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Welcome to World Ocean Radio…
I’m Peter Neill, Director of the World Ocean Observatory.
The sun is the greatest energy source accessible to our need. Today, the sun is viewed as more enemy than friend, volatile and dangerous, turning our historical climate patterns on end, transforming our world into what Stephen J. Pyne, Professor Emeritus at Arizona State University, has termed “the Pyrocene,” the energy of the sun driving volatile weather patterns, temperature rise, desertification, wildfire, and dramatic social disruption. As with all natural systems, when our relentless behavior and indifference accelerates extremes, when limits are reached that can no longer be denied or avoided, phenomena, once nurturing and sustainable, become destructive and debilitating and threaten every one everywhere with spontaneous combustion beyond our imagination. Pervasive wildfire, coupled to concomitant drought, has reached a reality just a few years ago unimaginable.
At the center is the sun. And yet, its power and immutability remain as a constant that can be turned into opportunity, indeed as the counter force to reverse the devolving historical condition, Nature providing a cure for Nature, as if by design. So, if we accept the sun as the solution, not the cause of the problem, how do we capture its enormous energy potential at scale?
If you begin at the most focal point of access, success has been demonstrated with the installation of individual solar panels and water heating units on roof-tops across the world, in the dessert, in the tundra, and in the forest and open lands between, where small, reasonably inexpensive systems have begun to proliferate with many small incremental contributions to the conversion away from centralized fossil fuel-driven power stations toward aggregated independent systems backed by the grid. I see more and more such systems everywhere I look; in fact, the problem has become delimited, not by solar supply, but by the limitation of the grid to accommodate the excess power generated as surplus. Further, mid-size systems and small solar farms are now appearing everywhere you look, from abandoned blueberry barrens to highway interchanges to factory roof-tops—all expanded iterations with local focus and community benefit.
But suddenly there is real progress at the other end of the scale. This month the largest solar and battery storage project in the United States has come on line on 4600 acres in the Mojave Desert in California on private and public land adjacent to Edwards Air Force Base. The project, owned and operated by Terra Gen, a private company, is designed to provide generated power of 875 Megawatts DC, and 1300 MWs of battery storage, to the City of San Jose, Pacific Gas & Electric, the Clean Power Alliance, and Starbucks – an alignment of public and private clients eager to reduce costs and alleviate production reliance on conventional fossil fuels.
In addition, as importantly, the US Bureau of Land Management has recently updated publicly-owned land available for solar development in six western states to 22 million acres, as a policy incentive to enable major expansion of solar installation in areas adjacent to existing transmission lines and away from sensitive natural and cultural locations, a major policy shift from the more than 80 million acres of federal land open for oil and gas exploration. This is a huge policy shift and signal of US intent and capacity to reach net zero energy production by 2035.
There is suddenly some tangible reason to hope that we are engaged at last in a real process, with land and capital availability in place to enable best intentions. What is key to this, of course, in the accommodation of scale, from individual to collaborative to collective, public and private, enabling the possibility of accelerated change and realization of political declarations by government and industry heretofore unmet.
The sun is the greatest energy source accessible to our need. The ocean is the greatest heat pump on earth. We have the technology and we have the capital. We have all the necessary elements to design a practical response to the challenges of the Pyrocene, to recapture fire through the energy of our imagination and will to survive. The four classic elements of life all still remain -- Earth, Sea, Fire, and Water – their scale is infinite and available still should we choose to use them differently, and wisely.
We will discuss these issues, and more, in future editions of World Ocean Radio.
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