My immediate response to this piece was; exactly! This is exactly the argument I’ve been trying to make for decades. We have always had a choice. We can be short-term realists, continue to turn our backs on the future, and watch the civilization coast into oblivion or we can embrace the future, gamble on life rather than death, seize the tiller of change, and steer a more positive course. And steering that positive course entails a physical restructuring of the built habitat. We have to stop demonizing the urban habitat and accept it for what it is and what it could be. Just as suggested by Paulo Soleri and other mid-century futurists so long ago, we must pull back the civilization’s footprint to consolidate our infrastructures for efficiency-sake -the efficiency we need to implement renewable/sustainable alternatives- and give the biosphere back it’s breathing room. And this isn’t coming with an appeal to self-sacrifice but rather to a higher -smarter- standard of living. As I was saying to someone recently, I summarize the ultimate purpose of the various Post-Industrial movements thusly; Through open invention leveraged by the power of Metcalf’s Law, to seize command of the state-of-the-art of The Good Life. This is how you propagate this change.

Concerning Vinay’s comments, I think you may be missing that this article is not merely calling for social change but a physical renovation of the built habitat that enables the implementation of the very solar energy technology you’re pointing out. Cheap solar panels are only a partial answer because, even if they were free, they cannot change the basic logistical situation common to most forms of renewable energy; that the locations of its optimal production tend to be far removed from the locations that need the power, due to the fact that the high portability of energy in fossil fuel forms have enabled people to live where it wouldn’t otherwise be practical, dispersing the energy distribution infrastructure to such hopelessly inefficient extremes. Solar dynamic energy systems have had the potential to match this level of cost-per-watt since the mid-20th century, and yet that didn’t result in any revolution even amid the Energy Crisis of the 70s because it couldn’t overcome the limitations in storage and transportability of electricity -limitations which are improved but by no means eliminated today.

Scalability is the key advantage of photovoltaics over other forms of solar power production. But this is keyed to conversion efficiency and regional solar insolation. The stated ideal cost-per-watt of as PV only exists in places like Keahole Point Hawaii. Everywhere else in the world your milage may vary. What really matters is PV area per person at the solar insolation level in their area and at their peak rate of energy consumption. Because if that’s greater than the built habitat area per person, you have a problem, since it means you’re back to putting million hectare arrays in southern latitudes and getting public money to pay to hook them up to where people currently live -radically skewing your cost-efficiency. This new panel technology would only constitute a breakthrough solution to the energy issue if you can actually say that it offers total and convenient energy independence at a dollar and personal space cost most of the global population can afford, For instance, if in any spot at least out of the polar regions, for about the cost of a PC or at worst a small car, and with a panel area akin to the roof of a two-car garage, you can fully cover a household’s energy needs, heating, cooling and personal transportation included all year round. Today that would take an array many times the area of a typical home’s roof costing at least as much as the home itself. (at a typical $10k US per ideal kilowatt -a figure that still hasn’t changed much in 30 years) Anything short of this sends you back to the social issue because you’re back to motivating a society to motivate its governments to invest public money in a deliberate change of the built habitat and its energy infrastructure to support higher efficiency through infrastructure consolidation and exploitation of solar energy over great distances.

yep. the question is, fundamentally, how much indium do they need per panel. I’m significantly less worried about gallium supplies.

however, note the comparison made with silver

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indium#Production

bottom line: we’ll see how this goes, but I have a strong suspicion based on available data that metal constraints will not derail this.

EROI for low temperature polymer panels – the konarka model – is vastly higher than for other panel production approaches.

on all of these issues, it’s a question of judgement, the question is how bad do you think they are, and on what basis. nanosolar are shipping a gigawatt of panels a year right now, something around 20% of total US panel output, and they appear to be getting dug in for extremely rapid scaling.

on the liquid fuel thing, yes-and-no. for climate reasons, we need to take out coal. but replacing oil depends on battery technology, and the ultracapcitor guys aren’t online yet, so we can’t assess how close they are.

on the other hand, make power cheap and clean, and wait for progress in cars is a decent enough strategy.

Vinay

PS: http://oilendgame.com addresses a US-centric biofuels strategy which is actually fairly doable. I edited this while I was working with RMI.

The part about the world running out of Indium and Gallium smells
funny to me, based on the following:

1. ITO (Indium Tin Oxide) is the transparent conductor used in LCD
displays, on this very Mac I’m using and billions of other laptops in
current and former use. See:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=ito+coating&btnG=Search

2. Gallium Arsenide is used in most IR and near-IR laser diodes (since
the 60s) and all blue laser diodes use Gallium Nitride. These lasers
are used in all CD and DVD players today, billions of them. However,
the amount of Gallium used in each diode is microscopic compared to
the amount of indium used in LCD displays. But to say that we will not
have blue/IR lasers because we’re running out of Gallium is a little
bit funny.

3. Gallium Arsenide is used in most very high frequency FETs (field
effect transistors) which are in wide spread use in
telecommunications…

I hardly have any credentials in the solar or semiconductor space
(besides helping students at Northeastern U. design a solar racer) but
had worked with lasers and flat panel display tech at the R&D stage
back in the early 90s when making a blue laser entailed IR beam
doubling via birefringent nonlinear crystals (a $100,000 setup at
least) and we used ITO in fabricating flexible displays and
architectural lighting.

“In general terms I agree, although I don’t know enough to have an
opinion about whether some form of photovoltaic will pan out and beat
fossil fuels in terms of EROEI.

But more generally, all the building blocks of an alternative,
decentralized and less energy-guzzling economy are out there and ready
to adopt. As Amory Lovins et al argued in Natural Capitalism, the
main thing holding it back is cultural inertia and path dependency.
When energy prices get high enough, they’ll overcome that inertia.
And according to Lovins et al, just the low-hanging fruit (things like
replacing trucks with trains and cogenerating power from industrial
waste heat) could eliminate more than half our current fossil fuel
consumption.

On a more radical level, the building blocks are already out there for
local, small-scale manufacturing economies, as well as the
prerequisites for shifting a considerable portion of production to the
household or neighborhood barter economy. As little known as they
are, I expect skyrocketing energy prices and a collapse of much of the
wage economy to make it a lot easier for those currently involved with
such technologies to promote them. For example, almost nobody in the
conventional building industry knows about passive solar cooling by
running intake pipes underground. But some people, scattered around
the country, do have it. And when the cost of air conditioning a
conventional tract house rises to $300 a month, I expect a guy whose
house is cooled for $0 a month to generate some hellacious word of
mouth in surrounding neighborhoods.

As I’ve also argued elsewhere, I expect small machine shops and
backyard hobby shops to become the basis of a localized industrial
economy, under pressure of necessity, when the supply chains of the
centralized corporate industrial economy collapse. This was the focus
of my discussion of S.M. Stirling’s fictional industrial economy in
the Nantucket trilogy, which I raised in an exchange with Samantha
Atkins on the Open Manufacturing list.

Coupling such distributed manufacturing with microenterprises
(bakeries, day care centers, cab services, market gardens,
microbreweries, etc.) run out of people’s homes using their ordinary
household capital equipment, and with liquidity provided by LETS
systems if the old currency collapses, I think thriving local
economies will expand to fill the gap pretty quickly under pressure of
necessity.

One thing that will help the transition will be if the U.S.
government, state governments, and other “hollowed out states” lack
the capability of enforcing bank ownership of paper on defaulting
mortgagers, and we can transition as the banks collapse to a default
system of ownership based on current possession. That, and no
last-ditch effort at large-scale police statism to enforce the DMCA
and suchlike.

FWIW, I also expect the collapse to be a long one (a “long emergency”)
taking around two decades, so there will be no catastrophic collapse
and sudden vacuum to fill. But even when collapses have been
catastrophic, as in Argentina early in the decade, people have been
extremely resilient and creative in finding ways to make things work
in the face of necessity.”