are no messy chemicals and test cars already have a range of 200km using a compressed air cylinder which is lighter and more compact than any battery in existing electrical vehicles. In my dreams I am already scheming to open the first compressed air re-energising station on the Ring of Kerry to power all those coaches flying along the road.
Indeed, this book will make most of its adult readers yearn to become engineers when they grow up. It is a rallying call for technologists to save the planet by designing ways to store the energy provided free of charge by the sun. As I write, I am sure an engineer in a small lab or a garage somewhere is putting the final touches to a prototype energy storage system that will mark this new century in the same way that Henry Ford's production of the Model T marked the last.
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