All of this suggests that there is a chance for a deep reorganization of earth power systems, in every sense of the word “power”, offering plausible control not only to the climate crisis but to autocracy. Instead of relying on dispersed deposits of fossil fuels – whose control has largely defined geopolitics for more than a century – we quickly head to dependence on diffuse but omnipresent sources of supply. The sun and the wind are available everywhere, and they complement each other; When sunlight decreases in northern latitudes as winter approaches, the winds collect. This energy is impossible to accumulate and difficult to fight against wars. If you are interested in abundance, the sun radiates tens of thousands of times more energy on the earth that we currently need. Paradigm changes like this do not often arise: the industrial revolution, the computer revolution. But, when they do, they change the world in a deep and unpredictable way.
In fact, the scope of this potential change seems to motivate a large part of the current reaction against clean energy in the “big bill of the Big Beautiful” of the United States, but no more than in its attempt to repeal the future of energy by putting an end to the credits will go for solar panels and EVS; He has already put a serious crimping in what was an interior solar industry with rapid development. (The course of action for Sunrun, the largest residential developer in the country, fell by forty percent in a single day in June, after a new version of the Senate bill has reduced the tax credits even more spectacular than expected.) An analysis of the Rhodium group’s thinking group revealed that, by 2035, the bill could have eliminated until the current law could have been produced in the United States. But, in a way, even this backlash is a reverse recognition of the moment; The administration and its supporters of the fossil fuel industry clearly consider this the last moment possible to stifle the sun.
To understand how we arrived here, you don’t need to go very far in time. In the post-war years, the United States appreciated the greatest push of the richness of history, and most of them focused on fossil fuels. We have built a new nation on cheap oil-one of the tentacular suburbs, defined by countless cul-de-sacs and connected by a network of roads which ultimately fueled the new interstate motorways. You can see why Trump, who was young these years, is still obsessed with oil. “I call that liquid gold,” he said in March. “We are going to earn more money than anyone who has never made energy.”
But, in these same post-war years, something else developed. It was at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey, that, on April 25, 1954, a trio of researchers announced the invention of the first practical photovoltaic cell: a silicon -based device that managed to convert around 6% of sunlight that fell into usable energy. The news made the first page of TimesAlthough under the fold (right next to a story on the launch of field tests for the Jonas Salk polio vaccine). Under the title “a vast power of the sun is used by a battery using sand ingredient”, the Times’ The journalist described a “simple apparatus made up of silicon strips, a main ingredient in common sand.” He can mark the beginning of a new era, finally leading to the realization of one of the most cherished dreams of humanity – the harvest of the almost unlimited power of the sun for the uses of civilization. ” The Sun, noted the article, “spills daily more than a quadrillion kilowattheures of energy, greater than the energy contained in all the reserves of coal, oil, natural gas and uranium in the earthly crust.”
At first, solar energy was so expensive that it was logical to use it where nothing else would work: in space, mainly, where it fueled the satellites. But, over the years, the cost has decreased fairly regularly. President Jimmy Carter gave technology a boost, offering measures which, until the Reagan administration reversed them, aimed to ensure that solar energy supplied twenty percent of American energy. Then, towards the turning point of this century, the German Green Party exploited its parliamentary power to win a large government subsidy for solar energy on the roof, creating a request that led China, which then built a coal -fired power plant after the other for its own use, to start making loose solar panels for export to Europe. Solar cells were, like computer fleas, a paradigmatic example of the learning curve: the more you produce, the better you have, which makes them constantly cheaper. Earlier, this decade, the distilled power of the sun and the wind has become cheaper to produce than the power which comes from fossil fuels; China was the first to achieve this; Hence its rapid conversion to renewable energies.
If you want to assign a specific moment when the results of this new economic reality have become manifest, consider June 2023. This month was when scientists reported that the earth temperature had suddenly started not only to climb, but to climb – the days around the solstice were the hottest ever measured, triggering a series of record heat which continued to date. But June 2023, also seems to be the month when people have started to install a gigawatt of solar panels every day.
To get an idea of the reason more deep than the transition is so important, consider the operation of a solar panel. As The Economist Described recently: “A photovoltaic cell is a very simple thing: a square piece of silicon generally 182 millimeters on each side and about a fifth of a millimeter thick, with thin threads at the front and electrical contact at the rear. Shiny light and electronic potential – a tension – will accumulate through silicone. Electric power. “There is silver dust in cells, and boron and phosphorus, critical additives to increase conductivity and to provide the necessary environment for sunlight photons detach from silicon. This is what creates power: a tiny reaction that becomes infinitely amplified.
Scientists call electricity produced in this way “work energy”, as opposed to “thermal energy”, which comes from the combustion of wood or fossil fuels, and it is a much more effective way to get things done. As explained a report published last fall by the Rocky Mountain Institute: “Burning Gas to light up a room creates more heat than light. Burning charcoal to create electricity creates more heat than electricity. The combustion of oil to move a vehicle creates more heat than movement. We send more energy in the smoke paths and the exhaust pipes we put to work on our economy. ” It is not a hyperbola: burning the oil to power a car or burn coal to produce electricity is at best a little more than a hundred efficient, or seventy percent ineffective. For this reason, it takes two to three times more energy to manage a standard car than to manage an EV, which is why even an EV responsible for power of a coal plant is much more effective than an vehicle executed on an internal combustion engine. E -BIKING – The best considered bike without hills – can be an even more important innovation. The electric bicycle is almost incredibly effective: to fully bill electric bicycle costs of five hundred Watts, on average, about eight hundred. This burden offers around thirty miles of reach, so it costs about one penny to cover five miles.
Work energy turns out to be better than thermal energy even to provide heat. An electric heat pump is three to five times more efficient than the gas boiler which is in most American basements. Essentially, the pump takes the heat in the air outside of your house, the extraction with a compressor to heat the air inside. (In summer, it works upside down, to cool the house.) It mainly pumps heat, not production. Last year, for the third consecutive year, heat pumps sold ovens in the United States
