The Solar Century

One hundred years ago, the world was at the threshold of a new era. All of the airplanes in the world wouldn’t have filled a schoolyard. Of the few automobiles there were, they were as likely to be powered by electricity as by gasoline. The land speed record was held by a steam powered car. Oil was mainly used for heating and lamplight. The industrial age had begun, but radical change was ahead. The tapping of the Spindletop oilfield had recently tripled US oil production overnight.

Citizens of 1907 could never have dreamed of the explosive growth that abundant cheap oil would cause for not only the already robust oil industry itself, but the enabled growth of every other sector of the economy due to cheap oil. For a hundred years, the economy has flourished and matured.

But the gift of oil will not last forever. For thirty years, its production and discovery rate have been in decline and at the same time, society has realized the myriad of externalities that burden its gift. Not only is oil the major contributor to air pollution, but in the long term, it is more precious as the raw material for pharmaceuticals, pesticides and other organic chemical products. As Terry Shoup, President of ASME pointed out in a keynote talk in May, “Oil is a better used as a lubricant than it as a fuel.” Future generations will resent us not only for putting pollution into the skies, but for wasting a precious resource in order to do so.

We therefore stand at a rare point of convergence. Just as we have acquired a distaste for petroleum fuel and its recently high price –we have in our grasp an array of new technologies that light the path from petroleum energy. We have the will and the ability. As Dick Swanson of SunPower suggested to a Harvard Business School symposium on Solar Energy in January, “In the last century, we built up the fossil fuel industry. This century will definitely be when we wind it down.”

The public’s demand for clean, distributed energy will only grow. New technologies that are available today will deploy as rapidly as factories can be built. And perhaps most promising of all, the next generation will only add to the energetic insistence that we follow this path.

We stand on the shoulders of all that came before us, but future generations will celebrate that this millennium began with the Solar Century.