After what seems like a long delay I’ve finally managed to read Part One. The Longform has started to take off (Hurrah!) and it’s wonderful to have the author participating in the discussion along with some very informed Primates.
We’re in NJ and have had roof-top solar for a bit over two years. We’re small fry participants in the renewables surge. Since we’re looking to move to Minnesota I notice how little rooftop solar I’m seeing. Some of that (for a homeowner) is related to the orientation and available roof of the house. There may be different incentives or disincentives. This will take more study, but roof orientation and exposure are considerations in our house hunting.
Haven’t read the article yet, but, judging from the comments, I would suggest an alternative approach based on the following premise; I am certain, based on 35 years of work, that we can’t solve our energy crisis with renewables, unless we solve the scale problem. We’ve been inexorably growing in consumption over the last century because fossil fuels are so energy dense and cheap. We use twice as much energy per capita as we did in the early 70’s without much of a change in lifestyle. Try moving a vehicle 20 or 30 or 50 miles with human labor to get a sense of how cheap gas is relative to its usefulness. We are just sloppy and will have to start tuning up our energy systems, from the top to the bottom.
The energy behind renewables are not dense; solar and wind power are very diffuse. If we are to continue the trajectory of energy consumption, we’ve either got to cover the earth with hardware or cut consumption drastically. I personally believe that we can cut our energy consumption by 80 or 90% without seriously affecting our quality of life. We certainly can do that with our buildings, having worked out the techniques over the last 30 years. Transportation will be harder, but here again, we’ve got a lot of slop in the system. We got to this point step by step and we can
Renewable energy systems are sexy, but they need to take a back seat to a focused look on how we USE energy.
Josh - can I suggest one thing for longform articles like this? Include links to the next piece in the series at the end of the previous piece. Understand that means retroactive edits. But definitely improves navigation. Even the headline list of the 5 articles hidden in a sidebar way up high only has ‘coming soon’ in the early pieces - and nobody wants to scroll up a longform piece searching for it anyway. Reach end, click link, next in series…
