This issue of Distributed Energy will be at the printer while the POWER-GEN Renewable Energy & Fuels trade show takes place in Las Vegas, so I will not have the benefit of passing along fruits of the many discussions I intend to have there. Nonetheless, I’d like to share some of my thoughts on renewable energy resources and their relationship to the broader topic of sustainability.

While recently attending a recycling conference, I found myself counting the number of times “sustainability” came up within a context that seemed to imply the speaker and the audience were worthy stewards—if not bona fide plank owners—of the word. By the time my tabulations reached into the double digits, I had a nagging doubt that I was possibly the only person in the room who wasn’t on intimate terms with a behavior that appeared to promise such magnificent rewards. The key to this golden age, according to presenters and witnesses alike, lay in the magic of recycling, but I feel quite sure you could substitute any of a dozen or more panaceas to achieve a similar outcome.

Sustainable energy is the subject of much debate, high hopes, and an increasing amount of investment as governments and industries try to get a handle on what it is and how, and to what extent, we can achieve it. Here, let me assert that I’m all for it (whatever “it” may be) and the activities it has generated, but at the same time I have concerns.

For starters, our economy is so overrun with subsidies of one sort or another, I seriously doubt that anyone can tell me the true, unadorned cost of practically anything—especially energy. In the absence of genuine economic signals, it’s possible for us to head down some very wrong paths.

Worse still is our ability to assess the long-term consequences of our actions. Did anyone anticipate the full impact of global electrification on the world in which we live? We’re only talking about a period of roughly a century from when the industrial revolution was able to spread beyond the confines of where power was produced to where it was available—next door, then down the block, onto the other side of town, and before long over the horizon. It was an amazing phenomenon, with an explosion in industry that truly beggars the imagination.

Try listing even the most obvious benefits, and in a week you barely will scratch the surface. Perhaps the most far-reaching of these was the colossal explosion in population, where in just slightly more than a century the human footprint has grown seven-fold to nearly 8 billion living, breathing, eating, thinking, feeling souls—each as eager as you and I to participate in a better life.

It is, without doubt, high time to focus attention on energy matters of all sorts—facets of sustainability high on the list—but I fear that the visions and solutions that emerge will reflect the needs and desires of entrenched interests rather than those of our nation or of the global community.

Paths to Glory
As we strike off in a hundred directions at once, it is not the activity or the money (or even the probability that much of both may be squandered in methods and agendas that will eventually take their place among the long line of blue-suede-shoe schemes that have come and gone over the years) that worries me.

These are signs of a vibrant learning process, and the source of industry and fun for a whole lot of people. Such seething activity is wonderful, but not likely to solve the morass in which we find ourselves if we are unable to develop metrics allowing us to accurately determine where we are today, let alone assess our options for the future.

Without a well-thought-out game plan, we may see the “sustainability” process co-opted by interests with separate agendas ... quite probably the same ones that have brought us to our present pass.

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DE - March/April 2007