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[mouhager2010]

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:De-monopolization and re-regionalization through solar resources

The dynamics of the drive towards business concentration is
thought to be the dominant force in economic development,
and, indeed, more and more industrial sectors are going down
84 CAPTIVITY OR LIBERATION
this route, even those for which concentration is not imposed
by the resource base, as it is in the case of the fossil fuel and
mineral resource industry described in Chapter 1. Many
economic analysts therefore assume that the introduction of
solar resources will also be followed by a process of business
concentration, and in consequence many also view local installations
of solar generation plant as merely the precursor to a
development whose end-point will be solar resource plantations
in areas of high insolation such as North Africa. In actual
fact, the scope for concentration with a solar resource base is
limited. Indeed, the dominant force may well be the very difficulty
of monopolizing solar resources, thus turning
conventional and seemingly universally applicable experiences
of economic processes on their head. Mathematically speaking,
it follows that the *****alent to a 1000 MW power station
would be – depending on their individual ratings – 2000–4000
wind turbines, 1 million solar panels, or 50 large or 5000 small
biomass plants; in practical terms, the *****alent energy
production would be achieved using a combination of these
sources.
The difference between the conventional energy industry
with its four corporate pillars – the oil, coal, gas and uranium
extraction and trading companies, the power station operators
and the (in most cases identical) operators of the distribution
grids, the power station construction industry and the investment
banks that underwrite all the above – and renewable
energy is that, in the latter case, only one sector is exposed to
concentration and monopoly: the manufacture and construction
of plant (ie, solar collectors, solar cells, wind turbines and
biomass plants).
If renewable energy sources ever come to dominate the
market, then the rump of the industrial webs described above,
the fossil fuel extraction and trading companies, will slowly
dwindle away. There will be nothing to replace the niche
currently occupied by companies that extract or supply fossil
fuels if fossil fuels come to be displaced by solar heating,
sunlight, wind, waves and water currents. As Franz Alt very
neatly puts it, ‘the sun sends no bills’.10 The basic problem
that fossil fuel companies have is that sunlight and wind cannot
EXPLOITING SOLAR RESOURCES 85
be patented and sold under licence. Comprehensive use of
renewable energy would take the wind from the sails of an
economic globalization and industrial concentration process
driven by the scarcity of fossil fuel reserves. This alone would
spark a process of de-concentration, de-monopolization and
the re-regionalization of economic structures.
The two spiders in the fossil energy industry web – the
operators of power stations and electricity and gas distribution
grids – will also have no further role to play in a
decentralized energy supply based on solar power. Large power
stations need large companies to run them; small local plants
have no such need. Once the transition to electricity supply
from renewable sources can no longer be stopped, the power
companies will naturally seek to gain control of these sources.
In the case of PV, the highly decentralized nature of the plant
makes this an essentially futile exercise. They will have more
success with wind, especially with windfarms and offshore
installations in coastal waters – how much success they would
have depends on the extent to which the laws regulating the
energy market favour this. But as generation plant for renewable
energy is subject to natural limitations – the effective
maximum capacity for individual wind turbines, for example,
cannot be much more than 5 MW – power plant operation will
no longer be purely the preserve of large companies. Provided
that the market is freely accessible, many new types of enterprise
are likely: local enterprise, on-site generation by
companies, producer cooperatives and innumerable individual
suppliers on a regional and local level. The politically and
economically explosive potential of renewable energy is its
universal availability, as this eliminates the dependency of both
society and political institutions on power companies and
reduces the influence that those companies can exert. Every
large-scale power station decommissioned, every new local plant
constructed and above all every improvement in power storage
technology reduces the central role played by the national grid,
to the point at which it becomes superfluous.
The economies of scale, which have favoured concentrated
business structures because of their ability to mass-produce
cheap consumer goods and so squeeze out smaller producers,
86 CAPTIVITY OR LIBERATION
do not apply to renewable energy. The rise of renewable energy
disrupts two of the fossil fuel spiders’ strongest webs, and the
third web, the dominant role played by the large investment
banks in the energy industry, is at least weakened. In a decentralized
market, all potential investors, not just banks, can be
sources of finance; the large investment banks will be just one
player among many.
As mentioned, the market for renewable energy plant
remains open to concentration and monopolization. It is possible
that, following an initial boom, the global market for solar
panels and accessories, solar collectors, wind turbines and
biomass plants will come to be dominated by a very few firms.
For the power station construction industry, this could even
present a golden opportunity for diversification, provided they
can make the leap from catering to a few large clients to serving
many small ones. For PV and solar collectors, the customer
base will be larger even than that of the car industry. That
notwithstanding, manufacturers of solar generation plant will
not be able to completely dominate the market. They will be
dependent on a multi-billion-customer client base with a
diverse demand structure for various panels and integrated
systems. There will be scope for a broad spectrum of manufacturing
and distribution firms, and an even broader palette of
technical engineering and installation services.
The representatives of the fossil energy industry have been
written out of the script for the renewable energy story, or
allotted at most a secondary role; the market for renewable
energy will no longer have a niche for conventional sources –
at least, not with turnover at high as it is at present.
Conventional energy companies are bound to old fossil fuel
structures by the sheer scale of their investments; their business
models, based on large-scale industrial plant, will prove their
own undoing in the transition to renewable energy. A solar
resource base makes it impossible to retain or ever re-create
the power structure that has hitherto prevailed in the energy
sector.
The short supply chains for renewable energy sources will end
the pressure to globalize that comes from the fossil resource
base. The dense interconnections between individual energy
companies and between energy companies and other industries
that result from fossil fuel supply chains will no longer be
necessary. Shorter renewable energy supply chains also make it
impossible to dominate entire economies. Renewable energy
will liberate society from fossil fuel dependency and from the
webs spun by the spiders of the fossil economy



Solar power: technology without technocracy

With very few exceptions, centralized power generation from
solar sources would effectively negate the advantages accruing
from a decentralized energy supply (the subject of Parts III
and IV of this book). It would be daft to close down existing
hydropower dams; large-scale solar thermal plants to supply
tropical cities make sense. Equally, the resulting disconnection
from the regional resource base makes biomass-fired power
stations of over 100 MW nonsensical; nor are large tidal power
plants along great stretches of coastline to be recommended,
when wind power provides a simpler, less costly solution more
in keeping with the natural landscape.
In any case, even centralized solar power generation in
sunnier parts of the world would inevitably need to be supplemented
by local PV, wind, small-scale hydro and biomass plant.
Yet the history of power generation and supply teaches us that
although large-scale generation plant may be technically
compatible with small-scale plant, combining the two produces
structural conflict. Operators of large-scale plant need to run
at full capacity to recoup their costs; the unpredictable output
of small-scale producers is an irritant. There is little reason to
assume that operators of large-scale solar power plant would
behave any differently towards smaller suppliers than operators
of nuclear and coal-fired plants. In the case of fossil fuels,
the obsession with large-scale production and supply is a reflection
of the underlying economic realities. In the case of solar
power, the same obsession would be ill-considered, an expression
of the industrial fantasies typical of the 20th century.
Grand schemes following the pattern of concentrated
generation and supply set by fossil fuel power generation have
been and continue to be entertained in respect of renewable
energy. They are the product of a paradigm that can conceive
only of individual large-scale remedies for large-scale problems.
82 CAPTIVITY OR LIBERATION
One example of this was the proposal of the Munich-based
architect and author Herman Sörgel, first presented at a 1931
exhibition of architecture in Berlin, to construct a dam right
across the Straits of Gibraltar to control the flow of water from
the Atlantic into the more low-lying Mediterranean. The idea
was to build a gigantic hydropower plant to supply Europe with
electricity, while at the same time lowering the level of the
Mediterranean to reclaim additional land from the sea along
the Mediterranean coast and create a land bridge between
Europe and North Africa. The Adriatic was to become dry land;
Naples would have ceased to be a port. The project was much
talked about; it fascinated Hitler as much as Mussolini.7 No
thought was given to the incalculable consequences of reshaping
the Mediterranean ecosystem on such a scale; the project
was too tempting to geopolitical ambitions of making North
Africa both a part of and, in conjunction with the greening of
the Sahara, the breadbasket of Europe.
Another, more contemporary example is the GENESIS
project (Global Energy Network Equipped with Solar Cells and
International Superconductor Grids) that some minds are
toying with. The idea is to construct a global belt of linked solar
power stations running along the equator to supply the entire
world energy demand through a superconducting distribution
grid. The supposed advantage would be an uninterrupted supply
of solar electricity, because the difference between day and night
and seasonal variation in output between hemispheres would
cancel each other out.8 But the result would be a hypercentralized
global energy supply, the global dominance of one
generation technology with the longest supply chain imaginable
and colossal infrastructural costs. It is a product of technological
megalomania with absolutely no conception of the
sociopolitics of energy supply.
A third and similar example is NASA engineer Peter E
Glaser’s concept of an orbiting ‘solar farm’, which also crops
up in discussion from time to time. Electricity for all Earth’s
inhabitants would be produced from PV platforms, orbiting
the Earth, with a total surface area of many square kilometres,
free of the limitations of diurnal and seasonal cycles.
Generative efficiency would be very high because even incident
EXPLOITING SOLAR RESOURCES 83
sunlight outside the angle of refraction (a product of the
Earth’s curvature) could be exploited. The current produced
would be beamed back to the ground in the form of microwaves
with a ground footprint several kilometres in diameter. These
would be picked up by a ground station almost 200 km2 in
size, converted back into electricity and fed into the distribution
grid.9 The same applies to this concept as to the
GENESIS project: it may be technically feasible, but otherwise
impractical, with no consideration of risk, economic
viability or social consequences, and a failure to appreciate the
real opportunities that solar power presents.
Proposals that turn a local resource free of supply chain
dependency into a hypercentralized generation and supply
system, maximizing dependency, are the product of a technocratic
approach that has no regard for social context; an
approach which, even without such engineering mega-projects,
has already led to the shaping of society to fit technology,
rather than – finally – adapting technology to meet real needs.
Even the idea of using Saharan solar power to produce hydrogen
for export, although on a considerably less monstrous scale
than GENESIS project or solar power satellites, fails to do
justice to the economic, social and political dimensions of solar
power. A resource that is universally available across the planet
without recourse to extended supply chains need not and
should not for any reason be first centralized under oligopolistic
or monopolistic business structures before being
redistributed to consumers at large. We must learn and understand
that it is not necessary to take circuitous and technically
complex routes when there are direct, simple solutions available.
It is only possible to understand and harness the social
and economic capacities of technology if we take an untechnocratic
approach to it.

The economic logic of the solar energy supply chain

Fossil fuel and solar energy generation are intrinsically very
different processes, and the opportunities they present for
maximizing availability and efficiency – with respect to both
resource consumption and financing strategies – are correspondingly
diverse. Besides the differing environmental impact,
the disparities between the supply chains demonstrate just how
absurd it is to evaluate the economic potential of energy
sources solely on the basis of the capital cost of the power
generation plant required. It is because of such absurd reasoning
that there has been such reluctance to exploit the potential
of renewable resources.
76 CAPTIVITY OR LIBERATION
Figure 2.1 compares the supply chains for fossil fuels and
renewable energies, from which the following conclusions can
be drawn:
• The shorter the supply chain – ie, the smaller the number
of distinct processing steps involved – the greater the scope
for reducing the costs of energy generation. If improved
solar technologies can be introduced on a large scale, they
represent not just the least environmentally damaging strategy
for meeting energy needs, they are also potentially the
most productive and thus the most economic solution. For
this to happen, it is insufficient merely to recognize the
benefits of solar energy. Technologies and strategies must
be developed to exploit its advantages to the full.
Insufficient progress on this front is the reason why the
greatest potential economic benefit of renewable resources
has not yet been systematically exploited.
As long as they remain embedded within the conventional
framework for energy generation, providers and
consumers of energy from renewable resources will continue
to pay the costs of fossil fuel supply and distribution
networks. The potentially decisive advantage that renewable
resources have over conventional fossil fuels will
continue to go unexploited. If the switch to renewable
resources simply replaces elements of the established fossil
fuel structure, this will introduce a systemic bias that will
hamper the growth of the renewables sector, confining it
to a peripheral role within the energy industry for some
time to come. Effective use of renewable resources requires
a radical rethink of the supply and distribution network –
simply copying the established structure will not work. The
construction and operation of the distribution grid, for
example, typically constitutes more than half the costs of
an electricity supply. It is in the elimination of precisely
these factors that the greatest opportunity for productivity
gains from renewable energy resources lies.
It follows from this that productivity gains from renewable
resources cannot be realized through the construction
of multi-megawatt power plants with sprawling distribu-
EXPLOITING SOLAR RESOURCES 77
tion networks. That is not to say that there is no place for
solar thermal power plants. What is does imply is that such
plants should not be used as the core of an inter-regional
– or even international – distribution grid. The ideal use
for a solar thermal power station would be to serve large
towns and cities in its immediate vicinity – for example,
Cairo’s power needs could be supplied by a plant located
in the nearby desert.
• On this basis, one criterion for evaluating the various
technologies available for exploiting solar energy will be
their potential for shortening or even completely eliminating
the energy supply chain. On-site generation using PV
cells, for example, may potentially be far more economic
than large-scale generation plant.
• One decisive advantage for renewable energy in the future
lies in the ability to generate electricity at minimal technological
and infrastructural cost. Because electricity is such a flexible
tool, the demand for electricity will grow at an increasing
rate, at the expense of other sources of energy.
Within the current system, it is simpler to supply fuel for
combustion when and where the energy is required.
Converting the same fuel into electricity requires additional
process steps, and thus is more laborious and technologically
complex. With renewable resources, the opposite
applies: electricity generation using PV and wind turbines
is technologically the simpler route, whereas producing
combustible fuel is more complex and long-winded. This
reversal provides the template for the energy revolution to come

https://wwwibrahimoenergies.blogspot.com

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[mouhager2010]

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