Some good news on the solar front

I suppose it is good timing. Congress eviscerated the recently passed energy bill, removing tax incentives for wind and solar. However, in a few years the solar incentives may not be necessary.

I just read that Nanosolar has shipped product.

To recap an earlier post, Nanosolar is a solar module manufacturing company that developed a new way to manufacture the cells that make up the modules. Instead of melting, purifying, and casting crystalline silicon they make a powdered ink out of nanoparticles of copper, indium, gallium, and selenium, and essentially print the stuff on a roll of metal foil at room temperature. The simplicity of the process reduces the cost of manufacturing the modules by a factor of four.

They have started by selling a megawatt of modules to a company in Germany for a single large array at a brownfield site. According to their press releases the eventually intend to manufacture 450 megawatts annually in their plant in San Jose, California. Compare this to the approximately 150 megawatts manufactured annually in the U.S. today. Think of it as Nanosolar replacing a regular power plant every year.

They claim to be able to wholesale these modules for a dollar a watt. Silicon based modules today wholesale for just over four dollars a watt. When I run the numbers on this kind of price drop it brings down the price of solar electricity to between 11 cents and 15 cents per kilowatt hour, roughly the retail price of electricity right now. That is without incentive grants or tax breaks. In other words, once Nanosolar modules get out in the general market, you'd be an idiot not to put them on your roof. It will probably be a few years before ordinary schmoes will be able to get their hands on them because Nanosolar seems to be focusing on industrial scale installations to start out.

I cannot emphasize it enough: This is a turning point in the generation of renewable electricity, and therefore a turning point in the world of electrical generation in general. With or without the actions of our ignorant sloths in Washington, the economics of electricity have tipped. It will take a few years before the movement becomes apparent, but we will witness an exponentially expanding market for solar electricity.

This isn't the silver bullet for our energy problems or global warming, but it is one of the necessary silver BBs that will eventually bring down the beast. So, amidst all the depression, violence, and anxiety in the world, take a moment to rejoice.

The stonemason and the gunman

First, two stories, one funny, one grim.

A couple of decades ago I spent some time at Aberdeen University in the north of Scotland. I struck up a friendship with an old stonemason who worked in the city of Aberdeen, one Henry McKay. Henry came from a line of at least two centuries of stonemasons, and at 68 was building stone walls in a local park. One day I found him in the park, tools set aside, arms folded, looking up at the towers of St. Machar's Cathedral, a 15th century structure then undergoing renovation. The average Scots face is dour at rest, but Henry's was more grim than usual. I asked him what was wrong. He pointed to the scaffolding surrounding the towers. “It's a bad job, it's a bad job,” he said, bitter emotion in his voice. “They're using dry fitted stone. Two or three hundred years and they'll have to do it all over again!”

I heard a radio interview with a reporter who had covered the civil war in Yugoslavia. The interviewer asked him if he had ever been in a place and realized that he really shouldn't have gone there. He said yes and told about driving into a small village immediately after a massacre. There were bodies and pools of blood still on the streets and nervous young Serbian militiamen standing around, their gun barrels still warm. He knew he was in the wrong place at the wrong time, but decided that his only course was to brazen it out. He walked up to the nearest militiaman, stuck his microphone in the young man's face, and asked, “What happened here?” The young man began, quite seriously, with the phrase, “In the year 1642....”

There is a concept in finance called the discount rate. Officially it is the interest rate that the Federal Reserve charges banks. Effectively it determines the relationship between money in your fist right now and money promised to you at some time in the future. If you are looking at some investment for your money and you want to know whether it is worthwhile, you have to ask, “Compared to what?” If the discount rate is high, then you can get a good return at the bank, so the other investment should give you a better deal. If the discount rate is low, then you should be willing to wait longer for a payback on that alternative investment. A discount rate of 100% means that money in the future has no value. A discount rate of 0% means that $100 in a hundred, or even a thousand years is worth $100 today. The discount window at the Federal Reserve has been hovering around 4.5 to 5 percent.

There is also a behavioral version of the discount rate. It has to do with our tendency to value the present over the future. Drug addicts, children, and people with terminal illnesses have high behavioral discount rates. Parents, farmers, and urban planners tend to have lower behavioral discount rates. Nate Hagens, in an excellent article on The Oil Drum, discusses human discount rates and global warming, so I will not go into it here. What I am interested in is what one might call the inverse discount rate – how someone values the past.

I told those two stories as a way to contrast two of the possible effects of a low inverse discount rate. In the case of Henry McKay, valuing the past meant valuing quality of craft and taking care of a centuries-old legacy for future generations. In the case of the militiaman, it meant holding a centuries-old grudge and regarding medieval conquests as defining present territorial rights.

That seems to be the defining factor in the relationship between the discount rate and the inverse discount rate. One long view is that what comes from the past does not belong to us, but is our responsibility, to be preserved, improved, and handed over. The other long view is that what comes from the past is our property, to be hoarded and jealously guarded. It also views the conflicts of past generations as rigidly binding the actions of those alive today. The former encourages a low discount rate and a long view into the future, the latter a paradoxically short view.

Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to James Madison, declared that, “...I set out on this ground, which I suppose to be self-evident, 'that the earth belongs in usufruct to the living...” The word usufruct means that the living have the right to literally (in Latin) “use the fruit” of the land without degrading it or destroying it and thereby denying it to future generations. It is an old concept in common law, contrasting with ownership in fee simple, meaning, “It's mine. Period.”

This is one of the great dichotomies in thought in our time – ownership in usufruct versus ownership in fee simple. Where the stonemason sees a common legacy to be preserved and passed on, the militiaman sees a gift to his people alone and a duty of vengeance. Sadly, most people in the world tend more towards the militiaman than the stonemason. This is partly due to the perilous circumstances of most of the earth's people. In part it comes from traditions left over from a less populated, pre-industrial world, where human influence was limited and the boundaries of ethics were tribal. That is the double edged sword of valuing the past.

In more prosperous countries I propose that it stems from the propaganda emanating from corporate sources. A corporation is a powerful economic entity, a sprinter in a world of marathoners, winning the short race by its unsustainable use of resources. Just as we humans modify our environment to suit our needs, so too the corporation, a legal creature, modifies its statutory environment to enhance its immediate survival. In a world where incorporation confers inestimable competitive advantages we are caught in a structural trap. The rules of our corporate industrial societies discourage acting as if we owned the earth only in usufruct. (See my earlier essay on corporate leadership)

There is no single clear answer here, but a trend. Part of the trend is increasing our awareness of the structures now present in our society that guide our patterns of thought, and thus our actions. We tend to think of the social and economic foundations of our present condition as inevitable. In fact, they were choices, and rarely enlightened ones. Part of the trend is being careful about the structures, both social and economic, that we create, in order that our thoughts are influenced towards the long view. A vital part is to work for the benefit of those in the world who are most in peril, whether from war or disease or poverty. Yes, it is good in itself, but it also allows them to think past their next meal and assist in the preservation of the whole.

Henry McKay was an old man with a failing heart when I knew him, 25 years ago. He must have died since then, leaving many monuments of his own making. I checked a satellite map online and found that the twin towers of St. Machar's are still standing...for the moment.

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Oil Dependence and Teflon Governments

There are times that I'll be driving down the road listening to the news on the radio and I'll hear something that makes me bang my hand on the steering wheel and swear. That has happened a couple of times recently.

The first was the story of the 19 year old Saudi Arabian woman who was gang raped. That in itself was horrific, but then she, the victim, was prosecuted under Sharia law for being in a car with a man who was not a relative. First she was sentenced to 90 lashes and a prison sentence. Then the number of lashes was increased to 200 because of her insubordinate attempt to challenge the ruling. Her lawyer, incidentally, is being stripped of his license to practice for contacting the media. The response from the Bush/Cheney administration to this medieval level of injustice was embarrassingly muted.

More recently, a British woman teaching in Sudan was prosecuted and jailed for “insulting Islam.” Her crime was allowing her elementary school students to name a teddy bear Mohammed, a common male name in Muslim countries, but, of course, common because it is the name of the Muslim prophet. Bad enough, but then groups of Sudanese conservatives marched in the streets demanding her execution. For...allowing...children...to...name...a...teddy...bear...Mohammed. The British government engaged in a restrained diplomatic effort to obtain her release, and now she is back in the U.K. According to another visiting British teacher the ordinary Sudanese people on the street seemed embarrassed by the prosecution. Some are theorizing that the incident was an attempt by the Sudanese government to signal its displeasure with western interference in its internal affairs.

Before anyone gets the idea that I am piling on the Muslim world, my previous all-time champion case of steering wheel abuse was when a 12 year old Nicaraguan rape victim was excommunicated by the Catholic Church because her parents obtained an abortion for her. What with the antics of the Bush/Cheney administration, I should be replacing my steering wheel any day now.

But let's get back to the Persian Gulf. Autocratic and theocratic governments in that region regularly commit acts that go against our basic moral and political principles. Even so, we are unable to distance ourselves from them. We are partners in the strategic oil tango, cheek to cheek. We have 160,000 soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan dependent for their survival on the good will of regional governments. The Bush/Cheney administration can't get too harsh with the Saudis because they are the swing producers of oil in the Middle East, and a quick turn on their oil valve could send shockwaves through our economy. Other nearby Teflon governments include Iraq, Israel, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, and any country in Central Asia ending in “stan.”

There are many good reasons to reduce our consumption of oil in the categories of politics, economics, and environmental protection. I would add moral principle. Not only have we engaged in immoral acts in the pursuit of oil, but we have also tolerated morally repugnant behavior in our strategic allies. Witness, for example, our government's feeble response to the ongoing political oppression in Pakistan by our ally and apparent President for Life, Purvez Musharrif.

Perhaps it is just a truism that excessive dependency on others breeds moral atrophy. It is an atrophy that we as a nation can't afford. (As if we could afford the oil.)

A Change of Scenery

A friend of mine recently noted the decline of baseball’s popularity. My immediate thought was that baseball requires an attention span, something increasingly rare. This begs the question: Why is a long attention span increasingly rare? One explanation is the popularity of electronic media.

I recently wrote about how many hours a day people (especially children) spend watching television, and that the picture of the world that it presents is truncated and distorted in some particularly insidious ways. One of those ways is the relationship between the viewer's body and the image.

Imagine yourself taking a walk in the woods. You exert your body and move across an unmoving landscape. When you stop exerting yourself, the scene stops changing. Your perception of the world changes according to your voluntary physical movement, whether that is walking, running, lying down, or turning your head. It changes in a smooth, linear fashion, without jumps or gaps.

When you are watching television, your body remains static, but the scene in front of you changes. Not only that, but it changes quickly. A few years ago a study of TV camera work showed that the average shot length, that is, the average amount of time that one view of the scene stayed on the screen, was one and a half seconds. This was down from five seconds some years before. The only way you can get this effect in real life is by blinking rapidly as you fall down a flight of stairs.

Now, consider your average kid at home and then in school. For part of the day this child sits motionless, passive, watching a scene change every 1.5 seconds, accompanied by a sound track and special effects. Then the kid is expected to sit motionless and watch a teacher for 7 hours a day. In the classroom the scene never changes. There is no music or special effects. What a disappointment! The child has been patterned to expect a world that jumps and skips on its own. Call it Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder in a box.

Turn on the TV and find a baseball game. The shot length of a ballgame is dead slow. There is no music. There are no special effects. You have to concentrate on each scene. The ritual plays itself out at its own unhurried pace. If you actually go to a ballgame, the apparent shot length is hours long. The TV watching public isn't conditioned to pay attention to one thing for this period of time.

American football seems to have made the transition to short shot length, with a dozen different cameras, whirling graphics full of statistics, and multiple angle instant replay.

On a similar front, a friend of mine who teaches at the college level reports that her students engage in incontinent text messaging in class. She forbade it, and then had to back the prohibition with grade point loss when it didn't stop. It was as if they were addicted to the constant connection, or perhaps the multitasking. ”Being here now” isn't enough.

Any addiction ends up being about dopamine, the brain chemical that signals reward when it floods the anterior cingulate. Drugs, gambling, risky behavior, and electronic entertainment all can short circuit our dopamine response. Our ever craving brains want that instant, elevated dopamine hit that artificial means provide. The downside of the first three means is obvious, but we should consider the consequences of electronic media addiction: a distorted worldview, social isolation, depression, and physical inactivity. The increasingly violent and degrading content available on electronic recorded media also provides the ability to ramp up the emotional shock value of the experience on demand. It's as if someone could increase a drug dosage without ever physically overdosing. The most damaging thing could be a reduced ability to experience and enjoy the natural world, with its indifference to our cravings, its three dimensional complexity, and its independent pace.

Turn off, tune out, slow down. You could go for a walk in the woods. You could go to a baseball game.