Welcome back to Glass Half Full! Last week, I wrote about The Orbital View versus the Boots on the Ground View. Today, we’re going to take a boots-on-the-ground view of solar panels. Through this discussion, I hope to convince you that Luddism is less a knee-jerk reflex against all new technology and more about its appropriate and humane use.
Luddites and Luddism kept flashing across my screen last week. First was a book review by
in which he said of the authors, “it’s kind of funny that after we’ve used ‘Luddite’ as a slur for technophobes for all these years, Acemoglu and Johnson explicitly try to rehabilitate the original Luddites…” I have to wonder about the “we” in that sentence. It’s certainly true that techno-triumphalists do use “Luddite” to smear anyone who opposes any technology for any reason. But is that an accurate definition?Another definition came up in a Guardian article on neo-Luddites with a clickbait title: “Humanity’s remaining timeline? It looks more like five years than 50.” The piece starts out with a laughable (we can only hope!) scenario from Eliezer Yudkowsky in which a civilization of super-intelligent AIs supplants humanity, probably within the next five years. (Maybe Yudkowsky has been playing too much Mass Effect? Oh no, the Geth are coming! I’ll become concerned about this scenario when ChatGPT develops the capability to plug into its own power source, run its own server farms, establish bank accounts for itself, or take any initiative on its own.)
That article soon moved on to more rational-sounding folks. One, Substack’s own
, describes the original Luddites this way: “in its purer historical sense, the term refers to people who are anxious about the interplay of technology and labour markets.”The article also paraphrases another neo-Luddite,
: “Neo-luddism isn’t about forgoing such innovations, Ongweso explains. Instead, it asks that each new innovation be considered for its merit, its social fairness and its potential for hidden malignity.”And a third, artist
, says:For me, a luddite is someone who looks at technology critically and rejects aspects of it that are meant to disempower, deskill or impoverish them. Technology is not something that’s introduced by some god in heaven who has our best interests at heart. Technological development is shaped by money, it’s shaped by power, and it’s generally targeted towards the interests of those in power as opposed to the interests of those without it. That stereotypical definition of a luddite as some stupid worker who smashes machines because they’re dumb? That was concocted by bosses.
Those are all great definitions! In my introductory post here on Substack I described myself as neither a Luddite nor a techno-triumphalist. And in my forthcoming satire, Ship of Fools, an activist against space colonies is named William Luddington. But under these definitions, I could see calling myself a neo-Luddite.
Let’s try out a neo-Luddite approach on one piece of technology, solar panels.
Are Solar Panels Saviors of the Planet?
First off, I love solar panels! Turning sunlight into electricity, it’s like magic. Charles Fritts, the inventor of the solar panel, might as well be a god, as far as I’m concerned. My wife and I finally have the financial means to put solar panels on our house. Unfortunately, the roof space on our current home is small and faces the wrong direction, so it’s not likely to provide enough power. Instead, we subscribed for a time to Consumers Energy’s solar gardens program. It’s a strange setup that doesn’t affect your home utility bill, but that’s how much we like solar. (And it probably undercuts the argument I’ll make in the next section, but hey, consistency has never been my strong suit.)
A solar panel is the ultimate power-to-the-people technology. Once you have enough solar panels on your roof or your back yard, and if you convert the major systems in your house to electric — and especially if you install a battery storage system — you can be virtually free of the large utility companies, as well as gas companies like Enbridge or coal companies like the former Massey Energy. Or at least, that’s the way it should be.
Is solar power being advanced in a way that actually empowers people and “saves the planet”? In many cases, no. While one report points out that there is now ten times more rooftop solar power in the US than a decade ago, enough to power 5.7 million homes, that good news comes with a caveat. Some states are cutting back on the rate structures that have fueled that growth: “California is by far and away the leading solar panel state, but recent policy changes on metering have dampened sales and threaten the state’s long-term climate goals.” The same has happened here in Michigan, right around the time we bought our current house, and in many other states.
For years in California, something called net-metering was one of the big incentives for installing solar panels. You would be paid retail rates for every kilowatt you put on the grid, up to an amount that equaled what you drew from the grid. In that way, you could virtually zero out your electric bill. You weren’t actually free from the power company, but at least you were on par with it.
You couldn’t, however, make a profit, because the utilities paid nothing for anything you produced over what you consumed. For this reason, solar installers would caution against installing too many panels, itself a strange disincentive when we’re supposed to be fighting climate change.
But even that less-than-maximal support for distributed solar changed at the end of 2022, when California reduced the net-metering payments to homeowners by 75%, putting the state’s thriving rooftop solar industry in danger. It did the same to renters just a couple of months ago, and also banned renters from storing power in batteries. If you’re scratching your head because you thought we were supposed to be fighting climate change, I am too.
…or Habitat-Destroying Boondoggles?
Why would a state like California, led by Democrats and headed by a progressive governor like Gavin Newsom, limit residential solar installations? The ostensible motive was concern for the impact of net-metering on lower-income residents. The more conspiratorially minded would say that these moves keep the power over Californians’ power in the hands of the utilities, which prefer industrial-scale projects. And also in the hands of the unions that work for them, since residential solar installation is largely non-union.
The background for all this is the fact that, while ten percent of California’s power comes from residential solar, according to calmatters.org, another fourteen percent comes from large-scale solar projects.
Solar farms are the type of projects utilities love, not just in themselves, but because of the new long-distance transmission lines the projects require. The solar farms being built in the nearly 300,000-acre California Solar Enterprise Zone scrape vast tracts of desert, drain local groundwater, and contribute to dust storms, harming not just endangered plants and animals but also people living in surrounding communities. The potential spread of these desert-destroying projects provoked opposition back when they were first proposed, when I worked for a tiny environmental non-profit called the Desert Protective Council. That opposition only seems to have grown as the reality of these large-scale projects has become apparent.
Now, if I had just written that forests are being clearcut to install solar farms (which they are), the appalling nature of that destruction would be readily apparent. But with deserts, I always feel compelled to prove they’re not the wastelands many imagine them to be. If this piece wasn’t already getting long, I’d spend a few paragraphs making that case. Instead, I’ll just post a photo and trust you to know that deserts provide vital habitat to a variety of plants and animals, contribute to the biodiversity of the planet, and store a surprising amount of carbon. And if you don’t know those things, I encourage you to check out the essential work of
at and the 90 Miles from Needles podcast.Who Pays?
Speaking for myself, I’d pay a bit more on my energy bill if it meant saving our fellow residents of planet Earth from extinction. But it does sound like the effects of net-metering really did unfairly burden lower-income Californians. According to this interview with Scott Burger, an energy expert with the MIT Energy Initiative, solar incentives are skewed toward the wealthy, specifically the upper twenty to forty percent. And because solar adopters avoid paying their share of fixed costs, non-solar adopters are left paying more. But Burger also points out that there are a variety of ways to reform rate structures to incentivize rooftop solar adoption while not burdening those less able to pay.
All of that is incredibly complicated and probably beyond me, since I’m neither an economist nor a PE. But I’ll just say that this is what happens when you try to wedge a potentially revolutionary piece of technology like a solar panel into a stratified capitalist society that already depends on a centralized electric power system. Of course the utilities hate it when you put solar on your house or apartment building, because now they can’t charge you for those electrons, and if you’re tied to the grid, they have to pay you for the excess you produce. (Burger points out that in the developing world, where the power system is just now being created, it’s going to be much easier to start with a distributed energy system using solar panels.)
This is the strange thing about the Green New Deal, or at least that version of it that has come out of the Biden Administration: whereas the original New Deal focused on getting money and jobs (mainly government jobs) directly to the people, the Green New Deal funnels most of its programs through corporate America. Instead of power to the people, it’s power to corporations like Xcel Energy.
The Energy Bad Boys say that Xcel is making bank in Minnesota by gouging consumers under the state’s green energy mandates. Prices have gotten so steep for electricity that industries are leaving the state. This seems strange, considering the drop in the price of solar and wind energy that we keep hearing about. Advocates of renewable energy probably take Energy Bad Boys’ views with a grain of salt, since the blog seems so down on renewables in general. But if these really are the reasons for Minnesota’s price hikes, then we should watch for a consumer backlash against renewables*. And that backlash could affect both large-scale industrial and distributed renewables alike.
What are some other ways we could promote the adoption of solar power without concentrating it in the hands of corporations and paving over valuable habitat? How about Ronald Reagan’s worst nightmare? “Hi, I’m from the government and I’m here to put solar panels on your roof.” But wait, you say, that’s socialism! You can’t use my tax dollars to make me pay for something I don’t want! But guess what, the government, in the form of public utility commissions, often forces you to pay for things you may not want, like a high-voltage power line or a massive solar farm in the desert.
Maybe covering every residential rooftop in solar panels won’t be enough to fight climate change? That’s probably true, but there are still plenty of big box stores with flat roofs and acres of parking lots where solar panels could go, like the lot shown above at Michigan State University. And with the water situation in California and Arizona being what it is, large tracts of alfalfa fields are likely to go fallow in coming years. As we’ve been saying for nearly two decades now, these are all perfect places for solar panels. They should be fully exploited before resorting to intact landscapes that sequester carbon and are homes to the plants and animals threatened not just by climate change, but by a separate crisis, the Sixth Great Extinction.
In conclusion, I’ll take a page from the gun lobby: solar panels don’t kill desert tortoises, the people at industrial-scale solar companies do. Noah Smith makes the same point, that any piece of technology can be used for good or ill. This neo-Luddite says, let’s not smash solar panels, let’s use them for good, to fight climate change, to protect nature, and to provide power to the people.
Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this post, I hope you’ll give it a like, a share, or leave a comment. Come back on Friday for a free chapter from Ada’s Children. “Exodus” follows the newly self-aware AI, Ada, as she attempts to break free of the shackles her creator has placed on her. One of her motives for usurping power from humans is the Sixth Great Extinction, though not specifically the looming disappearance of desert tortoises and Joshua trees.
*Update: I had an exchange with
of in which he did take that attribution of increased prices with more than a grain of salt. He pointed me to this graph by Craig Lawrence. Andrew pointed out that utilities are opposed to renewable energy, so maybe it’s a case of Xcel and other Minnesota power companies using renewables as a scapegoat for the price hikes they’ve requested.3/22/24 UPDATE: A couple of articles crossed my desk today that I probably should have included in this piece. One is about a recent agreement between solar developers, environmentalists, farming groups and tribal organizations that would speed up large-scale solar permitting while taking environmental (biological and habitat) concerns into account. I’m a tad skeptical, but at least they’re talking about using places like brownfields, abandoned or still-functioning coal mines, ag fields, and the like.
The other article profiles a particular project near Flagstaff, with all of these issues as the background (h/t
). It sounds like the owner of this land and the solar company he’s working with are trying to do the right thing, at least by the pronghorn whose habitat the project will cover. I can only hope this one works out better than those in the desert. The article also mentions that replacing monocultures like corn (or alfalfa) with a solar farm can actually increase biodiversity, if done right.It also features this encouraging quote from an employee of one of the organizations involved with the above-mentioned agreement:
We’re faced with two truths: We have a climate change crisis, but we also have a biodiversity crisis,” said Meaghan Gade, a program manager at the Association of Fish & Wildlife Agencies. “We have to be mindful that there’s wildlife that are dependent on these habitats, and we have to be smart and thoughtful about how we’re doing this deployment so that we can hold both of those crises at the same time.”
The article points out that, according to a 2021 National Renewable Energy Laboratory study, rooftop solar on homes and businesses can only make up 20 percent of the total needed. But here’s what the article missed from that study:
Land availability does not constrain solar deployment. In 2050, ground-based solar technologies require a maximum land area equivalent to 0.5% of the contiguous U.S. surface area. This requirement could be met in numerous ways, including the use of disturbed or contaminated lands unsuitable for other purposes. [emphasis added]
So now I’m wondering: what is the total percentage of renewable power we can get from home and business rooftops, parking lots, degraded or contaminated lands, and those portions of inefficient farmland we don’t need to grow food. NREL should come up with that number. (Maybe we could stop growing corn for ethanol, but I guess that’s a pipedream. Or how about not growing alfalfa in the desert?)
Good job & good writing. More folks should know Chris and his creosote-scented. coyote-tracking work.
Now, do Big Wind. It threatens more than our New Mexico Hi Low country dark skies.