TOWARDS A SOLAR ECONOMY

1
TOWARDS A SOLAR ECONOMY

• Solar Energy Applications
• EnvS 116
• Asim Zia
• Department of Environmental Studies
• San Jose State University

2
Overview

• Scheers concept of Solar economy
• Forwards Towards the primary economy
• Work and the Solar Economy
• From the bounty of the sun to global economic
  prosperity
• Haydens concept of solar fraud
• Low-Tech, High-Tech
• Delusional economics
• Land usage
• Environmental opposition
• The Echo Chamber

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Forwards Towards the primary economy

• Todays politicians seem to have no stomach for
  decisions that run counter to established
  business interests. Never before has political
  failure been so comfortable. Scheer 2004 313
• Transitioning towards Solar Global Economy
  water, energy, raw materials, food

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Forwards Towards the primary economy

• Solar shift will bring new impetus to primary
  productive economic sectors, e.g. agriculture,
  forestry
• A shift towards local/regional and renewable
  forms of agriculture
• Secure/accessible seed supplies call for halt to
  patents of GMO seeds

5
Work and the Solar Economy

• Transition to solar resources will have effects
  on the future of work as a social institution
  over and above the new jobs it creates Scheer
  2004 320
• Greffraths concept of three-shift society, in
  which people spend a third of their time in paid
  work, a third in unpaid voluntary activities and
  a third on their own needs

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Work and the Solar Economy

• Energy component of the work in solar economy
• total cost of work to society is reduced to the
  cost of human labor and technology
• More equitable distribution of the jobs across
  regions
• How people spend their free time?

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From the bounty of the sun to global economic
prosperity

• That solar wealth is today more often burnt
  than used and preserved for the future is the
  greatest economic nonsense imaginableThis is not
  economic growth but economic destruction
• Only with solar in place of fossil energy can the
  world reach the pinnacle of its potential

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From the bounty of the sun to global economic
prosperity

• Global resource conflict, environmental
  catastrophe, fossil energy prices that are
  unaffordable for most the worlds population, the
  economic crises to come as supplies dwindle all
  these put the world in grave danger of turning
  back the clock i.e. losing global civilization
• In contrast, solar economy brings the promise of
  cultural diversity, equal economic opportunity,
  fewer resource conflicts, no environmental
  catastrophe, equitable distribution of wealth and
  unlimited source supplies

9
Solar Fraud

• For decades, there have been delirious
  proclamations that the world would soon run on
  solar energy. Those statements have always
  sounded too good to be true and, sure enough,
  have always been false Hayden 2004221

10
Low-Tech, High-Tech

• Low tech
• hydropower,
• biomass (Ethanol 0.05 W/m2),
• wind (1.2 W/m2),
• bio-waste

• High tech
• solar heat collectors (60 W/m2),
• concentrators (3-11 W/m2)
• PVs (20 W/m2)
• But high tech sources are costly, and need more
  space!

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Delusional economics

• Govt. intervention in the marketplace comes
  with the arrogance that the bureaucracy has a
  better way to set prices than does the
  marketplace (example of USSR)
• The good professor sells electricity to the
  utility at retail rates. What a neat way to
  capitalize on the government money that was
  responsible for the photocells in the first place

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Delusional economics

• When gung-ho pro-solar parasites sell
  electricity to the utility for a dime per kWh
  as they do in net-metering the utility is
  forced to subsidize rich peoples toys to the
  extent of 8 cents per kWh

13
Land usage

• Solar energy is inherently dilute, and
  inefficiencies in collection and distribution
  reduce the energy intensity even further. The
  more dilute the collection of solar energy, the
  larger the land area that is required for any
  given task
• 0.4 W/m2 efficiency would require 100 of the
  US land area!

14
Environmental opposition or loosers in a solar
economy

• Environmentalists opposition to nuclear power
  plants, coal-fired power plants, natural gas
  power plants, hydropower plants, geothermal power
  plants, wood harvesting, high-intensity farming,
  gas wells, oil wells, coal mining, gas pipelines,
  oil pipelines, electrical transmission lines!

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The Echo Chamber

• The widely disseminated anti-nuclear
  misinformation described in statistical smoke
  generators is a metaphor for the echo chamber
  into which solar energy pundits yell
• Solar energy, in its various forms, once ran the
  world
• No matter how much power a PV or
  solar/thermal-electric system generates in the
  Mojave Desert on a summer afternoon, it will
  provide no electricity to NY city on a January
  night!