P2P Foundation

Alternet is interviewing Travis Bradford of the Prometheus Institute for Sustainable Development, and author of the book: Solar Revolution: The Economic Transformation of the Global Energy Industry . There/s a lot more in the original article here, we are only selecting a few key quotes:

Travis says that we’re moving towards a distributed power generation model, with solar as the only viable option.

He says:

Solar is different from other energy technologies in that it delivers energy at the point of use, directly to the end user. That allows it to circumvent the entire supply chain. It’s not another option for a utility, it’s a competitor to a utility — the first time utilities have really had a competitor.

And adds that:

Solar is slowly going to begin to unwind the existing utility economics, to the point where utilities decide they have to get in or they risk losing their core business — exactly the transformations we’ve lived through in the last 20 years.

The solar revolution does not require new breakthroughs in technology. You could do it with the technology we have, scaling it up and learning how to do it incrementally better every year — which is what naturally happens with scale.

While this would solve home usage problems, it would not solve the transportation fuels issue. For that a reconnection of the transportation and electricity infrastructures would be a necessity:

Everything has to reconnect. The infrastructures that separated — first at the beginning of the century, and again in the middle of the century for natural-gas infrastructure — have to reconnect. And we’ll need a lot more electricity to drive that.

There are real capacity constraints in any transportation-fuel option until we reconnect it with the electricity infrastructure. You do that either with plug-in hybrids or with electrolyzed hydrogen. My guess is that batteries will be better for transportation purposes, and electrolyzed hydrogen for stationary applications, because fuel cells on site are much easier to make than fuel cells with the thrust needed in automobiles.

What about the political implications of solar power? Will the decentralization of power production be accompanied by a decentralization of political power?

Bradford: Solar power is empowering. All things being equal, people like to control the resources upon which they rely. That’s why I spend time thinking about solar technologies rather than centralized, easily controlled technologies. At the end of the day, sustainability includes distributed power and democratization.