The planned Tesla Gigafactory in Nevada will produce lithium ion batteries for electric cars and other alternative fueled technologies.
In the dry Nevada desert, just outside of the city of Sparks, the world’s biggest building has begun pumping out lithium-ion batteries. This mammoth Tesla Gigafactory is the brainchild of a South African immigrant, Elon Musk, and named after a legendary inventor and immigrant from Serbia, Nikola Tesla. Its aim is to transform global green energy distribution.
Meanwhile, along New York’s Niagara River, another Musk enterprise, known as SolarCity, will soon be pumping out 10,000 solar panels per day.
These behemoths are at the cutting edge of an epic technological revolution now driving energy production rapidly, cleanly, and decisively away from fossil and nuclear power.
Germany, which has the world’s fourth-largest economy, is moving so rapidly into a post-fossil/nuclear reality that one of the country’s key “problems” has been a wave of cheap, clean wind and solar-based power strong enough to occasionally overload the national grid. Smaller countries like Iceland, Denmark, Sweden, Switzerland, and Costa Rica are eagerly following suit.
In the midst of this astounding bounty, the fossil-fuel-and-nuke-bound America of Donald Trump and the Koch brothers seems hopelessly out of step. While green-energy production soars in efficiency and plummets in cost, a corporate-owned central grid is dragging the United States down, toward environmental disaster, technological obsolescence, and economic depression.
Sadly for us Americans, many of the new technologies remaking the green-powered world were pioneered here in the United States but are now being dominated by global competitors. These include:
Photovoltaic cells: This photo-chemical process by which light can bump electrons from various inert media and create electrical current has been known since the early 1800s. The prototype PV cell was produced for the space program at Bell Labs in 1954. It still generates juice. The next incarnation went up on the Voyager satellite.
Arco and other American companies pioneered PV research and development. But gradually the lead slipped away to Germany, Japan, Israel, and China. And after decades of being dismissed as too expensive to matter, photovoltaics experienced one of technological history’s most astonishing price drops, falling by 80 percent in the last decade, with still more breakthroughs on the horizon.
Solar panels installed on rooftops can now produce electricity more cheaply than any other source, including fracked gas. With batteries from Tesla and other providers, solar panels will now be able to light, heat, and cool buildings 24/7 without interruption. Plus, they will be powering electric vehicles. Millions of free-standing structures can now become their own self-sufficient power plants.
The principal beneficiary of these developments may be China. With massive government support, the People’s Republic recently made a daring attempt to corner the world photovoltaics market. It ramped up production and flooded the global market with panels priced below cost, intending to drive out competitors. But enough independent factories survived that the Chinese wound up with both global competitors and a surplus of panels, which they began to deploy domestically.
Facing horrific problems with coal-based air pollution, China is now taking a second great leap into PV. By 2020, it plans to invest some $360 billion in renewables, much of it in PV. Already dominant in the global market, China’s grip on this most crucial technology is bound to deepen.
Photovoltaic roofing shingles: Photovoltaic technology has long been dominated by rigid crystalline wafers, which need to be mounted in glass and metal casings. A far more attractive option was pioneered by the legendary Stanford Ovshinsky, who died in Michigan in 2012 at age eighty-nine. The holder of more than 400 U.S. patents, Ovshinsky established a factory outside Detroit to produce roofing shingles that embody amorphous PV, a more flexible incarnation of the crystalline solar cell. The shingles offered a building owner the benefit of a new roof along with electrical generating capacity.
Ovshinsky’s business acumen never matched his genius as an inventor. But Elon Musk has picked up on the technology. His Tesla operation will be offering “solar roof tiles” as the core of a “trifecta” home system that will collect electricity, store the juice in a PowerWall battery array, and use it to power both homes and plugged-in electric cars. The company says it’ll be delivering the package by the end of this year.
Wind power: In the early 1980s, during Jerry Brown’s first stint as governor of California, the generous tax incentives drew thousands of wind turbines to the Golden State.
Many came from overseas, especially Denmark. Prompted by a powerful Green Party, the Danes made a conscious decision to avoid nuclear power altogether and plunged into the wind industry, at times generating more wind power than the country can use. Like Germany, Denmark is now well on its way to going 100 percent renewable, a goal it intends to achieve by 2050. Meanwhile California has counted more than 13,000 turbines, producing enough electricity to light a city the size of San Francisco.
Advancing efficiencies have rapidly driven wind power prices down. Big utility-scale machines now generate electricity far more cheaply than nuclear power and all fossil fuels except fracked gas, with which it is competitive. New designs have reduced the number of birds killed by turbines, which was already less than the toll extracted by tall buildings, automobiles, feral cats, or tall cooling towers at fossil/nuke burners, which are also the source of chemicalized waste known as hot water effluents, responsible for killing untold millions of marine creatures.
In places like West Texas, as in Germany, American turbines sometimes flood the grid with more cheap juice than the utilities can handle. But the real boom may soon come from the oceans and lakes, where the breezes can be almost never-ending. The Great Lakes boast some of the world’s most powerful breezes, in close proximity to cities including Detroit, Toledo, Cleveland, and Buffalo, and are free from the salt that corrodes ocean-sited turbines.
Batteries: The term “battery” was originally coined by Benjamin Franklin, soon after he flew that kite. The core technology he invented hadn’t changed much in a quarter-millennium—until recently.
The mobile storage units Tesla is building in Nevada are a new breed; as production ramps up, some 5,000 workers will lead the charge to close an “intermittency gap” in power storage that has been one of green energy’s chief stumbling blocks. And while doubters may still fret that we’ll freeze in the dark “when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow,” a new generation of batteries from Tesla and others will smooth over the gaps in Mother Nature’s production cycles, lowering the down times in factories, homes, cars, and more.
With the ability to smooth over gaps in production and distribution, this new technology will eventually end the plague of blackouts caused by central grid failures. The change could be aided by an ironic automotive twist. Under the hoods of millions of aging hybrids, batteries need a very high level of charge. As they age, they need to be replaced. But they still hold enough juice to help power a house, which does not need to accelerate down a road. Millions of these old batteries may soon plug in to free-standing buildings, speeding up the new paradigm.
Electric cars: Trump’s attacks on fuel-efficiency standards aim to prolong Detroit’s ability to produce high-profit gas-guzzlers instead of ultra-efficient electric cars. But California’s tough stand in favor of those standards may render Trump’s attacks futile.
Far safer, simpler, and more efficient than internal combustion machines, electric cars are finally tearing through the automotive market. Though repeatedly hampered by corporate resistance and government opposition, they remain a sure bet to dominate the future market. The question is when and where.
LED lights: Simpler, cleaner, and far longer-lasting than the billions of incandescent and fluorescent relics being replaced virtually everywhere, light-emitting diodes are essentially photovoltaic in reverse. They convert electricity to light in much the same way that PV converts light to electricity, among other things minimizing heat loss.
A new type of LED lights, double-heterojunction nanorads, being developed in the United States and South Korea, promises to both store and emit the energy that produces light, revolutionizing yet another green industry. These astonishing yin/yang units have the ability to charge themselves with ambient light, then re-emit it, and will clearly follow the original LED units into a global boom.
These are a few aspects of a far-reaching energy revolution that could help end fossil-fired global warming and erase the apocalyptic risks of our decrepit reactor fleet. But the Trump/Koch cabal is running a tragic replay of American techno-industrial failure.
It began in the 1970s, when the Big Three American auto elite decided not to build fuel-efficient cars. Foreign car makers such as Honda and Toyota filled the void, helping transform our industrial heartland into a poverty-stricken Rust Belt.
The farce deepened when those same big-wigs declined to build hybrid cars. Toyota eagerly filled that gap with millions of Priuses.
Now we have the Trump/Koch oligarchs fighting renewables at every turn. They are rushing to assure Detroit that fuel efficiency is once again not a concern and electric cars will never come. They are working to pull back investments and progress in renewables. The jobs, says Trump, are in the coal mines and pipelines, and in subsidized oil and gas fracking projects.
Trump is trying to lead the nation in the wrong direction. More than a quarter-million Americans now work in the solar industry. Almost a hundred thousand more work in wind. According to the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, jobs dedicated to increasing energy efficiency employed more than 830,000 in 2014, with up to 1.9 million possible by 2050. Musk’s SolarCity, part of a burgeoning project known as the Buffalo Billion, will be by far that city’s biggest employer, and installing the solar panels it produces will employ thousands more. According to the Independent, more Americans now work in solar power than in all of America’s coal mines, oil fields, and gas extraction operations combined.
More than a quarter-million Americans now work in the solar industry. Almost a hundred thousand more work in wind. According to the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, jobs dedicated to increasing energy efficiency employed more than 830,000 in 2014, with up to 1.9 million possible by 2050.
But the ninety-nine nuclear reactors still operating in the United States continue to drain our resources. Despite the 5,000 jobs primed by the Buffalo Billion solar panel factory, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo wants to spend $7.6 billion to save 1,100 jobs at four dying upstate reactors.
Illinois wants to lavish $2.3 billion on two more. Ohio legislators may gouge ratepayers some $300 million per year to keep three decrepit midwestern nukes in operation, but just voted to zero-out mandates for renewable energy. That idiocy is being duplicated across the United States, by state legislators beholden to the Kochs.
Meanwhile, in the wake of Fukushima, China began to rethink its nuclear future. It has thirty-six operating reactors and about a score under construction. How many more will follow is unknown. Only Russia, India, South Korea, and a handful of small players are even contemplating new construction. And China, unlike the United States, is taking steps to phase out coal and embrace wind and solar power. Its huge investment in renewables virtually guarantees Asian dominance in global green markets.
Here in the United States, Trump cripples our economic future when he denounces climate science. As the auto industry should have learned by now, attacking efficiency standards is a fast track to failure. Promoting fossil fuels shovels vital cash into a burning pit. Subsidizing nuclear power guarantees economic and other meltdowns.
And assaulting renewables means getting left behind in the twenty-first century’s rich green boom. Donald Trump seems hell-bent on burying America’s economic future in collapsed mines, leaking pipes, obsolete cars, and nuclear waste.
But the boom in green-energy technology offers a vital path to a prosperous future. As that great American philosopher Yogi Berra might say, when you see such a fork in the road, take it. ω