Rooftop Revolution: Join the Fight to Save Our Economy - and Our Planet - from Dirty Energy: Join the Fight to Save Our Economy - and Our Planet - from Dirty Energy

An Energy Primer
Let there be light.
—GENESIS 1:3
WE LIVE IN ELECTRICITY LIKE A FISH LIVES IN WATER. UNTIL a big storm knocks out our power or we blow a fuse by using the microwave and the blender at the same time, most of us don’t think a whole lot about the electricity that surrounds us and powers our modern lives. We pay a monthly bill—usually while grumbling about its expense—and our lights stay lit, our toast gets toasted, and our web extends worldwide. Beyond that? Well, we may have a notion that Benjamin Franklin discovered electricity while flying a kite in a storm (that’s a myth, actually—Franklin may have never flown that kite, though he did do important research into how electricity is conducted). We may have an idea that a few big—and not necessarily benevolent—corporations have a monopoly on our power supply. And we’ve likely heard that the way we currently supply our homes with precious electricity is damaging our environment and endangering our nation’s security.
Yet we haven’t heard much about viable alternatives to this status quo, so we keep paying that monthly bill. We get on-demand light, heat, refrigeration, entertainment, information, blended margaritas, and microwaved pizza. And those corporations keep lining their pockets while our nation and our world are put in an ever-more-precarious situation.
What if I told you that there is a viable alternative—despite what Dirty Energy propagandists would have you believe? There’s a way to power your home that saves you money, that can free our nation from dependence on foreign energy sources, and that’s completely renewable. It’s ready and available right now.
It’s an American invention called solar power. And the ascent of solar—following a Rooftop Revolution—is set to remake our world. To be certain, it’s fighting against some monumental institutions and deeply ingrained behaviors and mind-sets. (If you’re thinking, Oh, solar—it’s just a fantasy some radicals had in the 1970s, the Dirty Energy public relations [PR] machine has gotten into your head!) But recent advances of ingenuity based on solar power’s brilliance have unleashed the creativity of entrepreneurs and capital. These advances are supported by serious social movements—committed activists who seek to break the corporate power of Big Oil and Big Coal and to reduce pollution and corruption. In this book I explain the early history of the Rooftop Revolution as well as what needs to happen next and how you can join the fight.
Electricity 101
We already get our energy from the sun—we just do it in the most laughably inefficient way imaginable. In short, fossil fuels—that is, coal, oil, and natural gas—are the sun’s energy, stored in the form of 200-million-year-old plants and extracted today by dangerous, costly, environment-destroying methods.
Solar power, by contrast, comes directly from the source. There are no mines and no rigs—a solar panel just sits in the sun, takes in sunlight, and turns that light into electricity right at the point of use. There’s no costly and unsightly transportation, no danger of explosion or mine collapse, no mountaintop removal, no Fukushima or Deepwater Horizon, and no spilling or killing required. Just clean, cheap energy.
You don’t have to be an energy expert to see how strong the case for solar power is. I’ve spent my adult life fighting on the front lines of the Rooftop Revolution, working around, with, and often in spite of the energy industry, yet I have no formal training as an electrical engineer. So I can tell you, in layperson’s terms, what you need to know before joining this fight.
How did electricity become ubiquitous and affordable for most Americans?
The machines that make the electricity became standardized, and the businesses that delivered them scaled. The machine most commonly used to make electricity in the United States and elsewhere is the steam turbine, developed by a British engineer in the 1880s, which extracts thermal energy from pressurized steam. That pressurized steam is created by boiling water, which is heated by burning various forms of fossil fuels. We get those fossil fuels in a variety of ways: open pit mines, shaft mines, drilling rigs on land and sea, and “fracking”—or geologic fracturing—which is the propagation of fractures in a rock layer by pumping high-pressure liquid down a hole to release natural gas locked in the sediments and fissures.
All of these aforementioned fuels store energy in chemical bonds; the energy is released when they’re burned. The energy got there hundreds of millions of years ago, when these fuels were plants, through the process of photosynthesis: the sun put that energy there. Most of the world’s coal, for instance, comes from the fossilized remains of dinosaur-era plants, hence the term fossil fuel.
See what I mean about a “laughably inefficient way” to get power from the sun?
Coal is mined from holes in the ground—often from shafts but increasingly, due to the use of machinery, from open pits. Humans have been extracting coal from shaft mines for nearly a millennium—and it’s a hugely dangerous enterprise, as you often hear about in the news. Every year thousands die in mine disasters, especially in China, as that country slakes its thirst for low-cost coal. Aside from the human costs, mining has well-known environmental repercussions, such as water pollution, mountain-top removal, and forest clear cutting.
Sucking oil and gas—fossil fuels in liquid or gaseous form—from beneath the ground is a similarly invasive process. While the hole in the ground isn’t usually as large as the holes caused by mines, the cumulative impact of a drilling field can be quite extensive. I spent a year documenting one such project in Papua New Guinea for an academic thesis in human geography, and it took me the better part of two months just to walk around the drill sites that fed one pipeline in the mountains near Lake Kutubu, the second-largest high-altitude lake in the world. I saw firsthand the spills, helicopter accidents, invasive logging, and other ecological effects that made this “best in breed” oil project pretty high impact. Offshore rigs are similarly dangerous, as we recently saw in BP’s devastating oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
Gas drilling is a little different. It requires a large industrial infrastructure nearby to liquefy or pressurize the gas for transport in some form. A new gas project off Australia’s northwest coast has so far cost $40 billion just to get up and running. In the United States and elsewhere, getting to natural gas increasingly requires fracking, which is quite controversial because the liquids used are frequently toxic and because the volumes of fluids injected underground are causing groundwater contamination and even earthquakes. We all know that mining and drilling are pretty ugly, but we rarely make the connection between this ugliness and that little light that comes on every time we open the fridge.
Perhaps the biggest problem that we inadvertently exacerbate when we use electricity is climate change (or global warming, as it’s also called): when fossil fuels release the energy locked in chemical-based bonds from plants that once captured carbon dioxide, they also release some of that carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The way we currently create and process energy releases much of this carbon dioxide pollution. Many books have been written about the subject of climate change, and this is not one of them. Every relevant, reputable scientist in the field has shown that the way we currently create and process energy is a cause of climate change. If we don’t slow the steady rise of global warming, our planet will be beset by more drought, more floods, more hunger, more disease, and more-extreme weather as time progresses. Even if we could clean up all the pollution or accept all the other impacts of the fossil-fuel-extraction industry, we can’t afford to accept the worsening of climate change that burning these fuels causes.
Then there are nukes. A nuclear power plant uses radiation from uranium, instead of fossil fuels, to boil water and create the steam for its steam turbines. The problems with nukes are many, from uranium mining to nuclear waste, which can kill many things living nearby for generations—think of the Chernobyl and Fukushima nuclear disasters—and because of these risks, new nuclear plants are virtually uninsurable (that is, expensive)!
It’s worth noting that turbines can be powered by forces other than steam, the most common being hydroelectric turbines, which capture and transmit the kinetic energy of falling water. Similarly, wind turbines use the power of naturally occurring wind to create energy, which is also sneakily due to the sun’s heating parts of the atmosphere, changing pressure, and causing wind. Like solar, wind is a wonderfully clean and renewable energy source.
The Grid
The system of wires between these electricity-generating machines and the users of that electricity is known as “the grid.” There are basically two types of wires in the grid. Electricity begins its journey at the types of generators we’ve just discussed (which are usually far from high-population areas). It’s carried on high-voltage transmission wires to “demand centers,” where transformers reduce the electricity’s voltage and send it out via distribution lines to consumers.
Electricity is a vital commodity service that powers our economy. We’re the end users in our homes and offices, and we pay the full retail rate for dirty electricity. A big commercial user—like a factory, a store, or a university—may pay a lower rate, and some industrial users negotiate to buy electricity almost at wholesale prices. This pricing pyramid of lower-cost bulk buying and higher-cost structures for residential and other users has been applied in the United States and many other countries for much of the past century. In China, however, it’s different: to create efficiency in bulk use, China’s utilities charge higher prices, but they ask retail users to pay less because they aim to spread the benefits of electricity to more citizens.
The grid’s complexity has grown over time. The fundamental structure is often described as “hub and spoke”—central-station generators being surrounded by wires out to users—but it’s more like a hub and spaghetti and meatballs, with more and more generators also on the rim and a crisscross of wires around the network.
Managing the grid is challenging. The technology supporting it is one matter, but then consider the interests of the businesses generating the power and maintaining the grid, and then think of the rights of consumers, who are represented by politically appointed regulators of those businesses—and you start to see how the grid is actually a very tangled web!
Nonetheless creating the grid—and thereby providing the service of electricity to a nation of consumers—was one of the great achievements of the twentieth century in the United States. Although nearly 90 percent of urban dwellers had electricity by the 1930s, only 10 percent of rural dwellers did. Private energy companies argued that providing electricity to rural farmers was too expensive (and they charged farmers up to four times more than they charged city dwellers). As part of the New Deal, the Rural Electrification Administration brought the productivity and the personal improvements afforded by electricity to the many farmers who were going without.
Today countries are still judged by their ability to deliver electricity service to more and more people, although a lot of people are still off the grid. At least 1 billion people can’t take electricity for granted; in fact, they’ve probably never experienced it, but they’re likely to in the coming decade as new, more-localized ways of making electricity become commonplace. Their governments—in India and some African countries, for example—are trying to not re-create the brittle twentieth-century model but rather have a more flexible set of resources to serve their communities with electricity. This is actually more reliable and secure; here in the United States, our grid is at risk of breakdown (if a tree falls on a power line, it can trigger the collapse of a whole network as much of the Northeast experienced in 2003) and attack (the grid’s many linkages make it an easy target for terrorists).
One of the resources being deployed in these countries without extensive grids, as they seek to leapfrog the era of dirty-electricity supply built around the expensive and insecure central-station model, is solar power. Places like Germany, India, Japan, and California have also been in the forefront of the Rooftop Revolution as they have connected solar panels to their grids to augment their power supplies; we’ll visit some of these places in later chapters.
Shining a Light on Solar
Solar power is harnessed in a number of ways, including some solar-thermal solutions that concentrate sunlight directly onto water-filled vessels—to boil water, generate steam, and spin a turbine much like the fossil-fuel-based electricity technologies. There are also straight solar hot-water systems, which heat our water only for direct use—not to create electricity—and are very efficient ways to create hot-water service.
But the solar power that I most want to focus on—because it’s the real game changer—is what’s known as photovoltaics, a method of generating electric power by converting solar radiation (photo) into direct-current electricity (voltaic) using semiconductors. When people talk about solar panels, they’re talking about this technology, though the systems range in size, from one small cell (for instance, to power a single light in Zambia) to 10 panels (to power a home in California) to 400,000 panels (to power a city in Crimea).
Solar panels are often called modules because they can be customized to serve any size electricity demand. This alone makes them a remarkably disruptive technology to the electricity industry. Better yet, they don’t require fuel or produce pollution. The production of the panels may cause some pollution, as the production of any manufactured goods does, but it’s minuscule compared with the production of fossil fuels, and it can be contained in a closed production process. Plus, solar-panel components are completely recyclable—something fossil-fuel industries can’t claim about their products—and they pay back the energy put into them in the first few years of operation.
A solar panel at work is like magic in the sense Arthur C. Clarke meant when he said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Here we have light shining on the surface of the silicon cells, creating an electric current; it’s a tiny amount, but sometimes that’s enough. For instance, there’s my wristwatch, which I’ve had for nearly a decade and have never had to wind or replace a battery. It has a tiny amount of photovoltaic silicon on its face, and that provides the power for the mechanism day in and day out. The minuscule current of electricity that this cell makes can be joined with currents from a series of silicon cells that make up a solar panel, which in turn can be strung together to form an even bigger flow of electricity.
When you hear energy experts talk about “loads,” they’re referring to electricity usage. Solar panels can be quite close to loads and sized appropriately. This is different from steam-based technologies, which tend to be far from loads and oversized, so they’re sure to meet demand. Solar power is not only clean but also local. And now it’s the most cost-effective.
Before we proceed, I should explain how we measure power and energy: “Power” is what we can directly use, like the water we pour into our mouths. “Energy” is like all the water stored up in the clouds; it has the potential to come down to us, but until and unless it does we may go thirsty. That is to say, we can have energy but not necessarily usable power. Power is measured in kilowatts, and electricity comes in kilowatt-hours because we’re measuring how long a source can provide an amount of power. Your electricity bill charges you per kilowatt-hour.
The energy potential in 20 days of sunshine falling on Earth is the same as that of all the coal, oil, and natural gas known to humans. We may find more fossil fuels at some point, but solar power is effectively infinite, unlike fossil fuels, which someday, especially at the rate we’re using them, will run out. They are governed by the reality of scarcity and become more expensive the more you use them. Sunshine as fuel renews every day. It is abundant and becomes cheaper the more you use it. I admit that there’s an assumption here—that the sun will rise and shine on us—but the day it doesn’t, we’ll have bigger issues to deal with than whether the toaster’s working!
So if you understand the significant potential of solar energy, you’re going to be excited about the reality of solar panels to tap it. They take 15 percent of sunlight’s energy and convert it into useable power. And solar panels are more affordable and more powerful each year. These 2-by-3-foot framed modules of glass and aluminum, sandwiching some slices of silicon arrayed in a 60- or 72-cell format, and the economy that will emerge as part and parcel of them have the potential to completely negate the entire grid infrastructure built around steam turbines since the end of the nineteenth century.
The grid, as it exists now, consists of large generators that convert the energy stored in fossil fuels into electricity that’s then sent over cables and wires into our homes and businesses. We’re dumb recipients down a one-way line. The growing demand for electricity, plus constraints on transmission systems and the environmental costs of fossil fuels, has resulted in many concerns about the limits to this approach among politicians and others hoping to keep the lights on. Solar technology allows individuals to become producers of power, too, and to engage in the creation of the electricity they use.
This shift has been described as enabling electricity users to become “prosumers”—producer-consumers—on a smart grid, a bit like the Internet has allowed individuals to not simply consume media content but also create and share it. It need not be a frightening transition to be more involved in energy production while we consume it. Society just needs businesses that make doing so seamless and simple—and maybe a little sexy. The economics can already make it worth our while.
I call this change from dirty-energy dependency to a portfolio of clean, distributed energy solutions the Solar Ascent because solar will be the primary source of power. This transition will be triggered by this decade’s Rooftop Revolution, in which many millions take part in the Solar Ascent by producing their own power on their own places. In other words, the longer-term evolution will be driven by mass adoption of solar panels on our rooftops in a historic burst of resistance to the powers that be.
The previous big energy revolution was the Industrial Revolution. Coal combined with the power of steam engines created new opportunities in our economy and changed the world. Replacing our agricultural society (before the steam engine, most work was fueled by eating plants with their more freshly stored sunlight) with an industrial society unleashed a boom in productivity and innovation that has lasted for centuries. The Rooftop Revolution will launch similarly world-changing outcomes if it succeeds. If it doesn’t, we’ll be stuck with the impacts of the dirty-energy sources that steam power bequeathed to us.
Join the Revolution
Making solar power easier to access, demonstrating solar’s power by adopting it into your life, becoming involved in spreading sunshine into other people’s lives with electricity cost savings and a reduction in pollution, voting for positive energy policies (or those that break the grip of fossil fuels and support the emergence of solar and other local, clean energy)—all are things we must accomplish now. Speaking truth to power, in the form of government and corporate bureaucrats beholden to what I’ve learned to call “King CONG” (the four-headed monster of coal, oil, nukes, and gas) is also critical.
So get involved. Use this book as a resource and a how-to guide, not just to putting solar on your roof but also to being part of the fight against Dirty Energy. (Of course, if you’re ready to put solar on your roof, do that too!) Right now it’s important that everyone know the truth about solar’s power and how we should be making energy. Our future—our safety, our prosperity, and our environment—depends on the success of the Rooftop Revolution.
In each chapter of this book is a section called “What You Can Do as a Rooftop Revolutionary” (in the short term and in the long term) and where you can learn more.
The Rooftop Revolution has begun. The time to fight is now. Semper ad lucem—always toward the light!
What You Can Do as a Rooftop Revolutionary
You have taken the first step to join the Rooftop Revolution by reading this prologue and educating yourself about how electricity is produced. Now take that knowledge a step further: read your electricity bill thoroughly and gain a strong understanding of the charges.
Ask your friends and colleagues if they understand how electricity is produced. If they don’t have a good grasp, fill in the blanks for them.